Amos's River of Justice

Tag: Harold Kaplan

  • The Spirit of Comedy Without Humor

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    Sheila Marler
    in

    Reading Time: 8 minutesIn Kaplan’s view, and that of other literary critics cited by him, this work is a ‘special form of dry comedy’. Its effect is the spirit of comedy without humor.

  • Can Democrats Criticize the Enlightenment?

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    Sheila Marler
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    Reading Time: 3 minutesCan democrats criticize the Enlightenment? In Harold Kaplan’s analysis of modern literature, he doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment (late 17th to early 19th century), but he mentions it as a timeframe for a modern state of mind which has been detrimental to western thought.1 He doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment in Democratic Humanism and…

  • The Crisis of Knowledge

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    Sheila Marler
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    Reading Time: 5 minutesIn this series, I want to share my thoughts about Harold Kaplan’s book, The Passive Voice1. Kaplan deals with several related literary topics, but they all arise from the crisis of knowledge in modern intellectual history. I have some doubts about my part in this endeavor, which I’ll state briefly in this…

  • Was the Enlightenment Democratic?

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    Sheila Marler
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    Reading Time: 3 minutesThere is no question that the Enlightenment and Reformation made the United States possible. But there have always been concerns about the Enlightenment.

  • American Classics and the Poetry of Democracy

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    Sheila Marler
    in

    Reading Time: 3 minutesHarold Kaplan said ‘humanist aspirations’ are the dominant American intellectual tradition. But an abstract notion of democratic humanism is only part of the story. Kaplan explains democratic humanism in the context of writers of the American classics: Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Poe, D. H. Lawrence, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Twain, and Henry James. They…

  • Was the Enlightenment a Democratic Movement?

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    by

    Sheila Marler
    in

    Reading Time: 4 minutesAccording to Harold Kaplan, Americans do not question the effects on the United States of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. But was the Enlightenment a democratic movement? Kaplan wrote: “We do not question that the twin roots of American national history were the religious revolution, which broke the Catholic hegemony, and the…

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