Do you still read under the covers with a flashlight? Academics, with their ever-expanding lists of obligatory books, often view other reading as a forbidden thrill.
Jerome E. Singerman, the humanities-acquisitions editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, hopes people inside and outside of academe will want to read about such guilty pleasures. He has started a new series, “Personal Takes,” in which “interesting writers will write about things that really interest them.”
The first book in the series, Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress (January), is by Nina Auerbach, a professor of history and literature at Penn who specializes in Victorian England. “All books seem better when I’m not supposed to be reading them,” writes Ms. Auerbach. As an adolescent at summer camp, she secretly read du Maurier late into the night. Before she ever discovered Rebecca -- du Maurier’s most famous book -- Ms. Auerbach devoured novels like Hungry Hill and The King’s General, about powerful, troubled men. Only recently has she decided that her interest in du Maurier is legitimate, she writes. The novelist is “so unorthodox that no critical tradition, from formalism to feminism, can digest her.”
Other books in the series will describe obsessions that led to, or grew out of, the authors’ academic work. Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Near Eastern studies at the University of California at Berkeley, will write on the Talmud and his changing relationship to it. Mr. Boyarin, who began as a traditional Talmudic scholar, is now noted for his studies of Jewish masculinity and sexuality. “One of the things that will emerge from his book is the flexibility of the Talmud, which bears all the changes in his ways of reading,” says Mr. Singerman.
Also planned is a book by Andre A. Aciman, an associate professor of French at Bard College, who is best known for his memoir Out of Egypt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). It was not until he had completed that book, Mr. Aciman says, that he realized his long-standing interest in the French roman d’analyse -- a genre preoccupied with secretiveness and the interpretation of peoples’ interior lives -- was probably connected to his own history as a hidden Jew.
“I’m interested in psychology as a literary device. A person who has been raised as a Jew in secret tends to be extremely aware of ways in which behavior is coded and how you try to understand what other people intend -- are they friendly? Are they unfriendly?” he says.
“It takes you years to realize you’ve been carrying this around in your soul, and then it becomes a whole new field of endeavor.”
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There was no shortage of reactions when William G. Bowen and Derek Bok published their massive 1998 study supporting affirmative action in college admissions. Among the most passionate readers was Glenn C. Loury, a well-known black neoconservative commentator and the founding director of Boston University’s Institute on Race and Social Division.
“Glenn read it more carefully than anybody else -- comma by comma, semicolon by semicolon,” says Mr. Bowen, the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Mr. Loury’s interest in the book’s findings led him to have several conversations with Mr. Bowen, a fellow economist, as well as to apply for Mellon money to support the institute’s research. It also led the authors to invite Mr. Loury to write a foreword to the new, paperback edition of the book, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton University Press).
“There were no marching orders given,” Mr. Loury says. His position on affirmative action has shifted over time, a change evident in his support of the book. “I went from being an opponent of affirmative action to being an opponent of the abolition of affirmative action,” he says.
His essay largely leaves aside the authors’ statistical evidence in favor of affirmative action. Mr. Loury frames the issue in moral terms, concluding that, at this moment in history, racial justice is more important than color-blindness.
Princeton has sold about 22,000 copies of The Shape of the River in hardback. For those book-owners interested in an update, the Mellon foundation is circulating a booklet featuring Mr. Loury’s foreword and the new introduction by Mr. Bowen and Mr. Bok. There, the scholars share responses to the book and discuss where the affirmative-action debate has moved since its publication. “We need to ask directly,” they write, “why people accept so readily the legitimacy of considering other dimensions of diversity but pause, and often feel uncomfortable, when race is used.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A22
