Scholarships and Criticism

A vigorous call to restore imagination, judgment, and intellectual courage to American culture.

In this essay from Civilization in the United States, J. E. Spingarn challenges universities and critics to recover the purpose behind their learning. He questions scholarship reduced to collecting information and criticism governed by moral verdicts, fashionable theories, or personal taste alone.

For Spingarn, knowledge finds its greatest value in serving thought and imagination. Meaningful criticism requires cultivated taste, intellectual discipline, and the ability to enter sympathetically into another person's creative vision. His argument reaches beyond literature to ask how a nation develops a rich inner life.

Narrated by Ryan Durham, this classic work of cultural criticism offers an invitation to reconsider how we teach, read, and judge. An engaging listen for educators, students of literature, and anyone drawn to aesthetics, American intellectual history, and the life of ideas.