Culture as Counterculture

Abstract

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, a leading literary critic and intellectual examines classic English poetry, modern Jewish literature, the intersection of science and religion, and the fate of culture in a technological age. Whether the subject is the literary abilities of ChatGPT, the erotics of opera, the political imagination of Wordsworth and Shelley, or the return to tradition by contemporary Jewish novelists, these searching and insightful essays ask how the twenty-first century can make contact with an increasingly distant and contested cultural legacy. The book concludes with “Nothing That Is Not There,” a major new essay that attempts to think in Jewish terms about the problem of faith and meaning in a secular age.