Roger Whitney Shattuck (August 20, 1923 in Manhattan, New York – December 8, 2005 in Lincoln, Vermont) was an American writer best known for his books on French literature, art, and music of the twentieth century.
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Academic philosophy[edit]
Routinely described as "one of America's leading literary scholars,"[1] Shattuck was considered something of a traditionalist. He became well known for his 1994 speech "Nineteen Theses on Literature," delivered to the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. In it he argued (as point XIV), "Everything has been said. But nobody listens. Therefore it has to be said all over again—only better. In order to say it better, we have to know how it was said before."[5]
Upon Shattuck's death, the Yale critic Harold Bloom said of his colleague, "He was an old-fashioned, in a good sense, man of letters. He incarnated his love for literature."[2]
Bibliography[edit]
- The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (1955)
- Proust's Binoculars (1963)
- Half Tame (1964)
- Proust (Fontana Modern Masters, 1974)
- Marcel Proust (1975) [won National Book Award Arts & Letters prize in 1975]
- The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (1980)
- The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature & the Arts (1984)
- Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1994)
- Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education, and the Arts (1998)
- Proust's Way: A Field Guide to 'In Search of Lost Time (2000)
Roger Shattuck, a polyglot scholar and writer whose many subjects ranged from the emergence of modernism to whether some knowledge might be too dangerous to know, died on Thursday at his home in Lincoln, Vt. He was 82.
The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter Patricia said.
Mr. Shattuck's scholarly contributions included writing three books on Marcel Proust, one or which won a National Book Award in 1975. His intellectual journey included a groundbreaking work on the rise of the avant-garde in France in the decades preceding World War I and a provocative examination of the famed "Wild Boy of Aveyron" as a study of how humans develop intelligence. In all, he wrote 16 books, including six translations.
In his later decades, Mr. Shattuck became a caustic, if often witty, opponent of postmodern trends in the study and teaching of literature, including deconstructionism and semiotics, which he contended stripped literature of its intellectual, moral and human environment. In particular, he lamented that the literary world increasingly failed to celebrate the works of classic writers.
"Everything has been said," he said in a speech in 1994 to the first gathering of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, a group he helped found. "But nobody listens. Therefore it has to be said all over again -- only better. In order to say it better, we have to know how it was said before."
In an interview yesterday, Harold Bloom, the author and Yale professor, said Mr. Shattuck's own writings exemplified these traditional ideals.ntinue reading the main story
"He was an old-fashioned, in a good sense, man of letters," he said. "He incarnated his love for literature."
In 1996, David R. Shi, writing in The Christian Science Monitor, called him "one of the foremost interpreters of modern intellectual history."
Mr. Shattuck, who also wrote poetry and short stories, never earned a master's degree, much less a doctorate. But he taught at Harvard, the University of Texas, the University of Virginia and Boston University, from which he retired in 1997. In retirement, he served for four years on the school board of his Vermont village, where he continued to press for a firmly traditionalist curriculum.
Roger Whitney Shattuck was born in Manhattan on Aug. 20, 1923. His father was a successful physician with a brownstone on the East Side.
At Yale, he floundered in a pre-med program, then interrupted college to enlist in the Army Air Force and become a pilot in a combat cargo squadron in the Pacific. He flew a B-25 over Hiroshima a few weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped.
He ruminated about this in his 1996 book "Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography." He wrote that although the bomb's ending of the war probably saved his life, it raised the question of whether it embodied a knowledge so horrific that it meant man no longer controlled his fate.
The book used myth, literature and other sources to question whether there were some things man was better off not knowing. These ranged from the threat genetic engineering posed to natural selection to what he deemed the violent pornography of Marquis de Sade, whom other writers were lionizing as a great author.
The book provoked a storm of protest, but Mr. Shattuck stopped well short of advocating censorship. He suggested a "wise agnosticism" and the setting of reasonable limits.
In The New York Times, Richard Bernstein called the book a creed to live by.
