Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World [Paperback]

David Denby, New York city movie critic and journalist, entered Columbia University in 1991 to take the university's famous course in "Great Books." This is the course that, in preserving the notion of the western canon without apology to multiculturalists and feminists, has been an unlikely focus of America's culture war in recent years. Where other universities have caved in and revised or enlarged the canon, Columbia's course has remained intact. Denby's intention as a writer and protagonist in the culture war was to record the experience and the personal impact of the course. He has produced a cry from the heart in favor of the classics of western civilization, relaying with infectious enthusiasm how literature touched his soul. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Does a great books canon exist? Left-wing critics denounce the notion of a canon, while right-wingers often use it to assert unquestioned Western supremacy. This superb book suggests an answer. Denby, the film critic for New York magazine, returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, after 30 years to retake the two core curriculum courses, grapple with the world's classics and regenerate his own lapsed reading habit. It is a heartening portrait of (elite) American education and a substantial?sometimes enthralling?read. His teachers are committed pedagogues, the students a diverse (religious faith separates more than does ethnicity) and thoughtful lot. But the students are young, and the book's richest moments are when the mature Denby engages with the texts. Reading the tragedy of Oedipus Rex, he feels anxious, recognizing the ironic truth "[W]hat we avoid, we become." Hobbes's comments on the state of nature lead Denby to muse on insider trading and the time he was mugged. He contrasts Beauvoir's call for female liberty with the "Take Back the Night" antirape march on campus. Denby steps aside to interview academics and analyze the debate about the canon; he acknowledges that white male critics too long ignored the likes of Virginia Woolf, but resolutely argues for the seeking out of all great books, not merely ones that represent excluded groups. Why? Because the "Western classics were at war with each other," and learning to read Hegel and Marx, or the Bible and Nietzsche, is no lesson in indoctrination but the beginning of "an ethically strenuous education" and "a set of bracing intellectual habits." Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Denby, a noted movie critic, goes back to his alma mater, Columbia University, to retake the LitHum and contemporary civilization courses he took in the early 1960s to determine whether the politically correct crowd is right about the great books being intellectually bankrupt. He decides the PCs are mostly all wet. "These books...speak most powerfully of what a human being can be. They dramatize the utmost any of us is capable of in love, suffering, and knowledge. They offer the most direct representation of the possibilities of civil existence and the disaster of its dissolution." For a scholar's viewpoint on great books, see Harold Bloom's The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (LJ 9/1/94). (LJ 8/96).
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Thomas Wolfe may have proposed that we can't go home again, but he didn't exclude the possibility of a quick scuttle back to college. Denby, a film critic for New York magazine, returned to Columbia at age 48 to participate as an observer in two core courses he had taken there as an undergraduate: Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. When he realized that "I no longer knew what I knew," Denby took his wife's dare to reread and rethink the classics in an academic milieu. He spent two semesters listening, debating, observing students, and critiquing teaching styles in an effort to "possess" reading and turn it once again into a satisfying act. Denby's account is a fascinating blend of memoir, journal, reporting, exegesis, and soul-searching by a man who slowly realized the truth of one professor's caveat that to read these works, each reader would need "to create a self." In the act of doing so, Denby proved that one man's response to the Great Books might be writing a great book of his own. Patricia Hassler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In a coup of cultural journalism, a prominent film critic returns to the Ivy League classroom as a front-line correspondent on the culture wars. For this book, Denby, film critic for New York and a contributing editor at the New Yorker, spent an academic year attending Columbia University's famous ``core curriculum'' classes in the great books, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. Denby recreates how he read, pondered, and discussed classic texts from Homer and Sappho to Nietzsche and Conrad, all the time maintaining and meditating on his intensely cosmopolitan yet family-centered life. When Denby reads Plato, or for that matter Austen, he contemplates how the ``media fog'' to which he contributes as a film critic envelops his fellow students; when he reads Woolf, or for that matter Virgil, he considers the transformations wrought in his own lifetime by feminism. Denby's book will be easy to poke fun at--or to poke holes in. Academic leftists will note how after much anxious criticism of some vague group called the ``cultural left,'' an interview with an actual radical professor discovers only a sensible, if gloomy, argument that the great books are too hard for today's underprepared undergraduates. Conservatives will snort at Denby's epiphanies over a feminist critique of Aristotle's Politics. But Denby's mission is precisely to counter such pessimism and cynicism, and to capture the potential of such epiphanies, by honestly recording his own intellectual experiences. Such exposure takes real courage. And Denby's courage pays off: His thick description of what learning and teaching the great books actually means to us today puts to shame the facile speculation that has heretofore dominated culture-wars journalism. When Denby puts himself on the line as a student and as a person by actually reading the classics, his audacious humility amounts to a kind of greatness of soul. In important ways, this is one of very few truly good books on the culture wars. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Joyce Carol Oates The New York Times Book Review A lively adventure of the mind....The tone of the prose...is one of unqualified enthusiasm: energy, vigor, intellectual curiosity, and what might be called an ecstasy of imaginative journalism.

