نبذة مختصرة : This past May, the appearance in bookstores and libraries of four handsomely produced volumes marked the auspicious public beginning of a major cultural enterprise. These volumes—the first fruits of a venture known collectively as the Library of America—present in an attractive and uniform format authoritative texts of literary works by Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Under the direction of Daniel Aaron, professor of English and American literature at Harvard University, and with initial funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the Library plans to bring out over time comparable editions of the works of all major American writers. (See the ruled insert on page 170.) Scholars and students have already begun to celebrate the new availability of these classic texts, many of which have long been either out of print entirely or accessible only in makeshift editions. The cause for celebration is legitimate. No other Western culture has been so unintentionally profligate of talent or wasteful of its accumulated riches as our own; no other has so carelessly maintained its traditions of insight and imagination. A publishing venture that redresses this sorry neglect is not, how. ever, of moment just to students and scholars. It deserves the active support of the business community as well. A place of honor ought to be made for these volumes in every company's library, but not merely—or even mainly—as an act of corporate philanthropy Achieving familiarity with the central works of America's literary tradition, with the nation's ‘great books,’ is not an exotic accomplishment fit only for dilettantes or tweed-jacketed professors. It is at the heart of the liberal education so noticeably lacking in many of our country's managers. Idle literary chatter at cocktail parties may, in some quarters, pass for social polish, but such a shallow acquaintance cannot substitute for that enlarged view of human affairs that comes only from wide personal experience and a sound liberal education. It makes little sense for companies to spend countless dollars on the technical aspects of management training and but loose change on broadening the outlook of the managers who are to wield those techniques. Especially in a democratic society, if richness o[ perception and depth of understanding do not come voluntarily through education, they do not come at all. There is no cultural elite to follow in matters of opinion, no agency of the state to establish standards of value or taste. Our triumphant virtue as a society has been from the outset our willingness and ability to learn from experience, to profit from what has gone before. Our society has never viewed culture as a neat package tied up in ribbons. The genius of America has lain, instead, in a ready hospitality for that which is new—but a hospitality deeply informed by the communal experience that shaped it. And it is precisely this balance of outward-reaching imagination with a homegrown respect for the facts of local circumstance that most distinguishes our major writers. Lacking familiarity with them and with the tradition they represent, we run the risk of serious misjudgment. Recent economic difficulties have, for example, caused many managers to ask what aspects of foreign managerial practice–in Japan and elsewhere–can survive transplantation to domestic settings. In the flurry of discussion such questions have raised, cultural traits have figured largely as constraints or limitations. American companies cannot do what the Japanese do, runs the familiar refrain, because Japanese culture is so very different from our own. True enough, of course, but how one-sided. Asking questions in this way implies that American traditions are important as barriers to certain forms of activity, not as valuable resources to be called on in need.… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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