Harvey Gross, Diane Leonard, Steven Marcus, and James Olney discuss how best to measure the cultural and aesthetic health of a society, whether great art can be consistently equated with great social institutions, and some of the criteria against which twentieth-century social and aesthetic critics gauge modernism’s effects on politics, literature, and art.
At the time of this interview, Gross, a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1981-82), was professor of comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Leonard was professor of comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Marcus, a Fellow at the Center (1981-82) and trustee of the Center, was professor of English at Columbia University. Olney, a Fellow at the Center (1980-81), was professor of English at North Carolina Central University.
This edition of Soundings was conducted by Wayne J. Pond.
