Robert Boyers
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAISE
Photo by Emma Dodge Hanson
About Robert Boyers
Robert Boyers is Editor of the quarterly Salmagundi, Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters at Skidmore College, and Director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. His books include Atrocity and Amnesia: the Political Novel Since 1950 (Oxford), After the Avant-Garde: Essays in Art and Culture (Penn State U. Press), and three books devoted to leading critics of the modernist era: Lionel Trilling, F.R. Leavis, and R.P. Blackmur (all three with the University of Missouri Press). He writes regularly on contemporary literature for The New Republic, and his essays on literature, politics, and culture are published widely.
IN HIS OWN WORDS
On the current literary scene:
"The worst thing about the American literary scene at the moment can be summed up in two words: Dale Peck. The meteoric rise to prominence of this coarse, shallow, publicity-hungry so-called "critic" suggests that a great many literary people do not know the difference between nonsense and serious discussion. Worse, the fact that very few writers have come forward to defend those who have been trashed by Peck—people like Don DeLillo and Rick Moody among them—suggests as well that courage does not rank high among the virtues prized by many American writers…. On the other hand, a fall issue of Poetry magazine,a publication hardly known in recent years for taking risks, is largely given over to a very long and brilliant poem by Frank Bidart, which suggests that there is, as always, some reason for optimism about the state of contemporary letters."