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Louis Menand Biography

Louis Menand (/ˈluːi məˈnɑːnd/; born January 21, 1952) is an American critic and essayist, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.

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Louis Menand Quotes

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

Illiberal, Illiterate, Medicine, Political, Taught, Views

Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.

Thinking, Students, Kind, Think, Manages

The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.

Educated, Jobs, Know, Numbers, People

It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by their schools where they're graduate students, and that does become exploitative eventually because they're very cheap labor and there's a way in which in it's not in the institution's interest to give them a degree if they can continue to employ them, I don't think anybody thinks that way, but effectively that's the way the system is starting to work.

Become, Graduate, Jobs, School, Schools, Teaching

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

Right, Sound, Timing, Unrehearsed, Writers, Writing

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

Different, Ideas, Oddities, Responses, Writing

It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm. . . if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.

Reader, Knows, Hard, Know, Head, Probably

It's generally sort of sociologically observed that the better educated people are, the more liberal they tend to be, which would suggest that professors are going to be more liberal than the general public.

Educated, Liberal, People, Professors, Public, Tend

My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student body that it has.

Appropriate, Body, College, General, Views

The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.

Coming, Curriculum, Discipline, Faculty, Thinking, Trained

A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.

Curiosity, Journalist, Modest, Outsized, Requirements, Risk

One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but one of the functions of that is basically the sort of Consumer Reports function of letting readers know whether this is something they want to read.

Criticism, Literature, Want, Generally, Literary

I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.

Writing, People, Intellectual, Writes, Academic, Generally

Basically what you want in any profession - I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor - is you want bright undergraduates to look at your profession as something they would be interested in getting into.

Doctor, Doctors, Look, Looks, Profession, Would Be

Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

Having, People, Set, Together, University, Working Together

If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.

Amateur, Kind, Know, People, Writing

I do worry a lot about the time it takes for people to get a PhD, about the difficulty of finding employment, about the difficulty of getting tenure, and generally about the perception that undergraduates have, that this is a very high-risk career to get started.

Career, Careers, People, Perception, Time, Worry

The time between Bachelor's degree and a PhD, the median time is over 11 years. So then you're still only on a tenure ladder, you're not tenured. So it generally takes 6 to 8 years after that to get tenure. So that's a very long period of what's essentially apprenticeship, of insecurity.

Essentially, Insecurity, Long, Tenured, Years

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

Care, Good Things, Professors, Profession, Professor

I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.

Believe, Dreiser, James, Matters, People, Thinking

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Louis Menand Biography

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