David Langston
English/Communications



Favorite Writers and
Intellectual Heroes


Intellectual kinship is, by turns, mysterious and obvious. With some writers and thinkers, we discover a mind at work that resonates with our own ways of posing questions or constructing the world. At first the meeting of minds seems dramatic and miraculous; then later we discover parallels between ourselves and those other persons which make the linkage seem obvious and that person, even if long dead, becomes familiar and taken for granted like an old friend.

The following roster has a list of web sites devoted to figures in literature and philosophy whose work I find particularly compelling and that I recommend for sustained attention and careful study. Whenever I can find time, I will supply brief rationales for these choices, and I will add other names and sites.

Charles Sanders Peirce:

....the most important philosopher of American Pragmatism. His theories of semiotics were groundbreaking, and the subtleties of his thought set him apart from some of his contemporaries whose notions seem problematic today. He profoundly influenced the better known William James and John Dewey, but his philosophical judgment towers above theirs. His notions also have many strong parallels with the anti-foundational Continental thinkers like Heidegger, Sartre, Barthes, and Ricoeur. His ideas on truth and the significance of the community of inquiry are superior, in my judgment, to derivative concepts advanced recently by neo-Pragmatists such as Rorty, Fish, or Michaels.

Kenneth Burke:

...the guy who said it first -- and often best -- on a wide range of topics affecting art criticism. He led the way in making art intelligible as rhetoric with links to developments in social theory, psychology, and politics. His writing was already influential in the 1930's, and when he was in his eighties he still drew large crowds to his lectures. I heard him speak at Bennington College where he taught for many years. His notions of "terministic screens," his complex descriptions of symbolic action in all art forms, and his sense of the historical and linguistic embeddedness of self-identity are only a few of the ideas he advocated which seem right to me. His ideas have numerous resonances with those of C.S. Peirce. If your time is limited, start by reading his brief essay, "Literature as Equipment for Living"; my bet is that you won't stop reading Burke after that.

Raymond Williams:

...when I enrolled in a course he offered as a visiting professor, I was sceptical about his work, but before long I had moved to open admiration for the man, for his work, and for the too-rare combination of intellectual depth and courage plus personal warmth and savvy he never failed to display. To my mind, his books, Culture and Society and Keywords, remain hallmarks of sound methods of analysis and good reasoning. His unassuming book, Marxism and Literature, states in a few brief chapters a fresh direction for Marxist criticism for which an entire generation of Cultural Studies research has been elaborating the details. His notion that "culture" is an everyday habit or practice rather than a special, set-aside event paves the way for link between semiotics and Marxian power analysis, and it is a healthy corrective to the reductive economic determinism which crippled Marxist analysis for the first half of this century.

Herman Melville:

...no one has exceeded -- and few writers can match -- his ability to analyze a philosophical problem in narrative form. If Moby-Dick is not the Great American Novel, then that achievement is permanently out of reach. Students sometimes consider Melville's writing to be overheated adventure stories, but every time there is a crisis in contemporary affairs, Melville's quest to understand the human dilemma about meaning in its modern manifestation takes on fresh relevance.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

....the term, "damaged archangel," nicely captures the contradictions that make Coleridge's work endlessly fascinating and inspiring. Possessed of a unique and far-ranging genius, Coleridge saw further than anyone else into the intertwined intellectual and social quandaries of his age, but weighed down by personal timidity, by a dead-end marriage, and by debilitating drug addiction, he never achieved in print the eloquence he was reputed to command in person. His philosophical and aesthetic reflections in Biographia Literaria are extremely useful for understanding both the direction and the internal conflicts of Romanticism; I find that his poetry holds up under repeated reading better than all of his contemporaries, save Keats. Coleridge is not easy reading because his original ideas are intricately bound up with his commentary on the ideas of other people (a fact which has led some people to accuse him of plagiarism). But even a partial understanding of Coleridge in his context supples all the important clues to the persistent attraction and power of the Romantic movement. I have found that close study of his poems, his notebooks, and his essays is a better door than most into the controversies and themes of post-Enlightenment thought.

Karl Barth

...the towering theologian of our time whose commentary on the Book of Romans broke Rationalism's reign in theology. Barth, who was Swiss by upbringing, is widely misunderstood among U.S. scholars because, first, they do not grasp the radical theory of knowing he has proposed, and, second, because Barth's (religious) advocates in the U.S. sometimes make him sound superficial and even anti-intellectual.

But like Milton, Coleridge, and Melville, Barth was a Calvinist who thinks the human imagination is instrumental in constructing the world we live in. Like his disciple, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Barth was a socialist and radical critic of religions like National Socialism whose founding presuppositon is "natural religion." To understand Barth, I recommend thinking of him as a post-modernist long before the term became a faddish term for criticizing the Enlightenment. His mind is, in some crucial ways, parallel to the genius of James Joyce when he was writing Finnegan's Wake: (1) the only god we will ever know is revealed in language and (2) language is a wonderfully supple and yet dangerously weak instrument and (3) the human condition would be irredeemable without the renewable resources of language. For Joyce, scripture needed a fresh composition in the Wake; for Barth, by contrast, scripture had already been written and he concentrated on the conditions its readers should observe as they interpret it. Like Stanley Fish, he contends for "interpretive communities," but unlike Fish's communities, Barth wants them to remain open-ended toward new historical experience and revelation.

