On the intellectual element in modern fiction
Discussed in this essay:
The Fun Stuff, by James Wood. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
352 pages. $27.
Happiness: Ten Years of n+1. Faber and Faber. 384 pages. $16.
Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas, by Adam Kirsch. W. W. Norton. 320 pages. $26.95.
Strange as it might seem in the age of Miley Cyrus Studies and Fifty Shades 101, Columbia University’s English department offered no courses in twentieth-century literature until well after World War II. When the department finally relented to student demands…
