Too often academic rigor is associated with a bloodless style and “proficiency in the use of the sacred tongue.” Too often lively writing is taken as a sign of dilettantism. Things don’t have to be this way, and Kumar, who is himself both a critic and a novelist, insists that scholarship should argue and inform but also surprise and delight.
Once upon a time there were plenty of scholarly that we literary masterpieces. To name just two: Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea, which won a Pulitzer Prize and Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England, which won both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. Of course, the first is about that bad guy Columbus.
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