David Denby's Great Books

...For the record, the only such people Denby encounters are undergraduates—black female undergraduates, and a pitifully small number of them at that (I count two in the book...

...It was never really legitimate for anyone, from William Bennett ("To Reclaim a Legacy") to Irving Howe ("The Value of the Canon"), to pretend that the academic left consists of a United Front to ban Homer, Plato, Augustine, and Hobbes and replace them with working-class Chicana poets and cross-dressing hip-hop superstars...

...the fifth interlude is given over to an interview with Siobhan Kilfeather, formerly the most vocal opponent of the course among Columbia's junior faculty (she now teaches at the University of Sussex...

...I must admit, though, that the academic left too often earns its caricatures, and I know that there are some scholars—people I would normally consider political allies—who have regrettably divested themselves of disparaging and ridiculous remarks about Western Civ courses...

...SPRING • 1997 • 107 Books Thankfully, neither Denby nor Columbia College makes such a claim for core courses...

...The context here has to do with Hobbes's Leviathan, for which Stephanson has prepared lectures on the differences between feudal society in England and on the continent, which help to account for the shape of early capitalism in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...

...In one of his attacks on "canon-bashing critics," Denby asks, "Does anyone seriously imagine we will achieve social justice in America by reading bad or second- or third-level books and by ignoring great ones...

...If the course is supposed to give students some kind of grounding in the basics of Western intellectual history, it only makes sense to teach the books in a way that allows students to see the books' grounding in history...

...Denby claims to have been inspired to write his book by a desire to dispel "the crudities and irrelevancies of the `culture wars,' " so it's something of a shame that his book relies on them so often, even when the evidence is clear that Denby knows better...

...Kilfeather happens to be Oxbridge material, and it shows in her insistence that these courses are part of an "American mentality" of cultural "insecurity...

...great books" courses, a term which smacked of leather-bound "sets" with gold-leaf edges and the hard sell of snobbish magazine and newspaper ads...

...The book does attempt to answer this question, but for the most part it does so on the cheap, by perpetuating and then "refuting" the usual caricatures of the academic left...

...Ti-Grace Atkinson doesn't, and neither do I. But the cultural right does: they call it "tearing down the intellectual foundations of the West...

...But he does not offer the courses—or his own book— as acculturating devices that will keep kids in school (and keep their parents, the ones in good families, from losing caste...

...Kilfeather's objection to works in translation is valid but answerable: it is better to read Homer in translation than not at all...

...In literature, no argument is ever made in a vacuum...

...I'm not even slightly ambivalent about that aspect of the book: everyone in the academy these days knows that the humanities need a good market-and-promotion strategy, since core courses don't actually qualify their students to run the country, and Denby has come up with one of the best humanities-promotion strategies I can think of...

...Somewhere in an honored place in my office files is a twopage ad from the Saturday Review of the early 1960s, depicting a vaguely ethnic-looking white male teenager leaning against a wrought-iron school fence...

...What then is the purpose of such courses, in Denby's rendering...

...This is not an academic quibble...

...Denby has little trouble debating these ludicrous straw positions, and for good measure, he throws in a few more, attributing to nameless "younger faculty" the belief that the Iliad should be tossed off the syllabus because "it was a poem that oppressed women and glorified war, and it had an infantile hero, and so on...

...What makes Great Books so strange in this respect is that Denby praises individual academic leftists warmly—and then, moments later, dismisses wholesale the kind of professor he's just praised...

...from Columbia College, where, in 1961, he began his undergraduate career by taking Columbia's pair of required courses in Western literature and civilization— Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization (Lit Hum and C.C., for short...

...of me to point out that not a single one of these women, not even Austen, was on the C.C...

...Yet this seems an odd place for Denby to use "academic" in a derogatory sense (here it suggests both "pedantic" and "irrelevant"), because, after all, the books are being taught in a university, where it is normally considered legitimate to raise academic concerns about reading...

...Those caricatures are themselves partly the product of the media frenzy from which Denby sought escape, but in case you've forgotten that tableau vivant, it looks like this: every card-carrying member of the academic left uniformly despises core courses in Western Civ...

...But perhaps this is a good time to clear the air, all the same...

...To these standard complaints, Kilfeather adds two more: first, literature loses too much in translation, so that the reading list should be confined to works in English...

