Louis Menand Thinking Quotations

I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new general education curriculum, our experience was that Harvard's all about specialization, that's not just true of the professori, it's also true of a lot of the undergraduates, too, and they come, they kind of know what they want to do, they select it because they have a strong aptitude for something in particular.

I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

I don't think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.

I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.

I think that the idea that there's such a thing as a national literature that's somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.

Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds of subjects that the courses ought to cover.

I think in general there's no point in going into a field like English literature if you're not going to have fun with it.

The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.

I suppose everybody does get attached to characters whether in movies or in stories, but I think that's part of the reason you get involved with literature is because there's somebody that grabs you about it and then you want to figure out why.

I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.

I don't think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political views, or views in general. You want the market to work in the way the market works.

For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.