EXTRA POINTS
The essays by Steven Marcus and Richard Poirier in this issue
were presented at a conference on the state of the humanities sponsored
by
Partisan Review
and the Rockefeller Foundation on May 10, 1974 at the
offices of the Foundation in New York. The participants, invited by
Parti–
san Review,
included Leo Braudy, Morris Dickstein, Thomas R. Edwards,
Richard Gilman, Caroline Rand Herron, Frank Kermode, Edith Kurzweil,
Christopher Lasch, Steven Marcus, Richard P()irier, Harold Rosenberg,
Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling and, representing the Rockefeller Founda–
tion, Lydia Bronte, Dr. John Maier, Michael Novak, Ellsworth
T.
Newman,
Kenneth Wernimont and
P~ter
Wood . The discussion, which ran from
about 10 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, was led off by Morris Dick–
stein and Richard Gilman who had prepared comments on the lead pa–
per .
I would like to say the conference was a wild success, particularly be–
cause I have felt for a long time that we talk better and more freely about
our main concerns than we write about them. In fact, it seems sometimes
that writing has become a strategy for evading bothersome questions. Of
course, the conference was on an unusually high level, which would almost
be guaranteed by the distinction of the participants, and several of them,
tough-minded veterans of the conference business, said this was the best
one they had ever attended. I felt so, too, though it must be said that there
isn't much competition. For most conferences are little more than intellec–
tual encounter groups, with talking taking the place of touching, though
they are an essential part of the new verbal culture which assumes that the
more talk there is on any given subject the better it is for the talkers, the
listeners, and the subject.
I must confess, however, that we did not solve the problems of the
humanities, though we were obviously bound by the iron law of confer–
ences which forbids them to answer the questions they raise. But we did
address ourselves to the complexity of the questions, and we did so with
the awareness we had to deal with them speculatively and problematically
particularly in a time of instant and fashionable solutions.
In general, we were divided on the aims of education, on the state of
the arts, on the question of standards, on the relation of current works and
