DIVING INTO LITERATURE
A MEMOIR
James A.W. Heffernan
The richly detailed life story of a Dartmouth Professor of English who aims to re-animate the humanities in American higher education by showing how much great works of literature can tell us about ourselves.
Studded with stories about the far-flung places he has seen (such as Buenos Aires, Budapest, and Tokyo) and the fascinating people--some of them famous--he has met along the way, enlivened by an Oedipal struggle with his father (a well-known Boston obstetrician who thought all abortion was murder), it culminates with Jim's inside history of Dartmouth over the past sixty years, which he recounts with a riveting combination of admiration, appreciation, and brutal honesty--even to the point of giving one Dartmouth president a grade of E.
In writing this book, he chiefly aims to show why Dartmouth College should lead the way in reviving the study of the humanities--as distinct from STEM and data science--as the indispensable foundation of a truly educated life.
DIVING INTO LITERATURE:
A MEMOIR
James A. W. Heffernan
It's who you are when time's up that matters.
-- Anne Perry
The author at age 72 (in 2011)
The author at left with wife Nancy, daughter Virginia, and son Andrew on Christman Day 2023 at our house in Hanover, New Hampshire.
In memory of my beloved parents, Roy J. Heffernan (1894-1992) and
Kathleen Walsh Heffernan (1900-2002), and with boundless thanks to my beloved wife Nancy, our dear and wondrous children Virginia and Andrew, and the teachers, mentors, and countless friends whose multifarious jolts and juices have played a crucial part in making me the man and the writer that I have become just before my time is up.
Special thanks also to Andrew Foust, my indispensable digital supergeek, and to Tom Pemo, the Dartmouth IT guy who miraculously revived my HP laptop after I spilled water all over it.
Finally, special thanks to Dr. Mary Ellen Taplin of the Harvard Medical School, whose expert advice has sustained me for the past seven years even as my skeleton has been terminally gripped by metastatic prostate cancer.
To live is to play at the meaning of life...The upshot of this... is that it teaches us once and for all that childlike foolishness is the calling of mature men.
--Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Mark me now. In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation. Omnis caro ad te veniet.
--James Joyce, Ulysses, Chapter 14
TABLE OF CONTENTS