Editor's Notes
Winter 1942
A Word about Naturalism
The Kenyon Review intends to pursue the discussion of Naturalism initiated in our last number by the papers of Messrs. Vivas and Wheelright and by W. C. Barrett’s review of […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1945
Brief Comment: The Middle Span (Continuing Persons and Places)
The Middle Span (Continuing Persons And Places) by George Santayana. Scribner’s. $2.50. It would have been kinder to Mr. Santayana, if less to his publishers’ profit, for them to […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1945
Brief Comment: The Captain of St. Margaret’s
The Captain Of St. Margaret’s by Ferenc Molnar. Duell, Sloan and Pearce. $2.50. Upon approaching his hotel on St. Margaret Island, Budapest, one snowy morning, the narrator sees a […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1941
Toward a Philosophy of Language
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth y Bertrand Russell. Norton. $3.75 Language and Reality by Wilbur Marshall Urban. Macmillan. $5.50 Russel’s fairly good book and Urban’s bad one swell the […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1940
George Santayana: The Philosopher as Poet
Mr. Santayana began his poetic career with three handicaps which he did not entirely overcome: he was a philosopher, he was addicted to Platonism, and he lived in the United […]
Special Anniversary Feature: Excerpts from the War Years
Winter 1989
Notes on a Democratic Philosophy
From the Autumn 1942 issue. We hear frequently these days that if democracy is to survive it must have a new faith; that battles are not won by tanks and […]
Book Reviews
Summer 1944
Salt, Pepper, and Pity for Mankind
Persons and Places: The Background of My Life by George Santayana. Scribners. $2.50. Mr. Santayana has always professed that his writings were nothing but soliloquies, and in such works as […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1954
Faulkner’s Crucifixion
A Fable by William Faulkner. Random House. $4.75. From the opening paragraphs of A Fable, it is evident that Faulkner is tackling a larger and more serried canvas than he […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1946
Brief Notices: Productive Thinking
Productive Thinking by Max Wertheimer. Harper. $3.00 The late Max Wertheimer was venerated as the founder of the Gestalt school in psychology, and he acted as its guiding genius in […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1954
The Intellectual Quarterly in a Non-Intellectual Society
The title of my paper1 was suggested to me; I should not otherwise have had the temerity to choose it. For I am in no way specially qualified to be […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1950
Existentialism and the Self
French existentialism is a complex and, to the critic, a disconcerting product of the European agony. How shall we treat it? As a philosophy in the sense of an attempt […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1950
Children of Narcissus: Some Themes of French Speculation
The legend of Narcissus has exercised upon the French an irresistible fascination. From the beginnings of modern thought in Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal to the poets and philosophers of our […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1949
The Merging Parallels: Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”
On the first reading, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus1 is a strange, difficult and forbidding novel. Mann himself has called it his wildestes, his most savage, book. He has also said […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1948
An Existentialist Allegory
The Blood of Others by Simone de Beauvoir. Translated by Roger Senhouse and Yvonne Moyse. Knopf. $3.00 In France, as in English-speaking countries, poets and critics have from time […]
A Communication
Summer 1948
A Letter to a Frenchman
Dear B.: You have summed up accurately the feeling expressed in my letter from Paris: that France in the autumn and early winter of 1947 was still very beautiful, but […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1948
A Letter from France
Paris, November 2, 1947 The French are very outspoken about their feeling that this is for them a major time of troubles. Their awareness of it quickly forces itself upon […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1947
The Semiotic of Charles Morris
Signs, Language And Behavior by Charles Morris. Prentice-Hall. $5.00 Unlike those “semanticists” who have created the biggest public splash, Charles Morris makes modest claims for the theory of signs. He […]
Book Reviews
Autumn 1945
Melville’s Imagination
Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind by William Ellery Sedgwick. Harvard. $2.75. For some twenty years now, an increasing number of critics have been conjuring with the names of […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1945
Thomas Mann and the Religious Revival
Some of the meteorologists who record shifts in the winds of doctrine are labelling the second quarter of our century a period of religious revival; others put it down as […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1945
Brief Comment: Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol by Vladimir Nabokov. New Directions. $1.50. Mr. Nabokov argues, jauntily but convincingly, that Gogol is one of the least understood major figures in literature. In English-speaking countries […]
Poetry
Summer 1944
Hide and Seek
(After Tchelitchew’s picture in the Museum of Modern Art) For my daughter 1. Aetat. 5 Through the vines’ tangle and the terror of leaves,Thrust on by the tenor drum of […]
Book Reviews
Spring 1943
Gibbs and the Age of Power
Willard Gibbs by Muriel Rukeyser. Doubleday Doran. $3.50. Both before and after writing this book, Miss Rukeyser has received for her intrepidity a number of slaps on the wrist—and even, […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1942
Notes on a Democratic Philosophy
We hear frequently these days that if democracy is to survive it must have a new faith; that battles are not won by tanks and planes alone, but also by […]
Editor's Notes
Spring 1940
Psychoanalysis: The Second Wave
The initial wave of popular interest in psychoanalysis arrived during the years just after the first World War. From the therapeutic side, it may have been given impetus by the […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1940
Dewey and His Critics
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry by John Dewey. Henry Holt. $3.00The Philosophy of John Dewey edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. The Library of Living Philosophers: Vol. 1. Northwestern University Press. […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1939
Foreign Periodicals
The European thought and creative effort of the nineteen-twenties was brought to a focus in three periodicals—The Criterion, Die Neue Rundschau, and Nouvelle Revue Française. Of these, only the NRF […]
The New Encyclopedists
Spring 1939
The New Encyclopedists: A Symposium
I. ProBy Eliseo Vivas The history of modern philosophy may be envisaged from many points of view. One of these conceives of its development as an effort to mediate between […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1939
Twenty-Five Directions
NEW DIRECTIONS 1938. Edited by James Laughlin IV. New Directions. $2.50 Finding twenty-five or thirty new directions a year is a task that might strain any literary compass, even so […]