"The edifice trembles here and there," he wrote, "but it is nonetheless a fine structure, full of dark passages and richly furnished rooms."
Mr. Shattuck returned to Yale, where he dropped pre-med studies, became an editor of Yale Review, a literary quarterly, and graduated in 1947. He used money he had saved from the Army to go to Paris, where he got a job in the film section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
He took along a letter of introduction to Alice B. Toklas, who was famed for her salons and was a close friend of Gertrude Stein. Toklas introduced Mr. Shattuck to Thornton Wilder, Francis Bacon, Braque and Cocteau, as well as Fernande Oliver, Picasso's first mistress, whom Mr. Shattuck remembered as quite a flirt.
In 1949, he married Nora White, a dancer with Les Ballets Russes des Monte Carlo and Les Ballet de Paris. In addition to her, he is survived by his son, Marc, of Richmond, Vt.; his daughters, Patricia Shattuck, of Sanbornton, N.H., and Eileen Carpenter, of Lincoln; and six grandchildren. One daughter, Tari Elizabeth Shattuck, died in 1993.
Mr. Shattuck returned to New York to be an editor at Harcourt Brace before accepting an appointment as a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, free to do advanced studies without a doctorate. He pursued his interest in French culture.
In 1958, he published "The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I." He chose four men to represent the era: Henri Rousseau, the painter; Erik Satie, the composer; Alfred Jarry, the writer; and Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and promoter of the avant-garde. Alfred Kazin called the book "a fascinating and brilliant account."
In 1963, Mr. Shattuck published "Proust's Binoculars," which explored Mr. Shattuck's belief that an event, originally fleeting and meaningless, may later by some reflex be recalled and seen, this time in true focus, as with binoculars. In 1974, he wrote a sweeping biography of Proust, which won a National Book Award the next year. His third Proust book, "Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time" was published in 2000.
One of Mr. Shattuck's most discussed books was "The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron" (1980), which retold the story of a child discovered living in the wild in France in 1800, and what happened to the boy after he was found.
Newsweek called the book "as moving and dramatic" as the story of Helen Keller. Mr. Shattuck later edited two reissues of books by Keller.
Mr. Shattuck, who wrote painstakingly on an old Remington typewriter in a tiny shack with a kerosene heater, liked to pursue the traditional way of cutting grass in his meadow with an old-fashioned scythe. He won hand-mowing contests at the local county fair.
我於一九七二年秋天通過了《姜夔詞的結構研究》博士論文的答辯。答辯會 後，我和論文指導老師友工師在他的辦公室裏談了一會兒。他說，他覺得我的論文 和答辯都做得還不錯。接著，他問：「你看過沙塔克 (Roger Shattuck, 1923-2005) 的 《宴會年代：一八八五年至第一次世界大戰期間法國前衛藝術風格的起源》嗎？」 我說：「沒有。」他說：「你應該去讀一讀，看看能否從中得到啓發。這是一部關於 近代法國繪畫、音樂和文學裏四位看似不重要的人物的研究。沙氏有力地論述這四 人的生涯綜合起來，卻能比一位同時代大人物的單一生涯呈現出一幅更為完整的、 他們所處的時代之風貌。」因為姜夔不是宋朝文化裏的大人物之一，所以我非常誠 懇地接受友工師的建議，於論文答辯後不久就去買了一部沙塔克的《宴會年代》。 • 6 • 中國文哲研究通訊 第二十七卷 • 第二期 高友工教授紀念專輯 記得那年秋天，我一開始讀那部書，就被其魅力吸引得不忍釋手。這本書最給我 留下深刻印象的，倒不是其內容，而是沙氏的廣闊視野，以及精彩迷人的描述和剖 析問題的手法。《宴會年代》對我擺脫僵硬、刻板、而又狹窄的形式分析的研究途 徑，真有莫大的助益。我也從閱讀沙氏的書深深體認到，好的學術寫作不必老是既 嚴肅又枯燥無味的才行。
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