One spring day in 1969, Roger Rosenblatt was puzzling over Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of a Jar" with his Harvard students. But discourse about ordering poetic universes seemed to end when that class did: "During the hour I was teaching, about three hundred students and others seized University Hall." Coming Apart is a record of his own nervous responses to cultural cataclysm, along with those of students including James Atlas, Al Gore, Martin Peretz, and James Fallows.
With his trademark mix of quizzicality and reason, Rosenblatt strives to understand "the folklore of the moment," the politics that led to the student takeover and the rift it left behind. He is strong on the individual response though less secure when it comes to the general: "I do not know why, but there was an impulse running under the events of that spring to let things go to hell, and it was acted upon by young and old alike." Sterner commentators have before now critiqued Rosenblatt's supercivilized examinations of the American psyche, and Coming Apart can only provide more ammunition. The wars of his subtitle may seem too tame for some, but Roger Rosenblatt convinces that the wounds (particularly his own) are permanent.
With his trademark mix of quizzicality and reason, Rosenblatt strives to understand "the folklore of the moment," the politics that led to the student takeover and the rift it left behind. He is strong on the individual response though less secure when it comes to the general: "I do not know why, but there was an impulse running under the events of that spring to let things go to hell, and it was acted upon by young and old alike." Sterner commentators have before now critiqued Rosenblatt's supercivilized examinations of the American psyche, and Coming Apart can only provide more ammunition. The wars of his subtitle may seem too tame for some, but Roger Rosenblatt convinces that the wounds (particularly his own) are permanent.
Used availability for Roger Rosenblatt's Coming Apart