Große Bücher: Meine Abenteuer mit Meisterwerken aus drei Jahrtausenden

by David Denby

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, Education, Memoir, Literature, Classics, Philosophy

Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

David Denby is an American journalist, best known as a film critic for The New Yorker magazine. Denby grew up in New York City. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965, and a master's degree from its journalism school in 1966.

Reviews

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The purpose of education, after all, was not just to impart knowledge and modes of thinking but to train character, which meant, in the end, the character to handle difficult or even catastrophic experience. Not to accept it, but to handle it – to be equal to it. (p. 385)

This book came out in 1996, and my copy is from the first edition. There are underlinings and marginal notes from my first reading, and sometimes I was amazed at the things that seemed important to me then, and how my ideas and outlook on life have changed. When the book came out there was a fierce debate going on about the Western canon, whether it should continue to be taught as-is, modified to reflect the contributions of women and other cultures, or scrapped altogether as a quaint relic of an outmoded approach to what it means to be an educated person. In the end it was scrapped at most colleges, but not because of any well thought out educational philosophy, but because students were coming to college increasingly literate only in the functional sense of being able to read basic texts. To have them read Aristotle or Augustine, much less Kant and Hegel, you might as well ask them to read the books in their original languages.

Classes like these do not exist in may European countries, because students are expected to have read the classics while still in high school. The idea of teaching the great texts of Western civilization originated at Columbia in 1919 and spread to other colleges across the country. To this day Columbia continues to soldier on with these as required classes. Freshmen take the year-long Literature Humanities, and sophomores take a year of Contemporary Civilization, along with classes in music, art, foreign languages, and others. The syllabi for these classes are available on the internet, and the university does indeed keep the fires of Western heritage burning even in our age of dumbed-down everything.

David Denby was the film critic for New York magazine in 1991 when he decided, at the age of forty-eight, to return to his alma mater Columbia and re-take the literature classes he took as a freshman in 1961. He did so because he was frustrated with the way the issues of the day were being discussed, the cult of victimhood and the endless arguments over hegemony, privilege, and who gets to decide what constitutes culture and whose voices should be heard. Returning to school wasn’t going to be easy, since he was compressing the reading and class discussions for both the freshman and sophomore two semester courses into a single year, along with a holding down a full time job and raising a family. I could sympathize with him when he talked about the difficulty of getting back into being a committed reader, since I too, having spent years reading e-mails, presentations, position papers, and other short texts, struggled mightily to regain the ability to read for a couple hours at a time. As he wrote, “I no longer had the concentration or the discipline for serious reading; I had lost the habit of just falling into something the way real readers do, devouring it on the bus, in the tub, at a lunch counter.” (p. 36)

On the one hand the idea of teaching these books to eighteen and nineteen-year-olds is ridiculous. After all, what do teenagers know about – anything, about life, about history, about the issues of justice, honor, faith, and love on which civilization depends? On the other hand, their very unfamiliarity with these topics makes them clay to be molded, and these classes give them them a structure for becoming adults, a way to build a self which they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. They may not remember the details of all the books they read, but they will remember the class discussions, the key issues and how they were integrated into a coherent vision of history, art, literature, and life. They learn how to analyze, think, appreciate, and understand.

Along the way Denby addresses the major objections to the traditional Western canon, and provides thoughtful answers, although there were and still are many who object strongly to his positions. One objection was that the classes focus primarily on white, male, European sources, and should be broadened to include other voices and cultures. In fact, the Columbia courses are revised regularly; when he first took them there were no women authors but now several have been added. Also, trying to include a little bit of this and a little bit of that to ensure that everyone feels included is both patronizing and loses the focus of the classes, turning them into appreciations of the the flavor of the month authors. In addition, the students will be living and working in a world shaped by Western culture, so it cannot but help them to understand how it came to be and how it affects the way information is understood and decisions arrived at. It’s not like there is brainwashing going on; you can understand Sophocles and Montesquieu and still like rap music, the Bhagavad Gita, and NASCAR.

