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320 pages

English

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A one-man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman wrote over thirty books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the Sixties. A Paul Goodman Reader that does him justice must be a compendious volume, with excerpts not only from best-sellers like Growing Up Absurd, but also from his landmark books on education, community planning, anarchism, psychotherapy, language theory, and poetics. Samples as well from The Empire City, a comic novel reviewers compared to Don Quixote, prize-winning short stories, and scores of poems that led America’s most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim, “Not one dull page. It’s almost unbelievable.”

Goodman called himself as an old-fashioned man of letters, which meant that all these various disciplines and occasions added up to a single abiding concern for the human plight in perilous times, and for human promise and achieved grandeur, love and hope.

Sujets

Linguistic Criticism

Empire City

History of philosophy

Gestalt therapy

Poetry

Informations

Publié par	PM Press
Date de parution	24 février 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781604865271
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0025€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Paul Goodman Reader The Paul Goodman Reader © 2011 by Sally Goodman Introduction © 2011 by Taylor Stoehr This edition © 2011 by PM Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Acknowledgements The editor thanks Sally Goodman and previous publishers (especially Black Sparrow Press) for permission to reprint these selections; Sally Goodman, Joel Goodman, Rachel Goodman, and Columbia University Press for permission to reprint the selection from Communitas.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-058-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009912462
Cover: John Yates Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper.
Contents
Introduction
Preface to Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals
POLITICS
The Anarchist Principle
Freedom and Autonomy
Reflections on Drawing the Line
What Must Be the Revolutionary Program?
The Missing Community
Civil Disobedience
The Crisis of Belief
“Getting Into Power”: The ambiguities of pacifist politics
Social Criticism
Politics Within Limits
TECHNOLOGY AND PLANNING
Introduction to Communitas
Two Points of Philosophy and an Example
The Human Uses of Science
EDUCATION
The Present Moment in Education
The Universe of Discourse in Which They Grow Up
The Unteachables
Youth Work Camps
MEDIA AND CULTURE
The Present Plight of a Man of Letters
Format and Communication
The Shape of the Screen and the Darkness of the Theater
Designing Pacifist Films
Reflections on Literature as a Minor Art
The Chance for Popular Culture
LITERATURE
Western Tradition and World Concern
Literary Method and Author-Attitude
Wordsworth’s Poems
Notes for a Defense of Poetry
PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY
Anthropology of Neurosis
The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life
Post-Christian Man
Beyond My Horizon
FICTION
Iddings Clark
A Cross-Country Runner at Sixty-Five
A Ceremonial
The Commodity Embodied in BREAD
Terry Fleming, or Are You Planning a Universe?
Eagle’s Bridge: The Death of a Dog
From The Empire City
The Politics of Lothario
The Social Compact
The State of Nature
Mynheer’s Valedictory to Man
A Community of Human Relations
The Trial
POEMS
The Lordly Hudson
Birthday Cake
Fever and Health
Such beauty as hurts to behold
For Henry Hudson
One thing, thank God, I learned
From Little Prayers
The flashing shadow of the sun
Father, guide and lead me stray
By trials too hard for me beset
Jail and blows, being a coward,
My anger has become
Creator of the worlds, O joy
All men are mad some way: O Lord
If I undertake to say
I am willing, God, to say
I have no further grief in me.
My Bible text, when I grew
Some happy folk their faith
Sometimes I said I was marooned
I ask the Lord, “Who are You?”
From North Percy
Pagan Rites
Going mad with melancholy
The beauty of the world
The Russians Resume Bomb-Testing, October 1961
The Americans Resume Bomb-Testing, April 1962
Kent State, May 4, 1970
1945–1970
Go tell Aunt Rhody, go tell Aunt Rhody
Where is the little old woman in tennis shoes
Darius, says Herodotus, invaded Greece
So as I grow old I philosophically compare
Let me praise rapid speech
Proverbs of a Small Farm
In the Jury Room, in Pain
My poor one! Ocean.
Unexpected Sunflowers
Out of every wave lapping over the ledge
Sources of Selections
Introduction
W hen I met Paul Goodman in February 1950, he was almost exactly in the middle of his career as a writer, having begun with high school poems and stories in 1927, and having finished his last essays and poems in 1972. At our first meeting, he inscribed a copy of his latest novel for me, self-published and hot off Dave Dellinger’s Libertarian Press— The Dead of Spring , a book he still regarded as his best single work the year he died. I am holding that very copy, printed on the cheapest paper with a plastic spring binder, its yellow and black cardboard cover illustrated by his artist/architect brother Percy, though later adorned with scribbles by my own young children, now in their mid-fifties. I remember how puzzled and fascinated I was back then, reading the story of a youth so close to my own age, in love for the first time, and facing trial for treason against what Goodman called the Sociolatry. I understood the first predicament, not the second. As I turn these pages now, all brown and brittle, I find myself thinking once again that he was right, this book was his greatest literary achievement.
