Clausen, Christopher 1942- (Christopher John Clausen)

PERSONAL:

Born May 14, 1942, in Richmond, VA; son of John A. (a sociologist) and Suzanne R. Clausen; married Nancy Palmer, August 3, 1976. Ethnicity: "Mixed." Education: Earlham College, B.A., 1964; University of Chicago, M.A., 1965; Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Ph.D., 1972.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Carlisle, PA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, instructor in English, 1965-66; Concord College, Athens, WV, assistant professor of English, 1966-68; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, visiting assistant professor, 1972, assistant professor, 1973-79, associate professor, 1979-84, professor of English, 1984-85; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, professor of English, 1985-2006.

MEMBER:

Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Woodrow Wilson fellow, 1964-65; fellow of Canada Council, 1970-72; grant from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1979; The Place of Poetry was named a "notable book of the year" by New York Times Book Review, 1982; Djerassi Foundation writer in residence, 1984; Class of 1933 Award for Distinction in the Humanities, 2001.

WRITINGS:

The Place of Poetry: Two Centuries of an Art in Crisis, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1981.

The Moral Imagination: Essays on Literature and Ethics, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1986.

My Life with President Kennedy, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1994.

Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-cultural America, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 2000.

Work represented in anthologies, including Pushcart Prize VII: The Best of the Small Presses, Pushcart Press, 1982. Contributor of articles, poetry, and reviews to scholarly journals, literary magazines, and newspapers, including American Scholar, Commentary, Wilson Quarterly, New Leader, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Sewanee Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Christopher Clausen once told CA: "Literature, poetry in particular, was once central to our culture because readers took it seriously as an exploration of life, an attempt to grapple with the intellectual and moral problems that beset human beings like themselves. Viewed from one standpoint, every poem or story is an aesthetic object, a created work of art. From another equally legitimate standpoint, however, every poem is an argument, every plot an experiment in ethics. The ancient quarrel of philosophy with poetry would be incomprehensible if they had not been competing modes for the clarification of life. Today literary criticism has become excessively formalistic (except when it is narrowly ideological), while philosophy has likewise ossified into an academic discipline defined by a cramped range of concerns and procedures. Both poetry and philosophy are marginal to the life of our culture, although fiction retains some significance outside universities.

"As an essayist I try to combine cultural, ethical, and sometimes political content with aesthetic form. The essay, in my opinion, is not just a magazine article, let alone a television commentary, but the literary form that digests the largest slice of life today. It does most of the things that lyric poetry used to do in its heyday. Because it's short, the essay makes special demands on the writer's intelligence and style. The big nonfiction book that publishers love so much overwhelms the reader with a mass of unsorted detail. The essayist, on the other hand, like the lyric poet, has to choose the single perfect detail. The most useful discipline I ever underwent was writing a column for four years that had to be exactly 1850 words. Conciseness is not a common American virtue, but the best writing, as Hemingway (originally a journalist) said, always uses less to make more."