Roger Shattuck is a critic and educator, a former teacher at Boston University, and author of a number of works on literature and art, including Marcel Proust and The Innocent Eye. In Candor and Perversion he has gathered together a large number of essays, beginning with `Nineteen Theses on Literature', a defence not only of literature but of traditional methods of teaching it. Indeed, much of the book is taken up with impassioned calls for a reaffirmation of humanistic values in the classroom and the lecture hall. Shattuck expresses great fears for the consequences of the willed disintegration of the communitarian approach to education, seeing in the rise of cultural and gender studies a dangerous emphasis being placed on the things that separate social and racial groups rather than on what those groups, even the most disparate, share in common. This is a big book on big themes, urgent, bracing and timely.