Although some of the current cultural topics that Denby engages in are no longer front-burner issues, there were occasions when he would address something that I thought was well worth considering in our times. He writes, “For instance, the militia groups. Were such groups composed of anarchic individualists and right-wing libertarians, or were the members actually people clinging together for support, longing for a community they couldn’t find in the pagan media and shopping mall wastelands? (p. 352) Reading this made me think about the MAGA and QAnon devotees. What part of their beliefs are the result of ignorance and misinformation, and how much springs from a deeply felt need to be part of a community which provides strong bonds and a shared sense of purpose?

Denby quotes extensively from the original source material, and he does a good job selecting apt passages illustrating the major issues of Western life. I also liked his commentary on these passages, because even when I did not agree with him I had to admit that he had thought through his positions. As a result, I am going to finish this review with some of his observations about the books his classes read:

- Accepting death in battle as inevitable, the Greek and Trojan aristocrats of the Iliad experience the world not as pleasant or unpleasant, nor as good and evil, but as glorious or shameful. (p. 39)

- Pleasure is the route to understanding; you expand on what you love, going from one enthusiasm to the next, one book to the next, one piece of music to the next, and finally what you wind up with as the sum of these pleasures is your own soul. (p. 75)

- Mediocrity defines what’s normal and therefore what’s human; excellence is an attack on all the others. It’s the nightmare side of democracy, and truer and truer every year. (p. 99)

- We no longer placed unique value on “the higher” and many of us had abandoned the search for “absolute truth.” We were all in the cave, the media cave, sifting through representations, and choosing the ones we liked. We were free to embrace many partial truths; we were able to embrace virtue only after rejecting wickedness – in the nonfundamentalist world, we especially insisted on that freedom. (p. 104)

- the audience knows what Oedipus does not know – but a sense of the irony is at the heart of life. What we should avoid, we become; what we loathe, we are. That’s the part I couldn’t really tell eighteen-year-old men and women. I don’t think anyone else could explain it either. Some things have to be experienced without preparation. (p. 109)

- Ignorance is destructive, and knowledge is destructive, too – the ultimate bind for both the man of action and the intellectual. (p.110)

- The whole, sickly, self-pitying side of modern life, especially American life, with its feel-good therapies, its euphemisms, its self-transformation movements, its insistent cry of victimization, as if everyone were a victim, as if life made you a victim – all of this was calculated, consciously or not, to avoid precisely the moment of knowing who you are and what you have done and what you are responsible for. (p. 115)

- Oedipus is a hero because he longs to know the truth even after he suspects that it will finish him. That is a tragic fate inherent in the struggles of ambitious people everywhere. Not only are we not in control our lives, our very drive for control can undermine us. It was a frightening thought, enough to grab anyone by the throat. (p. 116)

- As a middle-class man of the postindustrial age, a consumer of goods, I wanted things that did their job superbly well. The middle-class citizen was by nature an Aristotelian. Idealism was for aristocrats, hermits, and terrorists. (p. 122)

- In the early pages of Genesis, power asserted itself without reason, without justification. Power does not “make sense.” By definition, it was that thing which compelled you to obey without making sense. Later, power subsides into law and mercy. An ethics of mutual obligation emerges. Ethics allows the Hebrews to exist. But in the beginning, power cares only to impose itself: God (p. 156)

- for secular men and women, the equivalent to Job’s belief without reason is that you live your life fully and boldly whether it makes sense or not; and then you face the inevitable accidents and pains of life without surprise or complaint. (p. 170)

- One advantage of living in an era that doesn’t make ideas a life-and death matter is that you can entertain many different ideas, retaining some, discarding others, mixing together what remained. Out of this early promiscuity, if you were smart and disciplined, would come something like intellectual experience and readiness for more. (p. 279)

- Columbia’s core curriculum had been designed not to enshrine the authority of the lecturing professor (that was something done at Harvard) but to reach understanding through discussion, however clumsy and uncertain. (p. 336)