...What then does he get out of the course this time around, reading the books as a much more mature and traveled version of himself...

...The taint of consumerism and middlebrowism, as the college well knows, was never too far from lists of classics...

...Why not say simply that people who hope to think seriously about their place in that world have a positive obligation to verse themselves in the history of human thought and achievement, and that at this time, in this country, Plato-to-the-present courses in "Western thought" are as good a place as any (and better than most) to start...

...Great Books is a detailed chronicle of Denby's second immersion in the Western tradition, and though it would probably be too much to say that the West itself is richer for Denby's efforts, I doubt that Columbia could have asked for higher praise—or better advertising—for its core courses...

...The college tried to dispel that taint by the way it organized and taught the two courses...

...This is bad popularization," Kilfeather concludes, "you're taking things out of context...

...She wisely avoids the term "middlebrow...

...What if (some, many, most) great books do all these things—or none...

...But by the same measure, it was never legitimate for my colleagues on the academic left to pretend that Western Civ is the record of a tradition of domination, imperialism, and exploitation so potent that it can corrupt any undergraduate within a five-mile radius of the quad...

...and they represent an arrogant imposition of dominant high-cultural values, a bald assertion of the premise (anathema to all academic leftists) that some books are better than others...

...What's more, Denby freely admits—a few pages later— that "context" is in fact indispensable for understanding what he reads: "C.C...

...He thinks often, over the course of the year, of the time he was mugged, and he writes frequently—if querulously—about the gender turmoil wrought by feminism...

...He begins the course very concerned about the constitution of civil society (fearing that the United States is coming apart at the seams), and understandably reads Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, et al...

...This is the standard modus operandi of the cultural left, but oddly, Denby reacts as if Atkinson has accomplished something no cultural leftist has ever attempted: "There was," he concludes, "a very simple reason for feminists to read Aristotle: 'Know your enemy.' And how, I wondered, could the cultural left find fault with that...

...they oppress minority students who are just gaining entrance to institutions of higher education...

...That makes Great Books a great gift idea—but it also makes it an edifying book, a contradictory but serious and sometimes moving testimony to the power of great books to instruct and delight...

...It would be easy to point out, for instance, that over the course of the year, Denby comes to agree with almost every major anti-foundationalist point the academic left carries around in its quiver: upon reading Nietzsche, for instance, Denby writes, "Like Nietzsche—and like members of the academic left—I did not believe in metaphysical truth...

...112 • DISSENT...

...This talk of context," he writes, "was an infuriating academic tic...

...upon rereading the Bible he begins by dismissing as "politically correct" those students who prefer to call the Old Testament "the Hebrew Scriptures," but gradually reverses himself, and wonders anew, upon reading the Gospels, at the West's long history of anti-Semitism...

...You can read selections from Leviathan without that kind of knowledge, to be sure (I did it both in high school and at Columbia), but it's hard to imagine why anyone would object to "context" as a matter of principle...

...It's crucial, though, that the courses Denby took in 1991-1992 were vastly different from the courses I took at Columbia in 1978-1980, and I'll return to this point...

...Anyone who reads Great Books, I think, will emerge with the impression that core courses in Western Civilization can be extremely rewarding educational experiences—and that the Columbia professors who teach those courses (Denby's principal instructors were Edward Tayler, Anders Stephanson, and James Shapiro) are singularly dedicated, inspiring, and inventive...

...The question of canon revision, in turn, bears directly on the question of what purpose the core courses might serve...

...On the contrary, values would exist in whatever form we gave them...

...It's not just a tour bus—it's a tour bus driven by Sandra Bullock...

...And anyone who reads Great Books will probably want to read more great books...

...How can great books impel their readers to reinvent morality and community but not to pursue social justice...

...Why might this not be a sufficient reason for any course in the intellectual history of the world, whether West, East, North, or South...

...The course, after all, is a broad survey, and takes students (of wildly disparate levels of preparation) through difficult texts at high speed...

...But to reduce her immense, varied output to a variety of current-day feminist agendas, and to marshal her iridescent metaphors as dull-edged weapons in the struggles for turf within the university, is to engage in exploitation, expropriation, and slander...

...We call it "critical thinking" or, more simply still, "education...

