Beyond Literacy

...The Harvard Classics and, more recently, the Great Books series overseen by Mortimer J. Adler were famous attempts to bring ordinary readers in contact with a selection of the world's most demanding writings...

...A more telling criticism could be that every single one of them—novels, poems, plays, works of philosophy—is European or American...

...a detailed re-creation of the story with descriptive passages from the book...

...You get the picture—from the Athenians to the Internet, or as close as you can come without paying a lot of royalties...

...One hundred cassettes, to be precise, each of them 45 minutes long...

...How many of its sets InteliQuest has sold so far I can't tell you, but the fact that there is enough of a potential market to prompt such an investment of time, tape and advertising—leaving aside the entrepreneurial end, somebody had to read the actual books and record the commentaries—is both touching and in its way mysterious...

...The contemporary twist—that the buyers don't actually have to do any reading—does not change the nature of the underlying attraction, which is Plato, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and 97 other powerful brand names...

...Like every other university, Yale already has a great many courses on western history, literature, art, and so forth...

...whether you decide to supplement them by browsing through the texts of the works discussed or not...

...InteliQuest, a postmodern version of these enterprises, carries the whole concept a megastep further: It dispenses entirely with the process of reading...

...The category called "Science and Civilization" includes the likes of Machiavelli, Rousseau and Marx, and ends with Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West...

...What is disappearing from university catalogs is the kind of course that concentrates on what great books of the past have to teach us and spends little time worrying about the proportion of black or women writers on the syllabus, let alone about social stratification in the societies where all those dead white males lived...

...But we're not just talking light entertainment here...

...Neither was Plato—hardly any of these books had even been written as books when he lived...

...Everything you need to know to become a sage is on audiocassettes...

...A mail-order business that calls itself the Teaching Company has for several years been selling audio and videotapes of university-style lectures on "The Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition...

...The 1990s are supposed to be a time when the attenuated remnants of literacy in American life, the last fading glimmers of affection for serious books, are hiding out in universities until the next round of budget cuts finally starves them to death...

...Think of that, only a few people in history...

...New wine, according to one famous book, cannot be put into old bottles, and it is equally obvious that old wine can't be put into new ones without losing more than just flavor...

...And just how many cocktail parties are there where conversation centers on the hundred greatest books of the Western world...

...Contrary to everything you might expect, a rather old-fashioned selection of famous books still has wide enough appeal to be marketed to anyone who flies USAir...

...In the 19th-century English-speaking world, great intellectual figures such as Matthew Arnold and Thomas Henry Huxley gave popular lectures, often to groups of workers with modest educations, about literature, science and similarly demanding topics...

...America's Super-Star Teachers, as the advertising calls them, give interesting-sounding, erudite "courses" on the history of thought from ancient Athens to contemporary American philosophy...

...But what a payoff...

...After listening to each of the 100 45-minute tapes," the ad promises, "you will have a depth of knowl-edge achieved by only a few people who have ever lived...

...On the other hand, I say bully to people who have read them, or in this case people who want to have...

...The only actual work of science is Darwin's Origin of Species...

...The ambition to be wise, or at least to be well informed about the wisdom of others, is one of the more admirable human desires...

...It might at least be a portent that universities (as well as cultural commentators) should pay some attention to...

...you'll hear a description of the book's themes...

...The objection to InteliQuest and the Teaching Company is not the aspirations they cater to, it is the obvious phoniness of the shortcut...

...Second Thoughts BEYOND LITERACY BY CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN WHEN MICHAEL KINSLEY announced he was going to stop writing his syndicated column in favor of a full-time television career, I realized that the written word, whose demise has been prophesied for the better part of a century, had finally taken a big-time hit...

...China and India might just as well have never been settled...

...Maybe not...

...Once again, books have been dispensed with...

...Are all these tapes designed for people who feel culturally intimidated at cocktail parties...

...It was an age of formidable explainers who helped raise the level of cultural life...

...Not even the Bible manages to cross over from Asia, though maybe it had too many characters to analyze in 45 minutes...

...some wish to understand the world at a deeper level than the Internet reaches...

...Should we be dismissing the whole phenomenon in these sarcastic terms...

...Starting with Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, you can while away the morning rush hour with the works of Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexandre Dumas both pere and fds, Louisa May Alcott, Leo Tolstoy...

...Yet InteliQuest is not appealing to an academic audience...

