Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

Dear Reader,

In recent decades, both conservative and revisionist cultural critics have called for a reassertion or reformulation of values in the cultural, ethical and political realms. The struggle over values–their definition, application and assertion–characterizes much current political discourse and academic scholarship. The literature reviewed in this issue of the YRB reflects this current trend, for many of these authors engage normative questions of, in the title of a Wallace Stevens poem, "How to Live. What to do."

Stevens’s poem expresses the impossibility and even the misguidedness of trying to establish a comprehensive system, but, through their writings, Peter Singer, Matthew Jacobson, and Wang Shuo seek to shape standards for society, scholarship and citizenship, respectively. Though, as reviewers Josh Foer and Susannah Rutherglen find Singer’s rational, utilitarian guidelines for social theory and individual behavior often inadequate, his critique of leftist doctrine and accepted morality challenge and inspire valuable debate.

Jacobson, a Yale Professor of History, and Anita Brookner, an English novelist and Professor of Art History, both use academia and scholarship to examine normative ideals. In his Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917, Professor Jacobson debunks romantic myths of American’s Gilded Age and Progressive Era in order to ground scholarship in a frank understanding of historic and institutional American prejudice. In Romanticism and Its Discontents, Brookner describes the Romantic redefinition and understanding of the relationship between the individual, particularly the artist, and society. A.S. Byatt, in turn, unites fiction and cultural criticism to satirize scholarship’s presumption of distilling and describing truth; her hapless narrator, a would-be academic, faces the ultimately impossible task of composing an accurate biography.

Please Don’t Call Me Human, Wang Shuo’s satirical novel addresses social norms, criticizing the Chinese conception of model citizenship and behavior in a post-Communist era. Gao Xinjian, Nobel Prize winning author of Soul Mountain, also relates the crushing effects of Chinese society. He depicts an attempt to escape the strictures of Chinese society, which leads to new spiritual conceptions and beliefs.

On the other side of the Pacific, Alan Lightman’s novel criticizes America’s cultural values and the dehumanizing effects of it social ideals. These writers use fiction, scholarship and history to challenge or reform models of the relationship between human experience and social norms.

As readers and reviewers, we absorb and filter these concepts and critiques of normative social and cultural models. While literature is often irreducible to normative ideas, as this YRB issue suggests, we do encounter these ideas in many forms and aspects. The ability to evaluate these writings informs our encounters with these models. And these encounters define the core of the liberal arts education we celebrate (well, maybe not during finals).

Happy Reading!

Editor-in-Chief