...In other words, Atkinson, like the good cultural leftist she is, reads Aristotle against the grain, not to cherish his every thought but to open him to skeptical scrutiny (in accord with the West's best traditions, one should add...

...they impose a monolithic view of human history and traditions...

...Though she disliked the word itself, Virginia Woolf was most assuredly a feminist...

...But it's her emphasis on "context" that most irritates Denby...

...was a text-based course—we jumped from masterpiece to masterpiece— but Stephanson firmly planted many of the books in their time and place...

...Few people at Columbia," he writes, in 1961 or in the nineties, publicly called Lit Hum and C.C...

...Here's a case in point...

...In the fall of 1991, at the age of forty-eight, Denby returned to Columbia to take those courses again, impelled partly by the 1990-1991 media frenzy over higher education and political correctness and partly by disgust at the machinery of media frenzy itself—"the sheer busyness of it all, the constant movement, the incredible activity and utter boredom...

...Denby is a fine journalist, and renders a vivid sense of the gestalt experience of his courses: grappling with each writer's prose (Denby writes particularly well on this), taking a final exam, watching volatile or testy classroom discussions, trying to concentrate on SPRING • 1997 .111 Books great books amid jackhammers and fire engines, attempting to guest-teach Pride and Prejudice...

...And Adler's appeal on behalf of great books was nothing if not determinedly middlebrow...

...To construe Columbia's current curriculum as a wholesale refutation of academicleft principles, then, requires some real strain— and plenty of caricatures...

...But to make this point would be to miss two seemingly minor points that are far more crucial to the book: one, that the standard faculty complaint about "great books" courses is much more pedestrian and practical than Denby usually admits, and two, that the Columbia curriculum underwent substantial revision in the 1980s precisely in response to challenges posed by the academic left (principally its feminist wing...

...If Great Books attracts more people to the pleasures and challenges of serious study in the humanities, Denby will have done us all a positive service—and whatever his intentions, he will also have made some complicated and contradictory contributions to the mass marketing of "high culture" in the United States...

...Denby has his moments of magnanimity, when he ascends from caricature and admits that the academic left has reformed and enriched Columbia's core courses instead of calling for their abolition...

...Kilfeather doesn't live up to the image of the canon-bashing radical: "many of her objections to Lit Hum, it turned out, were practical rather than ideological...

...Perhaps this is not as effective a tactic as claiming that the course will prepare you to become one of Tomorrow's Leaders, but still, I'd like to propose that it's worth a shot anyway...

...We will not attain it by reading great work either, but at least we will not be confused about what we are doing...

...So here goes...

...And he is bracingly self-critical throughout, always willing to interrogate his own earlier impressions, even when he's complaining about academic critics who use the verb "interrogate...

...If Woolf were now brought into contact with some of her academic champions, there would follow an explosion of scorn without parallel in English literature...

...Indeed, it seems likely that Great Books will eventually become, for any number of parents, students, and interested onlookers, a kind of layperson's Friendly Companion to the Classics—a perfect gift idea for the holidays or for the college-bound high school senior on graduation day...

...But it's indicative of something disappointing about Great Books: Denby signed up for the course out of a sense of frustration with the "crudities" of the culture wars, but by the end of his year of study, despite his sincere appreciation of the women writers added to the course list in 1986 (thanks entirely to the efforts of feminists), he was still sufficiently under the sway of those culture-war crudities to pose as a Paglian defender of Virginia Woolf against the legions of her academic-feminist exploiters and slanderers...

...This is an absurd passage, a kind of hyperbolic fantasy version of the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall, and its vituperative tone is a real 110 • DISSENT Books blemish on an otherwise generous and capacious book...

...Denby himself admits, at the outset of the book, that he didn't remember much about the courses he took thirty years ago...

...I found myself grateful for these brief impromptu lectures on the changes in agriculture or weaponry in the sixteenth century and the military techSPRING • 1997 • 109 Books niques of the Prussian Army in the eighteenth century...

...Perhaps so...

...The ad insists that two out of five high school dropouts come from "good families," and that (although this cannot be guaranteed) you might be able to prevent such a disaster in your own home by providing your children with a steady diet of Great Books...

...Great Books has more to recommend it than I've suggested here...

...We do so because (deep breath) the courses perpetuate white European male hegemony...

