There's a recent controversy caused by Garry Wills' reading of All Things Shining. Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly (saluted as good news by Susan Neiman in the NYT). I cannot take a personal stand on the issue because I haven't yet read the book which is causing the stir. I just want to give you the links which I came across during these last couple of days.
Gary Wills, Superficial & Sublime?, which appeared on The New York Review of Books, is a rather harsh piece, to say the least! The fact that the book at stake is "written by well-regarded professors (one of them chairman of the Harvard Philosophy Department)", made Wills rub his eyes "with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it." Among other superficial musings, Wills accuses the authors of holding the idea that “there is no reason to prefer any answer to any other.” A vain superficial subjectivism, fully in accord ⎯one might say⎯ with the spirit of the cultural logic of late Capitalism. Wills' diatribe finds superficiality plaguing the book everywhere.
Dreyfus and Kelly have retorted that Wills misses the point altogether of the book: "Wills’s description of our project therefore, as holding that 'each person must forge his or her own view of the universe,' is an unfortunate characterization. That is the position our book is against." Kelly seems to have at least thought of writing a full take on the Wills review, but has summed up some impressions before he does that piece of rebuttal: "it seems obvious that these discussions are completely irrelevant to the central purpose of our book. I have to assume, therefore, that they are not what is really motivating his critique. What is motivating it, however, I cannot tell."
Again, I haven't read the book but two things suggest I must be on guard against Wills. First, his tone and arrogance and second, his quick and mocking dismissal of David Foster Wallace: my favorite newly discovered American writer.
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