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Topic: Jacques Barzun

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	Jacques Barzun: A Sojourner in the Past Retraces His Steps
		Barzun recalls, C. Hayes, the author of a widely used two-volume textbook "The Political and Social History of Modern Europe," was planning its revision as "The Political and Cultural History of Modern Europe." Mr.
		Barzun's lexicon, is a period in which there is a kind of "falling off," a restless period in which "there are no clear lines of advance." "When people accept futility and the absurd as normal," he writes, "the culture is decadent.
		Barzun suggests, other more extreme periods of decadence -- which include the corrupt 17th-century universe of Swift or the 15th century before the Reformation challenged the corruption of the medieval Church -- were followed by periods of reconstruction, in which Western culture was re-examined and reconstituted.
	partners.nytimes.com /library/books/041500barzun-book.html (1348 words)

	Jacques Barzun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Jacques Martin Barzun (born November 1, 1907, Grenoble France) is a leading American historian of ideas and culture.
		Thus Jacques was sent to the USA at the tender age of 13, first to attend a preparatory school, then Columbia University where he obtained a broad liberal education.
		Barzun was first in the 1927 class of Columbia College and was a prize-winning member of the Philolexian Society, a Columbia debating club.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Jacques_Barzun (958 words)

	Jacques Barzun. American scholar, cultural historian, teacher and educator and prolific author.
		Jacques Barzun (b.1907) grew up in Paris and moved to the United States as a teenager.
		Jacques Barzun specialised in the cultural history of modern times and it is likely that few people have engaged in a more thorough and invigorating manner with the leading issues in the field.
		This is a brief summary of Barzun's life and work, with an account of the main themes of his recent opus.
	www.the-rathouse.com /JacquesBarzun.html (465 words)

	Jacques Barzun biography From Dawn to Decadence review
		Barzun shows how, from one perspective, the symptoms of decadence can be understood as resulting from the hypertrophy of those very traits that defined the West: primitivism, emancipation, self-consciousness, individualism, and so on.
		Barzun is right that "When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent." But futility and absurdity only seem normal to a damaged sensibility.
		Barzun paints is one of cultural desolation, he nevertheless manages to end on a note of cautious optimism.
	www.age-of-the-sage.org /history/historian/Jacques_Barzun.html (1212 words)

	Amazon.ca: Teacher in America: Books: Jacques Barzun (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Jacques Barzun is in his nineties today and still one of the best thinkers of our time.
		The best part is that while Barzun jabs at administrators and theorists (can't we all relate) he writes with obvious love for teachers and students, always keeping their interests in mind.
		While Barzun can come off as a sourpuss when poking fun at the circular Ph.D system and standardized testing, he is easily forgiven when discoursing on how and how not to teach mathematics, history, arts, literature, the sciences and writing.
	www.amazon.ca /Teacher-America-Jacques-Barzun/dp/0913966797 (725 words)

	Closing time? Jacques Barzun on Western culture by Roger Kimball
		Barzun once noted that “Intellect watches particularly over language because language is so far the only device for keeping ideas clear and emotions memorable.” Accordingly, his own success in these salutary endeavors has been due partly to responsible prose: clear, unpretentious, always favoring the homely concrete word over the fancy bit of fashionable jargon.
		Barzun’s hands, intellectual history is less an academic than an existential pursuit; reading him, you understand that curiosity about the past is at the same time a species of self-interrogation.
		Barzun is everywhere ready to rehabilitate a reputation unjustly diminished or to challenge received wisdom that unfairly pigeonholes its victim.
	www.newcriterion.com /archive/18/jun00/barzun.htm (3754 words)

	Kenan Malik's review of 'From Dawn to Decadence' by Jacques Barzun
		Jacques Barzun is an old-fashioned kind of historian and From Dawn to Decadence is an old-fashioned kind of book.
		For Barzun it is not so much relativism, as the knee-jerk attack upon it, that is the embodiment of contemporary decadence.
		Barzun, on the other, in attempting to rescue the idea of an elitist culture, feels compelled to ditch the notion of political equality.
	www.kenanmalik.com /reviews/barzun_decadence.html (1535 words)