...they silence emergent voices and cultures, thereby preventing students from engaging with the Other...

...Denby does confess that he returned to college out of a sense of spiritual and intellectual frustration with mass media, and he does conclude that Western Civ was balm for his soul...

...The notion of context was an academic rather than a literary or readerly demand...

...Upon rereading King Lear he revisits, with agonizing honesty, his difficult relationship with his mother...

...The short answer, of course, is that we don't...

...But that magnanimity comes at a price—as when Denby showers praise on Virginia Woolf, acknowledging her earlier neglect, but then turns with fury on (of all people) the academic feminists who helped to establish Woolf's reputation...

...But why should these courses be considered so central to a college curriculum, particularly for those vast numbers of undergraduates who have no interest whatsoever in studying the humanities...

...Someone at Columbia University owes David Denby an honorary degree...

...Another reason no one at Columbia calls the courses "great books," of course, is that to do so would be to confuse one of Columbia's major marketing tools with that of the University of Chicago...

...But what he got out of the books, he got by reading them in context—both in their historical context, and in his own...

...What happens is that students think over the most general aspects of the argument and make a vulgar paraphrase of it...

...As matters now stand, he's already received a B.A...

...To say this is not to slight Denby's achievement...

...Great Books is punctuated by "Interludes" in which Denby assesses the course in the light of the culture wars...

...My sense is that Denby got a great deal out of his courses: he learned about the history of feminism (which was not on the syllabus in 1961), he read great writers whose poetry and prose ravished his soul, and he revisited—more seriously this time around—the intellectual tradition of the West...

...or Lit Hum syllabus when I was an undergraduate way back in the final days of the Carter administration...

...Early in the fall semester, seeking a radical reading of Aristotle, Denby sits in on Ti-Grace Atkinson's section of C.C., in which Atkinson describes and decries the historical influence of Aristotle's notions of public and private, his emphasis on order and hierarchy, and his beliefs about gender...

...To its credit, Denby's book opens with precisely this note of ambivalence...

...Of Woolf's entry into the circle of great writers, writes Denby: It was a famous victory, and in gratitude to the feminist critics, who were mainly responsible, I have tried to ignore the women in the universities who were using and misusing Woolf, claiming the most private of artists as a public possession...

...But her point about context, however overdrawn, bears directly on the educational mission of the liberal arts...

...Anyone who reads her carefully could prove as much...

...In 1991-1992 Denby's reading lists included Sappho, Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and even Catharine MacKinnon Would it be insufferably P.C...

...Earlier in his narrative, while reading the Old Testament and disentangling it from its latter-day popularization and corruptions, Denby had hit upon a better rationale for Western Civ: for the students who had never read the Bible closely (or Hegel, or Wollstonecraft), "the core- curriculum courses amounted to remedial work on their own existence...

...second, the survey format prevents faculty from reading the works with due respect to the historical and social context in which they were written...

...And one of the (contextual) ironies here, as I've suggested above, is that Denby's courses were themselves the product of the "culture wars...

...That's an interesting parenthesis, not only because it begs the question of what we are doing by reading great work, but also because it undercuts one of the book's principal conclusions, which appears a scant ten pages later: "I agree with William Bennett and other traditionalists to this extent: Men and women educated in the Western tradition will have the best possible shot at the daunting task of reinventing morality and community in a republic now badly tattered by fear and mistrust...

...I'd like to believe this, and not merely because it would mean that I myself would be qualified to reinvent the country, but as matters stand I'm afraid it only leaves me confused about what we're doing in the humanities...

...The term "great books" is by now so closely associated with the Chicago program engineered by Robert Maynard Hutchins and promoted by Mortimer Adler's "Great Books" series that Adler should probably be receiving royalties anytime someone uses the term...

...For all that I might find vexing about it, Great Books has plenty of what they call (in the culture biz) "selling points...

...I did not believe that values existed outside of human practice...

...It is perfectly possible to be a member of the academic left in good standing and still be a sup108 • DISSENT Books porter of core courses in some version of the Western canon, and I offer myself as living proof of the proposition...

...he has written a thoughtful, engaging, and conscientious book, and I hope it wins a wide readership...

...Door prizes will be awarded to the person who first identifies a Columbia professor, of any political stripe, who has actually said these things...

...in that light...