Jane Smiley Chicago Tribune Books He sustains a variety of tone, subject matter and approach that keeps Great Books alluring and readable throughout...I was torn between getting out a copy of the book he had just discussed and reading it and going on with Denby. In every case. I went on with Denby.

Tracy Kidder What Mr. Denby has written is a book filled with keen literary and social observation, which captures the excitement of exploration and discovery. This is a wonderful book.

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

At the age of forty-eight, writer and film critic David Denby returned to Columbia University and re-enrolled in two core courses in Western civilization to confront the literary and philosophical masterpieces -- the "great books" -- that are now at the heart of the culture wars. In Great Books, he leads us on a glorious tour, a rediscovery and celebration of such authors as Homer and Boccaccio, Locke and Nietzsche. Conrad and Woolf. The resulting personal odyssey is an engaging blend of self-discovery, cultural commentary, reporting, criticism, and autobiography -- an inspiration for anyone in love with the written word.

David Denby is a longtime film critic for The New Yorker; prior to that he was film critic for New York Magazine. He lives in New York City.

Chapter 1

HOMER I

* The Iliad

* Professor Edward Tayler tells us we will build a self

* The college bookstore; my lost attention

* Columbia students then and now

* C.C. begins: Anders Stephanson and the hegemony of the western calendar

* Professor Tayler teaches the Iliad

* Achilles the hero

I had forgotten. I had forgotten the extremity of its cruelty and tenderness, and, reading it now, turning the Iliad open anywhere in its 15,693 lines, I was shocked. A dying word, "shocked." Few people have been able to use it well since Claude Rains so famously said, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," as he pocketed his winnings in Casablanca. But it's the only word for excitement and alarm of this intensity. The brute vitality of the air, the magnificence of ships, wind, and fires; the raging battles, the plains charged with terrified horses, the beasts unstrung and falling; the warriors flung facedown in the dust; the ravaged longing for home and family and meadows and the rituals of peace, leading at last to an instant of reconciliation, when even two men who are bitter enemies fall into rapt admiration of each other's nobility and beauty -- it is a war poem, and in the Richmond Lattimore translation it has an excruciating vividness, an obsessive observation of horror that causes almost disbelief.

Idomeneus stabbed at the middle of his chest with the spear, and broke the bronze armour about him which in time before had guarded his body from destruction. He cried out then, a great cry, broken, the spear in him, and fell, thunderously, and the spear in his heart was stuck fast but the heart was panting still and beating to shake the butt end of the spear.

(XIII, 438-44)

If I had seen that quaking spear in a shopping-mall scare movie, I would have abandoned the sticky floors and headed for the door. Exploitation and dehumanization! Teenagers never read anything -- that's why they love this grisly movie trash! Yet here is the image at the beginning of Western literature, and in its most famous book.

The quivering spear was hair-raising, though there were even more frightening images: eyeballs spitted on the ends of spears and held aloft in triumph, a blade entering at the mouth "so that the brazen spearhead smashed its way clean through below the brain in an upward stroke, and the white bones splintered." Homer records these mutilations with an apparent physical relish that suddenly gives way to bitter sorrow (this is one way the images differ from those in horror movies) and to a yearning for ordinary life, a caress of nostalgia slipped into the mesmerizing catastrophe before us. The exultant violence is shot through with the most profound dismay. The Greeks, camped outside the walls of Troy, are far from home, but home, and everything lovely, proper, and comforting that might happen there, is evoked in heartbreaking flashes. There is the case of

Simoeisios in his stripling's beauty, whom once his mother descending from Ida bore beside the banks of Simoeis when she had followed her father and mother to tend the sheep-flocks.

Therefore they called him Simoeisios; but he could not render again the care of his dear parents; he was short-lived, beaten down beneath the spear of high-hearted Aias, who struck him as he first came forward beside the nipple of the right breast, and the bronze spearhead drove clean through the shoulder.

He dropped then to the ground in the dust, like some black poplar...

(IV, 472-82)

The nipple of the right breast. Homer in his terrifying exactness tells us where the spear comes in and goes out, what limbs are severed; he tells us that the dead will not return to rich soil, they will not take care of elderly parents, receive pleasure from their young wives. His explicitness has a finality beyond all illusion. In the end, the war (promoted by the gods) will consume almost all of them, Greeks and Trojans alike, sweeping on year after year, in battle after battle -- a mystery in its irresistible momentum, its profoundly absorbing moment-to-moment activity and overall meaninglessness. First one side drives forward, annihilates hundreds, and is on the edge of victory. Then, a few days later, inspired by some god's trick or phantasm -- a prod to the sluggish brain of an exhausted warrior -- the other side recovers, advances, and carries all before it. When the poem opens, this movement back and forth has been going on for more than nine years.