Karl Marx

...what more is there to say?....his ideas and modes of analysis provoked millions of people to try to change the directions and contours of their common history. "History" is the key to understanding Marx because, for him, everything comes into being through a temporal and social process. Like other nineteenth-century thinkers -- Darwin, Hegel, Weber -- he made historical process the touchstone of human understanding. His ideas have been absorbed into so many disciplines we do not always recognize his fingerprint on them, but I still find the early essays and even sections of Capital absorbing reading. His concepts of alienation, the labor theory of value, the epistemology of material practice, and the economic foundations of class distinctions are indispensable for understanding our world.

Cornel West

...intellectual gadfly, philosopher and theologian, and, I might venture, an intellectual preacher of considerable talent and learning. West understands and articulates the interweaving of modernism and post-modernism better than anyone I know. He can bring complex political, philosophical, and artistic ideas into the same frame of reference with clarity and profound insight. His critics say he is superficial because his vision is so wide-ranging and eclectic; by contrast, I think he should be admired for his intellectual reach and for his refusal to let go of difficult and useful ideas in favor of a premature and comfortable coherence. West is an affirmative, dialogical thinker, rather than a defensive, one-dimensional thinker, and there is no living philosopher or political theorist I hold in higher esteem.

Paolo Freire

...an advocate for education which does not alienate and oppress...which opens people's minds to a sense of their own personal and social prospects. After you follow Freire's proposals to their philosophical implications, you will find some startling weaknesses and blind spots, but his descriptions of the current state of education should jolt you loose from stale formulas and give you a new track to rethink both the purpose and the means by which we educate ourselves.

Edward Said

...a cultural critic, literary scholar, and philosopher whose work has strongly affected a number of related political and epistemological questions. His book, Beginnings, was, and is, a beacon of intelligence for a whole generation of scholars who were working on placing the tradition of European phenomenology within American cultural criticism. His book, Orientalism, is the wellspring for an ongoing critique of a major ideological prop of European and American imperialism, and, like Beginnings and Culture and Imperialism, it gives a brilliant demonstration of how to analyze a complex social and intellectual reality that also has notable political and economic dimensions. Said is an intellectual's intellectual, and his tough mind, fair judgments, and weaving together of many divergent cultural threads for a single purpose never fails to hold your attention.

Mike Davis

Toni Morrison....... Return to Harlem Renaissance page

...if you are wondering where to focus your study of English literature, I would say start with Morrison's novels. Her works have enormous range, they probe issues of current interest with savvy and with and through powerful prose, and the have important philosophical and social consequences. Her books are not simple narratives, but they have a compelling pace which, even if it takes a while to engage them fully, will carry you along and absorb your interest.

Wallace Stevens

...the premier poet of the imagination whose work remains very contemporary and highly influential. He is a philosophical poet whose poetry concerns the status of poetry as knowledge, and although I don't respond with enthusiasm to everything he wrote, his major poems -- such as "Idea of Order at Key West" or "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" or "Ordinary Evening in New Haven" -- remain major poetic landmarks for the twentieth century. Stevens's "Adagia" in Opus Posthumous share important themes with Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations.

Henry James:

. . . while his later work can be maddeningly long-winded, James's best work brilliantly depicts the process through which a mind searches to know itself. The satisfaction of watching that process reach maturity is always attended by the James's wrenching depictions of the sacrifices and losses that attend those moments of mature clarity. Watching Isabel Archer's turmoil during her long night of the soul as she determines she will rejoin Pansy in Osmond's suffocating prison never fails to bring a lump to the reader's throat, and --equally -- our admiration for Maggie's Verver's deft maneuvering in The Golden Bowl is attended with our awareness of how much that deftness costs her and everyone she loves. A very wise man, Eric Solomon, once suggested to me that I should save a few James novels to be read after I reached 40 years of age; it was good advice.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

Marquez's masterwork, 100 Years of Solitude, has remained among the most important contemporary literary texts. Marquez combines historical events and realisitic narration with mythicized or fantastatic episodes to relate the story of a small society that could be anywhere. While his other stories do not quite stick in the mind like 100 Years, Marquez can concentrate his reader's attention on basic patterns to be found a confusing welter of circumstances. In that regard, his imagination has affinities with the modern masters who thought literature should present the abiding details human existence that were beyond the reach of the forces of modernization. But Marquez's awareness of historical contingency gives his work a fragile, quicksilver quality by which it eludes the ponderous abstractions that modernist writers have waiting in the wings. But whatever Marquez's status as a writer, I can safely guarantee you a remarkable reading experience if you pick up any of his works and commit yourself to its imaginative universe.




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