Against the Grain: Essays and Arguments

[G]reat literature, like history, like life itself, is too rich, too various, too human to be properly studied except through patient observation, a sympathetic engagement with a work or an era, and the ability to think things through for onself.... The instructors who mattered to me often gave the impression of making discoveries as they lectured. Underneath it all, like a constant refrain, was the lesson that these discoveries did not begin or end in concepts but perceptions. In our history, literature, and art history courses, we were schooled in the habit of absorption to the point where the material would register on our thoughts and feelings as an experience. ...The exact opposite is happening today in education, in which theory and a politically-obsessed instruction has composition and literature teaching by the throat.

From "Against the Grain"

Kogan's essays chart the steady erosion of a field of education and its impact on society. His study of Herman Melville and Melville's radical critics registers the magnitude of the collapse. Kogan constructs an alternative canon. As he writes in an essay on Oswald Spengler: "I am drawn to [particular] twentieth-century writers because of their distinctive voices, their intellectual energy, and grounding in reality, in the same sense as Maxwell Geismar said of Dos Passos, that he 'really knew what had happened to his society.'" In the course of his writings Kogan effectively chides the "hucksters of enlightenment" and demonstrates how the history of environmentalism is, itself, an ideology.

Steve Kogan was a Professor of English for over thirty years at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the City University of New York. He holds a Ph.D. in English (Columbia, 1980). He has published numerous pieces in Praesidium, The Thinking Housewife, and various other small journals, and he is the author of an award=winning study, The Hieroglyphic King: Wisdom and Idolatry in the Seventeenth-Century Masque.