“To see politics everywhere is to diminish the
weight of politics. Serious politics recognizes the limits of its reach; it
deals with public affairs while leaving alone large spheres of existence; it
seeks not to totalize’ its range of interest. Some serious thinkers believe
that the ultimate aim of politics should be to render itself superfluous. That
may seem an unrealizable goal; meanwhile, a good part of the struggle for
freedom in recent decades has been to draw a line beyond which politics must
not tread. The same holds, more or less, for literary study and the teaching of
literature.”—Jewish-American literary and social critic Irving Howe
(1920-1993), “The Value of the Canon,”
The New Republic, February 18, 1991
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