...Beginning in the late '60s many a university town had its short-lived "free university," a place where radical noncredit courses were taught in rebellion against the "establishment" institution...

...Chronologically speaking, the big C begins with Homer and ends with Harper Lee...

...PROBABLY A MEMBER of the Other 999 should forbear from dwelling on the slightly pathetic nature of this appeal...

...he died before the cassette was invented...

...an analysis of the characters...

...The rewards are strikingly similar to those promised by InteliQuest: "a grasp of the intellectual history of the Western World possessed by as few as one out of every thousand Americans...

...One cassette, one book...

...On a less ambitious level, there have long been watered-down, condensed editions of great novelists, philosophers and historians, designed so that he who runs (or more commonly runs a business) may read...

...Acquire and Apply The Wealth of Knowledge Contained in The World's 100 Greatest Books Without a Lifetime of Study," the headline at the top of the ad invited...

...The lecturers themselves often have appointments at major universities, and some of them are well known professors—Alan Kors of the University of Pennsylvania, for example, or Michael Sugrue of Princeton...

...Today the old audience for lectures is watching popularizations of science and history on cable television, a medium that com-promises far more with the presumed weaknesses of its viewers perhaps because those viewers can so easily change channels...

...By buying the tapes ($520 for the whole set on video) you can "comfortably grasp the essence and consequence of each author's greatness, in leisure moments in your home or car...

...Philosophy" starts with Aristotle and concludes with John Dewey...

...Indeed, the most influential people in humanities departments today scoff at the very idea of great books and would never dream of teaching from such a traditional list...

...The references to characters and story make it sound as though most of the books are novels, and they are, largely from the 19th century...

...You would think that, with all their current emphasis on outreach, continuing education, adult learning, and other such budget-balancing concepts, universities would be falling over each other to satisfy the market InteliQuest is aiming at...

...in short, the sort of list that might have been taught in a superior high school before World War II...

...But what do I know...

...Objecting to the lack of anything published since 1961 would be irrelevant...

...Some of that same audience are buying the tapes that promise to make them wise...

...As an academic, I'm acquainted with people who talk endlessly about their own specialties, yet that's not quite the same thing as spontaneously quoting Marcus Aurelius (on the Teaching Company's list but not InteliQuest's) or even Thoreau (on both lists) while the third jug of Chablis goes around...

...Is the commercial exploitation of traditional culture another sign of conservative rebellion against the legacies of the 1960s...

...Paradoxically, the names of the old books and their writers have held their magic even as the process of reading itself has become unnatural to an increasing number of people who would like to enjoy its greatest rewards...

...Midway through life's journey and then some, I haven't read nearly all of the hundred great books on InteliQuest's or anyone else's list...

...Recall also that earlierthis year Yale turned down a donation of $20 million for teaching about western civilization...

...It's a heavy hundred all the same...

...Do the women still come and go talking of Michelangelo...

...Then there are 11 20th-century American novels...

...Today the free university, now counter-counter-cultural, may be taking an electronic form and appealing to a more affluent public...

...There is something going on here beyond either conservatism or insecurity...

...But what really persuaded me that things were serious, maybe even terminal, was an ad I read a few weeks later in an airline gift catalogue for an outfit called InteliQuest, the Knowledge Company...

...it is one of the least attractive forms of class warfare...

...At two tapes a day you can knock off the whole assignment in 10 weeks of commuting and still keep your weekends free, all for $265, or $2.65 per tome, less than the present-day cost of a cheap paperback...

...You'll learn about the author's life and the time in which he or she lived...

...and a concise yet full discussion of the book's relevance...

...Like InteliQuest, the Teaching Company warns you against actually trying to read ("plow through," as they put it) the great thinkers: "Frankly, it would require a minimum of several years of withdrawal from active life, and devotion to intense effort and concentration...

...The culturally obese have always directed their sneers at the culturally hungry...

...Check your nearest state university's list of extension courses and you'll find out otherwise...

...Remember, this is supposed to be the hundred greatest books of all time...

...Of course, publishers have been making similar promises ever since the masses learned to read and printing became relatively cheap, two developments that occurred in the 19th century...

...Come to think of it, all the categories except one finish up with Americans...

...Three-quarters of an hour for the Iliad, three-quarters of an hour for To Kill a Mockingbird...

...But an abiding thirst for the old vintages may be more important to notice than an entrepreneur's eagerness to satisfy it with dregs on tape...

...Einstein wasn't one of them...