- I would have enjoyed putting to conservatives, especially when their blanket approval of capitalism left them inherently criticizing the popular culture produced by capitalism. When the motives turned violent and rap music profane and nihilistic, the conservatives could do nothing but complain about low morals. Where did they think morals came from? The sky? Since conservatives couldn’t, by definition, question the marketplace, in which “depravity” was often popular, they were left with a tautological critique. We have low morals because we have...low morals. (p. 349)

- As [John Stuart] Mill says, over and over, in Victorian England (and in America, too), persecution by state and church had given way to persecution by public opinion. Democracy has a bullying and conformist spirit built into its freedoms; many people would silence their fellow citizens if they could. (p. 353)

- [Mill] had formulated the rationale for Columbia’s reading – or any liberal reading – of “the great books.” The books embodied not imperishable truths, and certainly not a uniformity of approach, but a radical tradition of self-questioning. In this tradition, one book challenges another, or is even at odds with itself, from Homer right up to the modern texts. “ (p.355)

- If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, political correctness is the tribute that virtue pays to vice. (p. 357)

- The self may be a myth, but it’s one of those myths, like God and objectivity, that we cannot live without. We must act as if it existed. The striving for it ennobles us; and the absence of it, as Saul Bellow has said, make us easier to kill. (p. 457)

- The books are less a conquering army than a kingdom of untamable beasts, at once with one another and with readers. Reading the books, the students receive an ethically strenuous education, a set of bracing intellectual habits, among them skepticism and self-criticism. (p. 460)

[David Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am enough of a romanticist to buy Denby's central point, that the "great books" of Western Literature are valuable for aesthetic and instructive reasons. Indeed, when describing his response to the classic authors in those terms, the writing is fun and enjoyable.

Unfortunately, there is more to this book. Much of it is devoted to Denby's social/political commentary, which might best be described as the ultimate middle class white man's perspective on the culture wars of the 1990s. Not all of it is face-slappingly offensive, and he goes out of his way to present the views he disagrees with. But it is one thing to tweak a few post-modernist academics (everyone knows they're full of shit). It is another thing to quote (paraphrase?) a black student's passionate outburst about representation in the university, and then patronizingly wonder for the rest of the book why she is so wrong. Denby's most consistent error is to ridicule the notion that representation matters in the media or in academia.

The worst chapter by far is his reaction to Simone de Beauvoir, where he riffs extensively on "Take Back the Night." Denby listens to the stories of the women who have sufferred rape, and wonders why the ones who come back year after year can never "get over it". He tries to put himself in their shoes, and the furthest he can get is to reminisce (for a second time) about that one time he got mugged. He seems to think that sexual violence is some sort of cultural misunderstanding that might be addressed by rereading The Decameron. Even when he admits to feeling like a creepy uncle, you can't escape the sense that he is utterly, deeply clueless.

Stupid politics, a few good anecdotes, and possibly some reading recommendations. That's what Great Books has to offer. It worked for me in high school, but it's not my thing anymore.

[Emily Alp · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting read if you want to get an idea of what the prominent Western classics are and how they are taught at Columbia college in New York.

Denby goes back to retake his classical literature courses and recounts conversations in class, reflections outside of class and his deeper relationship with the characters in the classics.

Throughout the work there is strung a theme of defense against those who call Western works courses elitist. I didn't buy it and found that Denby talked in circles. It was clear to me that he hadn't ever spent a significant amount of time living outside of the Western sphere of influence.

Having lived in Africa and having married a Turkish man and integrated partially into the Turkish-American community, I would say that it's impossible to mount a defense against the mixture of Western and Eastern literature in higher institutions of education here in the US. People need exposure to the structure and thoughts shared by Eastern Literature. Now more than ever, we need to explore cultures that pull us out of our self-satisfied sense of human development.

