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Articles by Jacques Barzun
[From the Archive] Too Much Art, By Jacques Barzun
Once again, the budgets of the agencies that support the arts are to be cut. Meanwhile, costs in the arts are going up. But one continues to read and hear of one more dance group being formed, yet another theater company striving to lure audiences. Each new enterprise is self-assured of prestige, confident of support, and hungry for subsidy from public funds. This disparity between shrinking means and growing supply points to assumptions about art that have not been examined for a long time.
Teacher in America
With his customary wit and grace, Dr. Barzun contrasts the ritual of education with the lost art of teaching. Twenty-one chapters deal with three major issues: the practice of teaching, the subject matter to be taught, and the institutional and cultural aspects of teaching. Jacques Barzun is a renowned scholar, teacher, and author who lectures widely since his retirement in 1993.
“Les Troyens” at the Met by Jacques Barzun
The choice of Berlioz’s musical epic to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s one hundredth season was apt. The work has both grandeur and variety of scene, from the sack of a city to poetic love-making, and from religious celebration in monumental architecture to a quiet sunset on the African shore of the Mediterranean.
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present
National Book Award Finalist "A stunning five-century study of civilization's cultural retreat." — William Safire, New York Times Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.
Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life: In Pursuit of the “Real” Chateaubriand
While nowadays he might be best known for the cut of meat that bears his name, François-René de Chateaubriand was once one of the most famous men in France — a giant of the literary scene and idolised by such future greats as Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo. Alex Andriesse explores Chateaubriand’s celebrity and the glimpse behind the public mask we are given in his epic autobiography Memoirs From Beyond the Grave.
The Last Modernist: The Legacy of Jacques Barzun
As recently as half a century ago, there was a significant community in the United States which aspired—in a humble, decent, republican way—to acquire and promote high culture. These were the sort of people who launched “great books” programs, and begged European intellectuals to cross the Atlantic and teach them everything they knew. Jacques Barzun found and ministered to them. One hundred and four is not a bad age for a human to attain, though it seemed to us that Jacques Barzun was much older.
On Baseball ~ The Imaginative Conservative
People who care less for gentility manage things better. They don’t bother to leave the arid city but spend their surplus there on pastimes they can enjoy without feeling cramped. They follow boxing and wrestling, burlesque and vaudeville (when available), professional football and hockey. Above all, they thrill in unison with their fellow man the country over by watching baseball.
Present-Day Thoughts on the Quality of Life (1969) - The American Scholar
HarperCollins Click here to read previously unpublished excerpts from a 1999 interview with Jacques Barzun. Introduction Charles Barzun and Matthew Barzun The essay that follows was originally delivered as a lecture in 1969, but the two of us learned of its existence only in 2002. We were visiting our grandfather and his wife, Marguerite, at their home in San Antonio, Texas.
Spring 2019 - The American Scholar
Articles Orwell’s Last Neighborhood While envisioning the darkest of futures and grappling with mortality, the English writer retreated to an idyllic Scottish isle to write Nineteen Eighty-Four by David Brown
Mencken's America Speaking
To the nineteen-twenties H. L. Mencken was a dangerous iconoclast, the relentless and often ribald derider of what he called the; a man who consorted nightly with the works of Nietzsche and spent the day tracking down Americana for the inside pages of his "anti-American".
Edgar Allan Poe | Biography, Poems, Short Stories, & Facts
Life Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond.
The Wasteland of American Education | Jacques Barzun
The focus at colleges and universities on expansion—wholesale building, increase of staff, proliferation of courses, complex administration, year-round instruction—brought on a state of mind unsuited to teaching and learning. The bustle became a processing and a being processed.
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