Balanced Search: Between Morality And Beauty

Alfred Kazin, the American social and cultural critic, has such a long life for writing that he witnesses the transition of American literature from modernism to postmodernism, American criticism from literary appreciation to theoretical analysis, American society from liberalism to conservatism. Though Kazin undergoes profound inner struggle, his critical thinking remains the same. That is, true criticism wants nothing less than to understand men. His criticism seeks the balance between morality and beauty, emphasizes on individual experience and independent thinking, links literary works with their specific social and historical tradition. He believes that any critic who is any good has to bring the historical sense of what has been and the imagination of what must be into the immediate confrontation and analysis of works of art so as to go beyond one's own culture and enliven others' imagination. In a sense, what counts is critical thinking rather than conclusive ideas. Literary research needs more questions than conclusions.Born into the "New Freedom" society in the early 20th centuary, Kazin gloomly sees the Conservative sweep in the latter part of his life. The optimism of earlier decades and the hopes for social reform have come to naught. He is a humanist unhinged from his former faith in humanity by the Holocaust, a modernist who watched his iconoclasts being institutionalized by the pervasive of the New Criticism. Generally speaking, Kazin is a progressive with a despairing sense of the future, a traditionalist fighting against the tradition.