	Amazon.fr : Simple & Direct: Livres en anglais: Jacques Barzun (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		His object, says Barzun, is "to resensitize the mind to words." Do not use a word unless you know both its meaning and its connotations, its "quality" and its "atmosphere," and the ways in which it joins with other words.
		Barzun is an exacting taskmaster, railing against abstractions, "fancy" wordings, contemporary slang (which "prey[s] upon the vocabulary rather than nourish[es] it"), misprints ("it is rudeness to let them appear"), and the like.
		Barzun merely asks that you "have a point and make it by means of the best word." If that means splitting an infinitive or substituting a "which" for a "that," so be it.
	www.amazon.fr /Simple-Direct-Jacques-Barzun/dp/0060937238 (514 words)

	Amazon.de: A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works: A Selection from His Works: English Books: Jacques ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		H Beginning with Barzun's fearless argument for the centrality of race in Western consciousness in his 1937 essay "Race: Fact or Fiction?," and concluding with several selections from 2000's epic bestseller, From Dawn to Decadence, this is a staggering tribute to uber-critic Barzun's legendary intelligence and cantankerousness.
		Barzun's own occupation is another dominant concern; Barzun asks, is criticism art or craft?, coming down, conclusively, on the side of craft.
		Barzun is also unafraid of being silly, as in a brief aside on the "puncreas," a gland that, when inflamed, causes people to "puncreate" uncontrollably.
	www.amazon.de /Jacques-Barzun-Reader-Selections-Works/dp/0066210194 (579 words)

	Denis Dutton on Roland Barthes and Jacques Barzun
		Since Barzun’s observations span a generation or two, it’s interesting to consider which of these essay remain as valid as when they were written, and which have since in some way lost poignancy.
		Barzun’s 1950 “A Writer’s Discipline” in the Chicago collection presents what is still excellent practical advice for tackling the craft of writing: getting organized, overcoming writer’s block, the effort to revise, and how to use criticism to protect your work, rather than yourself.
		Barzun spends all his space deriding copy editors who overstep their calling; maybe he found one at Wesleyan who requires too little.
	denisdutton.com /barthes_barzun.htm (1928 words)

	Barzun, Jacques. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05
		Barzun moved to the United States in 1919.
		A student of law and history and one of the founders of the discipline of cultural history, he began teaching history at Columbia in 1928.
		He was appointed professor in 1945, became dean of the graduate faculties in 1955, and was (1958–67) dean of faculties and provost.
	www.bartleby.com /65/ba/Barzun-J.html (242 words)

	From the Barzun File
		Barzun and my mother discovered they were distantly related, which led to their living with us for some time, then moving to another place, but leaving Jacques to remain with us while he attend Harrisburg schools.
		Barzun introduced Byron’s irregular sonnet beginning “She walks in beauty like the night” to illustrate the method of relating a literary work to the historical setting in which it was produced.
		Barzun is not melancholic: it is the bright light of the soul, not its dark night, that concerns him.
	mysite.verizon.net /murphywong/barzun.htm (4941 words)

	News Release: Jacques Barzun (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Jacques Barzun, a respected author and cultural historian, will share his thoughts in a presentation titled "From Dawn to Decadence: A Conversation About Our Current Condition." The event will take place on Monday, April 17, at 7:30 p.m.
		Barzun has been recognized as one of our last living men of letters.
		Barzun is the author and editor of more than 40 books.
	www.trinity.edu /departments/public_relations/news_releases/barzun.html (222 words)

	The Austin Chronicle Books: The Man Who Knew Too Much: Jacques Barzun, Idea Man
		Jacques Barzun's book, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present (HarperCollins, $36), has achieved news status by the traditional route of inverting expectations -- as in the old "man bites dog" cliché -- by being at once an 877-page chunk of intellectual history and a bestseller.
		Barzun has done it, which is why he is being interviewed all over the media.
		Barzun's life has, indeed, been a happy, prolonged immersion in a pretty high level of civilization, starting with the circumstance of his birth.
	www.austinchronicle.com /issues/dispatch/2000-10-13/books_feature.html (2748 words)