I liked how Denby highlighted the over-indulgence in emotion by rape activists and people who live as victims. But I found this a strange branching off of the argument between those who want to expand the curriculum of great books to include Eastern thinkers and more females and those who believe that the Western classics explain everyone on earth's motivations. Doesn't the second part of that last sentence sound preposterous? It is and that's why this book only gets 3 stars.

The stars it does get are for assembling so many different angles and pieces of information into a relatively tightly woven book -- the writing is engaging as well. But if you've exposed yourself enough to the world, be prepared to be baffled by the arguments in this book.

[Sandra Strange · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for every English/literature teacher, and really is a good book for anyone interested in the most important writinigs of Western civilization. It sounds a bit ordinary: a journalist decides, as an adult 20 years out of college, to go back and repeat his Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities classes required for freshman at Columbia. And then he writes about what he reads and what the class and its professor discuss about all of these basic texts. As a journalist, Denby has mastered writing and knows what is interesting. Weaving exerpts from the texts with his own thinking, the thinking of his classmates and professors, and with his own life experiences, Denby presents these texts in a way that will help every experienced reader relive his/her reading adventures and will entice inexperienced readers to examine these important texts. It helps that I agree with his thoughts on contemporary literary criticism and teaching, as well as appreciate many of his opinions about the very important questions these texts raise. It has taken me two weeks to complete this "great book"--and the book was worth the time and thought! I am motivated to read Beauvoir, reread Woolf and wade more deeply into Nietzsche, Rousseau and the other philosophers I have merely sampled.

[Carol Storm · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved reading these books when I was at Columbia, and I certainly agree with David Denby that people from all backgrounds can benefit from studying what are generally regarded as the key texts of Western Civilization, i.e. Aristotle, Homer, Plato, the Bible.

Since I agreed with most of Denby's ideas it was hard for me to understand why I disliked this book so much. No, wait! I think it's because David Denby is a lightweight pretending to be a heavyweight, a privileged insider pretending to be an outsider, a smarmy, shallow, show business type pretending to be afraid of popular culture and the internet. He gives grudging, resentful consideration to the idea that these great books insult and demean women and minorities. He patronizes non-white students who speak out, especially the women, calling them "spirited," and "brave," like they're magnificent animals who just need to be tamed and disciplined by civilized white men . He acknowledges that non-white authors and female authors aren't well represented in the "great books" courses at Columbia. But there are other forms of hypocrisy and exclusion he doesn't even try to confront.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

When you read Denby's review of the Mel Gibson movie "We Were Soldiers," you get the impression that this movie offended him and threatened him in profound ways. It's a movie about the Vietnam War, but the soldiers are not portrayed as criminals or deviants. They're depicted as heroes, men who do what other men can't, rather like the heroes in Homer's Iliad. The extraordinary thing is that Denby never asks the most obvious questions about the meaning of his resentments. The Iliad is all about combat, but none of the professors who teach it at Columbia are combat veterans. None of the students in the classes he observes are veterans either. That's one perspective Denby doesn't want. And this is one minority group he is happy to exclude! And he doesn't even bother to pretend otherwise. He's an old SDS man and to him the soldiers of Vietnam are still pigs and baby-killers. What's remarkable is that reading the Iliad doesn't make him uncomfortable. He doesn't see the absurdity of an undeserving elite studying a poem about the kind of sacrifices they've been trained from childhood not to make. He pretends to admire make-believe heroes from long ago while spitting on the real heroes of his own time and place.

And that's what a Columbia education is all about!

[Robyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was pretty disappointing. I waited six years after graduating from Columbia and nearly 10 years after commencing Lit Hum to revisit the material via Denby's experiences. I found his take to be a combination of saccharine, patronizing, and dated (it's nearly 15 years old). Don't even get me started on his chapter on Simone de Beauvoir and the perils of Take Back the Night. I'm so glad that I didn't go anywhere near this prior to seeing the Core (which I adore) for myself, and I will continue to caution any prospective CU students from reading it themselves so as to not taint their vision (I'm pretty sure that I had a professor or two along the way give a similar warning, viewing the "text" as worse than Cliff Notes). My heart goes out to any fellow CC/SEAS alums who had to endure sharing a classroom with the not-so-silent observer/author during his journey back in time.