The teacher, a small, compact man, about sixty, walked into the room, and wrote some initials on the board:

W A S P

D W M

W C

D G S I

While most of us tried to figure them out (I had no trouble with the first two, made a lame joke to myself about the third, and was stumped by the fourth), he turned, looking around the class, and said ardently, almost imploringly, "We've only got a year together...." His tone was pleading and mournful, a lover who feared he might be thwarted. There was an alarming pause. A few students, embarrassed, looked down, and then he said: "This course has been under attack for thirty years. People have said" -- pointing to the top set of initials -- "the writers are all white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It's not true, but it doesn't matter. They've said they were all Dead White Males; it's not true, but it doesn't matter. That it's all Western civilization. That's not quite true either -- there are many Western civilizations -- but it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is this."

He looked at us, then turned back to the board, considering the initials "DGSI" carefully, respectfully, and rubbed his chin. "Don't Get Sucked In," he said at last. Another pause, and I noticed the girl sitting next to me, who has wild frizzed hair and a mass of acne on her chin and forehead, opening her mouth in panic. Others were smiling. They were freshmen -- sorry, first-year students -- and not literature majors necessarily, but a cross-section of students, and therefore future lawyers, accountants, teachers, businessmen, politicians, TV producers, doctors, poets, layabouts. They were taking Lit Hum, a required course that almost all students at Columbia take the first year of school. This may have been the first teacher the students had seen in college. He wasn't making it easy on them.

"Don't get sucked in by false ideas," he said. "You're not here for political reasons. You're here for very selfish reasons. You're here to build a self. You create a self, you don't inherit it. One way you create it is out of the past. Look, if you find the Iliad dull or invidious or a glorification of war, you're right. It's a poem in your mind; let it take shape in your mind. The women are honor gifts. They're war booty, like tripods. Less than tripods. If any male reading this poem treated women on campus as chattel, it would be very strange. I also trust you to read this and not go out and hack someone to pieces."

Ah, a hipster, I thought. He admitted the obvious charges in order to minimize them. And he said nothing about transcendental values, supreme masterpieces of the West, and the rest of that. We're here for selfish reasons. The voice was pleasant but odd -- baritonal, steady, but with traces of mockery garlanding the short, definitive sentences. The intonations drooped, as if he were laying black crepe around his words. A hipster wit. He nearly droned, but there were little surprises -- ideas insinuated into corners, a sudden expansion of feeling. He had sepulchral charm, like one of Shakespeare's solemnly antic clowns.

I remembered him well enough: Edward Tayler, professor of English. I had taken a course with him twenty-nine years earlier (he was a young assistant professor then), a course in seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry, which was then part of the sequence required for English majors at Columbia, and I recalled being baffled as much as intrigued by his manner, which definitely tended toward the cryptic. He was obviously brilliant, but he liked to jump around, keep students off balance, hint and retreat; I learned a few things about Donne and Marvell, and left the class with a sigh of relief. In the interim, he had become famous as a teacher and was now the sonorously titled Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities -- the moniker was derived from Columbia's most famous English literature professor, a great figure when I was there in the early sixties.

"The Hermeneutic Circle," Tayler was saying. "That's what Wilhelm Dilthey called it. You don't know what to do with the details unless you have a grip on the structure; and at the same time, you don't know what to do with the structure unless you know the details. It's true in life and in literature. The Hermeneutic Circle. It's a vicious circle. Look, we have only a year together. You have to read. There's nothing you'll do in your four years at Columbia that's more important for selfish reasons than reading the books of this course."

Could they become selves? From my position along the side of the classroom, I sneaked a look. At the moment they looked more like lumps, uncreated first-year students. The men sat with legs stretched all the way out, eyes down on their notes. Some wore caps turned backward. They were eighteen, maybe nineteen. In their T-shirts, jeans, and turned-around caps, they had a summer-camp thickness, like counselors just back from a hike with ten-year-olds. Give me a beer. The women, many of them also in T-shirts, their hair gathered at the back with a rubber band, were more directly attentive; they looked at Tayler, but they looked blankly.

Tayler handed out a sheet with some quotations. At the top of the page were some verses from the beginning of Genesis.

And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: And God

divided the light from the darkness....And God said,

Let there be a firmament in the midst of the wa...

Ed Asner gives a passionate, riveting performance. His commitment to the subject seems as strong and personal as the author's. Together they tell how Denby, at the age of 48, rediscovered the vital relevance of the beleaguered canon of Great Books. Unfortunately, Asner lapses into a growly condescension that clashes with the author's unpretentious first-person narrative. The clash blunts the book's point. Nonetheless, soldiers in today's culture wars will not only learn from this tape, but will gain strength for the next battle. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.