	Amazon.com: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present: Books: Jacques Barzun (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Barzun ponders, for instance, the tumultuous political climate of Renaissance Italy, which yielded mayhem and chaos, but also the work of Michelangelo and Leonardo--and, he adds, the scientific foundations for today's consumer culture of boom boxes and rollerblades.
		Jacques Barzun describes our current age as being decadent; but that sense of decadence is really the end of one age and a new beginning for the future.
		Barzun's view, Western culture underwent a fairly linear development and growth (with many reversals all the same) until the early 20th century, when it all began to fall apart...
	www.amazon.com /Dawn-Decadence-Western-Cultural-Present/dp/0060928832 (3285 words)

	Powell's Books - by
		Jacques Barzun's erudition is unrivalled in its comprehensiveness and penetration.
		Jacques Barzun has addressed these questions, and the questions which these questions raised, repeatedly--in an extraordinary series of books (not to mention his lectures, informal talks and conversations) over the course of half a century and more.
		Jacques Barzun is one of the most cultivated exemplars of Western civilization and his book contains the experience and the reflection of a lifetime.
	www.powells.com /biblio/65-0060175869-2 (1128 words)

	The Lair of Fang-Face DreamWeaver (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		In the United States, college and university are undergoing the fitting punishment of their snobbish neglect: all the ills of the lower schools have infected the higher -- bureaucratic rules and paperwork; students incapable and beyond rescue, but promoted yearly; a curriculum without plan or direction; subject matter dictated by politics or current events.
		The liberal outlook is no hidden secret; it is the outlook of the man who is free, because he does not toil for his living, because his responsibilities are his own choice, and because he can waste time in the pursuit of objects that only he values and understands.
		A worse by-product of modern inflation is that it defeats the very purpose of compulsory scholarship: that purpose was to engineer the growth of knowledge by having as many trained workers as possible add their little brick to the edifice.
	www.angelfire.com /scifi/dreamweaver/quotes/qtwriters3.html (9952 words)

	Closing time? Jacques Barzun on Western Culture
		The historian Jacques Barzun has been a voice of moderation and sanity in American intellectual life for some six decades.
		Barzun's overview of the last five-hundred years of Western cultural history, is a magnificent summa of his concerns as a thinker and historian.
		Barzun's approximately thirty books — I think particularly of Teacher in America (1945) and The House of Intellect (1959) — were bestsellers that influenced debate about culture far beyond the realm of academic history.
	www.catholiceducation.org /links/jump.cgi?ID=2922 (4077 words)

	Texas Monthly September 2000: Scholarship • Jacques Barzun
		Thanks to cultural historian Jacques Barzun, there's a $36 solution: a copy of his latest and greatest work, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (HarperCollins), an 877-page opus that is a do-it-yourself B.A. in book form.
		Barzun is arguably the country's leading intellectual and the smartest guy in Texas.
		And, of course, Barzun reexamines the work of various notables—some of whom, including poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Ezra Pound, happened to be friends of his parents in his hometown of L'Abbaye de Creteil, an artists colony near Paris.
	www.texasmonthly.com /mag/issues/2000-09-01/feature15.php (548 words)

	hackwriters.com - A Jacques Barzun Reader - Review by Dan Schnieder
		Of course, Barzun has never really understood the very nature of criticism, for in Criticism: An Art Or Craft, he argues that it was only with Oscar Wilde that critics claimed themselves as artists.
		That Barzun’s own dry and formulaic writing is bereft of such art speaks volumes for this flaying of his ideas, and the position he takes when he writes: If the critic finds in his own work the compression and suggestiveness of the poet, then he is blind to both sense and style.
		It does not work, and trashes the earlier brilliance of the piece, which is, in microcosm, all that is wrong with Barzun as a thinker and a writer- he simply does not have a clue when he is ‘on’ nor ‘off’.
	www.hackwriters.com /Barzun.htm (1365 words)

