Stanley Edgar Hyman

Stanley Edgar Hyman (June 11, 1919 - July 29, 1970) was an American literary critic, jazz critic, staff writer for The New Yorker, and teacher at Bennington College in Vermont.

Quotes

• Tylor's evolutionary anthropology, carried on by such successors as R. R. Marett and Henry Balfour, became the central tradition of British anthropology, but the emphasis gradually shifted from Tylor's concern with bellief and custom to the more tanglible areas of social organization, economics, and material culture.
  • (1955). "The ritual view of myth and the mythic". The Journal of American Folklore 68 (270): 462–472. DOI:10.2307/536771.

• Freud in fact defines hysteria as the conflict of two incompatible wishes, as Hegel defined tragedy as the conflict of two incompatible necessities.
  • The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers. New York: Atheneum. 1962; 492 p.  2nd edition. 1974.  (p. 312)

• In general, Eble's estimate of Fitzgerald's work seems to me just, even his suggestion that The Great Gatsby may be the greatest novel between Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye.
  • Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time. Horizon Press. 1966. p. 194. 

Quotes about Hyman

• For years after he joined the Bennington faculty his course, "Myth-Ritual-Literature," was said to be the most popular undergraduate offering of the college.
  • Robert Phillips: (Fall 1970)"Stanley Edgar Hyman: An Appreciation". The Courier, Syracuse University 3: 28–33. (p. 33)

• Reflecting on their friendship many years later, Ellison would credit Hyman as a crucial influence on his fiction. If Ellison was struggling with a project, Hyman often stepped in to encourage him. In 1943, when Ellison was about to ship out to the merchant marine, Hyman urged him first to finish 'Flying Home,' the story that would be his breakthrough work.
  • Ruth Franklin: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. Liveright Publishing. 2016.