"Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified, without knowing it, my ideal in life. All of them became famous as writers, influential thinkers, and public figures. Their names are Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. They met in college, they remained aware of one another as friends or, if less than friends, companions and fellow crusaders on behalf of similar ideals. Although one of them never knew of my existence, the second ignored it, and the third treated me with formal kindness, without them I would have had no concrete model in my youth of what I wanted to become. Theirs was the universe in which I wished to have my being." With these words, Carolyn Heilbrun begins a personal, pointed, and surprisingly moving account of how a woman, destined to become one of the leading feminist critics of her day as well as one of our most popular mystery novelists, found the models for the life she aspired to in men who neither imagined nor countenanced women as their equals or colleagues. Remembering these three figures as they were when she hung upon their printed words and professorial presences, reappraising them now half a century later, Heilbrun vividly evokes what these remarkable individuals had to offer to an admiring young woman who could not acknowledge—and later would not accept—the impossibility of following in their paths. In the admired anthologies, magazine articles, and introductions through which Fadiman transmitted the world of high culture to an educated general public, he indicated no devotion to questions of female destiny; yet long before Heilbrun could imagine the life in the academy that was denied to Fadiman but would eventually be hers, his was the career to which she privately aspired. Later, in her days as a graduate student at Columbia, it was Trilling who would have the most powerful intellectual effect upon her, formulating as he did the tensions inherent in the desire to salvage what was of worth from a sad, almost moribund culture, even if he frankly admitted to no interest in teaching women or in considering their destinies beyond the domestic sphere. Only the courtly Barzun, also a mentor at Columbia, seemed capable of respecting female accomplishment and eschewing stereotyped views of women. Yet together, all three men unconsciously made Heilbrun's life as a feminist possible, by representing both what she wished to join and what she needed to struggle against. When Men Were the Only Models We Had is a loving, admiring, but stringent account of youthful enthusiasms, of the romance of ideas, of the intellectual brilliance of three unwitting mentors, and of the hopelessness of female ambition in the years before the feminist movement of the last three decades of the last century. And it is, in the end, a book that offers splendid proof that the models we once had are no longer the only ones before us.

Describes mentoring of teachers and scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric.

The Conservative Turn tells the story of postwar America's political evolution through two fascinating figures: Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers, who went on to intellectual prominence, sharing the questions, crises, and challenges of their generation. Kimmage argues that the divergent careers of these two men exemplify important developments in postwar American politics: the emergence of modern conservatism and the rise of moderate liberalism.

This collection of essays investigates the historiography of rhetoric, global perspectives on rhetoric, and the teaching of writing and rhetoric, offering diverse viewpoints. Addressing four major areas of research in rhetoric and writing studies, contributors consider authorship and audience, discuss the context and material conditions in which students compose, cover the politics of the field and the value of a rhetorical education, and reflect on contemporary trends in canon diversification. Providing both retrospective and prospective assessments, Rhetoric and Writing Studies in the New Century offers original research by important figures in the field.

How virility and Jewishness became hallmarks of postwar New York’s combative intellectual scene In the years following World War II, the New York intellectuals became some of the most renowned critics and writers in the country. Although mostly male and Jewish, this prominent group also included women and non-Jews. Yet all of its members embraced a secular Jewish machismo that became a defining characteristic of the contemporary experience. Write like a Man examines how the New York intellectuals shared a uniquely American conception of Jewish masculinity that prized verbal confrontation, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Ronnie Grinberg paints illuminating portraits of figures such as Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Howe. She describes how their construction of Jewish masculinity helped to propel the American Jew from outsider to insider even as they clashed over its meaning in a deeply anxious project of self-definition. Along the way, Grinberg sheds light on their fraught encounters with the most contentious issues and ideas of the day, from student radicalism and the civil rights movement to feminism, Freudianism, and neoconservatism. A spellbinding chronicle of mid-century America, Write like a Man shows how a combative and intellectually grounded vision of Jewish manhood contributed to the masculinization of intellectual life and shaped some of the most important political and cultural debates of the postwar era.

Publisher Description

The first collection to bring together contemporary and classic writings on queer BloomsburyThis anthology presents important early essays that laid the foundation for queer studies of the Bloomsbury Group together with new essays that build upon this foundation to provide ground-breaking work on Bloomsbury figures and cultural achievements. As a whole, Queer Bloomsbury stands alone as a wide-ranging and critical resource that traces the cultural, ideological, and aesthetic facets of Bloomsbury's development as a queer intellectual and aesthetic subculture. Key FeaturesFifteen wide-ranging readings that trace the cultural, ideological, and aesthetic facets of Bloomsbury's development as a queer subcultureIncludes Carolyn Heilbrun's influential essay on the sexual dissidence of the Bloomsbury Group with an introduction by scholar Brenda SilverMoves beyond LGBT studies of Bloomsbury to provide substantive information on the queer philosophical and ethical underpinnings of the Bloomsbury GroupRarely seen reproductions of Duncan Grant's work from the Charleston archives as well as Dora Carrington's work from archives and a private collection