How ironic that the following year, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, Goodman wrote an essay “On Being a Writer” in which he seemed to be throwing in the towel, saying that his career had been a failure, he had not won the audience he longed for, and so no matter how much he loved his art, it was time to turn to something else. Soon he began to take patients as a Gestalt therapist, the blend of psychoanalysis and existentialism which he had helped Fritz and Lore Perls to theorize. Charging a dollar or two for a session, he earned a thousand dollars that year to supplement his wife’s salary as a secretary—still close to poverty level, but in 1951 it was possible to live in the Empire City in decent poverty, as it no longer is today.
Of course Goodman did not stop writing. Though his books did not sell and only one new volume (his 1940 dissertation) appeared between 1951 and 1959, his stories and poems and essays could be read in dozens of magazines, prominent or obscure, paid and unpaid. What he could not sell or give away piled up in his drawer, a stack that would later allow him to publish two, three, even five books during some years of his fame in the ‘60s. This Paul Goodman Reader , compiled for those not yet born when I met him, includes a generoussample from the book he gave me back in 1950, and from the hundreds of other works written before and after that poignant midpoint, at once zenith and nadir of his career. Although weighted toward the social criticism that made him famous, this collection attempts to do justice to his full literary and philosophic range in order to bring his unique message before a new generation.
In the four decades of his maturity as an author, Goodman averaged a book a year, most of them published in his lifetime and a number still in print after half a century. Few of his contemporaries left such a bountiful legacy, but what distinguished his work was not so much quantity as its extraordinary range, variety of forms, and unfailing ring of authenticity. Goodman was best known for his ten books on American culture and public policy, but he had prepared himself by more deeply philosophical studies of the disciplines in which his social criticism was grounded—language and esthetics (The Structure of Literature) , community planning (Communitas) , anarchist politics (The May Pamphlet) , religion (Kafka’s Prayer) , and psychotherapy (Gestalt Therapy) . During this same dozen years, roughly 1940 to 1952, he also completed four novels, including The Empire City , a four-volume comic epic in the tradition of Don Quixote and Candide , as well as dozens of short stories and poems. His plays were produced by companies like The Living Theatre that gave “off-Broadway” its first hits. Despite his self-described “failure,” by 1951 Goodman had already enjoyed a rich and various career as a man of letters.
His writings were the product of much study, life experience, collaboration with others, and soul work. He had the best education available in his day, all of it free: first in PS 22, a tiny “model school” conducted by the Manhattan’s teachers’ college; then in the first of the experimental “fast track” junior high schools, newly opened on the grounds of an old orphanage; next in the city’s elite “public prep school,” Townsend Harris Hall, with free admission by competitive exams; and finally the City College of New York, in its heyday of talented undergraduates from the cream of the new immigrant community. After graduation came five years of joyous self-education, enhanced by unofficial mentoring from Richard McKeon, a brilliant young professor of philosophy who not only allowed him to sit in on his courses at Columbia, but later invited Goodman along with him to the University of Chicago to earn his doctorate while teaching in the newly established Great Books program. During these years, 1931 to 1940, he was also turning out scores of stories and poems, a number of which were published and even won prizes.
Always restive in discipleship, both with McKeon and earlier with the legendary Morris Raphael Cohen at City College, Goodman gravitated toward very different kinds of mentors in his thirties and collaborated as an equal with practitioners of disciplines he wanted to master himself: his architect brother Percival Goodman; comrades in the lively anarchist groups that published Politics, Resistance , and Liberation; and his colleagues Fritz and Lore Perls, co-founders of the Gestalt therapy movement. His life experience and soul work included two marriages, fatherhood, and a period of single-parenting; a grueling year of self-analysis using the exercises of Wilhelm Reich; life as an active and open bisexual with several job losses as a result; and resist