	The New York Review of Books: The Science of Jacques Barzun
		Barzun, 'it should not greatly matter whether or not he agrees with the conclusions I reach.
		Barzun's it would, I think, be a mistake ever to take him simply at his word.
		The reader must therefore decide whether Barzun really does not mean to 'furnish a philosophy' and whether, as he says repeatedly, his only purpose is to offer a 'description' of some facts, pleasant or otherwise as the case may be, about our scientific culture, its conformations and history, its drift and its prospects.
	www.nybooks.com /nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19640416011R2 (467 words)

	Amazon.ca: A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works: Books: Jacques Barzun (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Barzun is a stunning example of someone who can and if you're anything like me (not reading all the way through, but reading each exerpt as it strikes your fancy), this book will rank on your 'most rewarding purchases' list
		This book may serve as an ancilla to Barzun's masterpiece From Dawn to Decadence, as a calmative for those upset by what they take to be Barzun's adverse criticism of subjects dear to them, and as a portable treasury of Barzun's writings - some of them never before published or hard to obtain.
		Murray, who is writing a biography of Barzun, no doubt worked with Barzun on the book, both his Introduction and the selections must have a certain authority for anyone interested in the inimitable JB.
	www.amazon.ca /Jacques-Barzun-Reader-Selections-Works/dp/0060935421 (1641 words)

	A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from his Works by Michael Murray, Editor \| PopMatters Book Review
		But Barzun understands the fickle nature of all literary reputations (see the essay on Shakespeare), and whatever his limitations, it's nice to think that his earnestly inquisitive nature and his unwavering belief in "The Centrality of Reading" will always be in style.
		He also includes Barzun's clerihews, a poetic form that seems a hybrid of haiku and limerick (the funniest thing about them is how unfunny they are), and a set of essays on Barzun's fondness for crime fiction.
		A self-described pragmatist, Barzun essentially founded cultural criticism as a discipline: a mode of historiography with hazy boundaries and a strong contextual bias.
	popmatters.com /books/reviews/j/jacques-barzun-reader.shtml (1102 words)

	Jacques Barzun quotes - Quotations Book
		Jacques Martin Barzun (born November 30, 1907) continues to be a leading voice in the fields of literature, education, and cultural history.
		A native of France, he moved to the United States of America in 1920 and was a graduate of Columbia University in 1927 (B.A.) and 1932 (Ph.D.), where he was a prize-winning member of the Philolexian Society.
		Barzun became one of the founders of the discipline of cultural history during his long tenure as Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia from 1928 until 1955.
	www.quotationsbook.com /authors/513/Jacques_Barzun (274 words)

	Book review of Jacques Barzun (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Barzun wrote an epic summary of 500 years of western civilization, from the Renaissance to the first world war.
		No question it is very educational and helps one create a "timeline" of the main events in western civilization, from politics to art to literature to philosophy.
		Even in the case of Shakespeare and Racine, one is left wondering what was so "new" about their art.
	www.scaruffi.com /politics/barzun.html (164 words)

	Jacques Barzun's Books: Tremendous - ExtremeTech Discussions
		Jacques Barzun's Books: Tremendous Posted: 07-23-2006, 7:04 AM It was good to see you advertising a book by Barzun.
		In 1937 Jacques Barzun, then Professor of History at Columbia, published Race, A Study in Modern Superstition, not in the spirit of a tract for the times but as a part of a deep scrutiny of modern intellectual history.
		In 1937 Barzun helped launch "Humanities A," now famously known as "Literature Humanities" aimed at helping to produce educated men and women in the arts not just trained people for the professions.
	discuss.extremetech.com /forums/1004330328/ShowPost.aspx (346 words)

	Powell's Books - A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works by Jacques Barzun
		Throughout his career Jacques Barzun, author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Finalist From Dawn to Decadence, has always been known as a witty and graceful essayist, one who combines a depth of knowledge and a rare facility with words.
		With subjects ranging from history to baseball to crime novels, A Jacques Barzun Reader is a feast for any reader.
		Jacques Barzun draws the reader into his enthusiasms with an infectious style and keen insights.
	powells.com /biblio?isbn=0060935421 (286 words)

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