Maynard Mack

Maynard Mack (October 27, 1909 – March 17, 2001) was an American literary critic and English professor. Quotes "The Charles Homer Haskins Lecture: The Life of Learning" (1983) "The Charles Homer Haskins Lecture: The Life of Learning", American Council of Learned Societies (1983) Have the prospects of the humanities ever been entirely reassuring? I suspect not. Most of the rewards of the life of learning, I have noticed, come after death if they come at all. When one reads thoughtfully in the works by Darwin, Marx, and Freud... what one finds most impressive is not the competence they show in the studies we associate them with, though that is of course impressive, but the range of what they knew, the staggering breadth of the reading which they had made their own and without which, one comes to understand, they could never have achieved the insights in their own areas that we honor them for. Today, it seems to me, we are still moving mostly in the opposite direction, despite here and there a reassuring revolt. We are narrowing, not enlarging our horizons. We are shucking, not assuming our responsibilities. And we communicate with fewer and fewer because it is easier to jabber in a jargon than to explain a complicated matter in the real language of men. How long can a democratic nation afford to support a narcissistic minority so transfixed by its own image? We have likewise lost face, in my opinion, by fostering a vast deal of solemn nonsense about "published scholarship." To study, to keep learning, to read widely and reflectively: these pursuits are essential to our profession, it goes without saying. I believe, too, that it is crucial to one's intellectual vitality to try to write (when one has something to write worth writing), partly for the same reason that hard physical exercise is important for physical health, partly because there is truth in the old chestnut: how do I know what I mean till I see what I say? It takes much harder work to write for the public than to write for one's colleagues. And it has a cleansing effect on one's vocabulary. Pompous gibberish rapidly disappears. External links Category:1909 births Category:Literary critics Category:Academics from the United States Category:2001 deaths Category:Educators from the United States Category:Yale University alumni Category:Yale University faculty