[James Henderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

David Denby, a prominent film critic returns to the Ivy League classroom as a front-line correspondent on the culture wars. For this book, he 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 the ancient Greeks (Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Euripides, and Sappho) to Nietzsche, Freud, and Conrad, all the time maintaining and meditating on his intensely cosmopolitan yet family-centered life. When Denby reads Plato and Aristotle, 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. He makes a sensible, if gloomy, argument that the great books are too hard for today's underprepared undergraduates. But I reject his epiphanies over a feminist critique of Aristotle's Politics. By recording his own intellectual experiences and glossing over his own cultural blindness he does a disservice to the texts he critiques. Rather than distilling some of the significant ideas of the great thinkers that he read he merely tosses off a rejection of "ideologues" in general with lines like this:
"By the end of my year in school, I knew that the culture-ideologues, both left and right, are largely talking nonsense."(p 459) This conclusion may have a grain of truth, but I would rather hear what he learned about knowing and thinking, and what truths he discovered that our culture does adhere to with justification.
While he does put himself on the line as a student and as a person by actually reading the classics, his humility should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. At the risk of being too skeptical, based on my own reading of these texts, I found this an unconvincing look at the classics. I would recommend you read the original classics with an open mind and then, if you choose to, consider Denby's book.

[Tim Weakley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author, David Denby, spent his professional career as a film critic. Good for him. People need to be taught what is a good film, and what causes a film to fail. Unfortunately he thinks his skills translate into writing a book about great works of literature and philosophy and they don't quite.

He begins well. He goes back to school and audits the same two courses by several professors to get an overall look at what passes for a great work at Columbia thirty years after he originally went there in the sixties. Some of his insights are very good. He made me want to read The Decameron by how he discussed it. The last part of the book sees the author getting caught up in self interest and what he sees as an intellectual betrayal of themselves by the students because they are too young to know any better. Prosaic stuff...youth wasted on the young etc. I also took issue with his seeming naivete about people of colour feeling alienated when presented with works that held less for them culturally then Western Europeans. He came off as disingenuous.

I enjoyed about two thirds of this books, insights and all. I just wish the author had done less comparison using film metaphors.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

My thoughts on this are a mostly incoherent mess that I emailed to Katie and got out of my system. This is partly very dated, partly very timely, partly suffering from that "critic unable to view without imposing his own opinion, when really the professor and the students are much more interesting" thing that Lit Up, the author's most recent book, also had.

And there's this, from one professor in the book:

"ABCDEF
ABABAB

ABCDEF... that's your cultural baggage, what you bring to a book. You know what a lighthouse is, you know what a window is, you have ideas about marriage. And then the artist begins to use these elements and repeat - ABABAB. And she transforms what you know."

Yeah. I liked that.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. If you want to be a well-read person, this is a great guide to the 'canon', to get you started.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full of insights, political, social and all the rest, of the great books through the eyes of a university course full of young people, filtered by the 48 year old Denby, who learns a lot himself, and about himself, during the course of a year. Particularly good if you haven't been able to attempt these intimidating texts. You'll get a crash course and may even decide after this to read them in full.

[Melody · Rating 1 out of 5]

Denby is unable to describe a female student without lingering on her velvety lips or her beauty and it's gross. He spends a great deal of time on why an African American student who dares question the whiteness and maleness of the writers presented is wrong, wrong, wrong. He's an old white man who comes off as both querulous and clueless. Give it a miss.

[Eric_W · Rating 5 out of 5]

At age forty-eight, Denby, a theatre critic for New York magazine, decided to return to Columbia University and retake two courses, Literature of the Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, both required of all Columbia graduates. His motivation was to force himself to read through the "entire shelf," not to rediscover his youth, " most overpraised time of life," but to get a second chance at school. He was " of not really knowing anything." The result is a fascinating intellectual journey through the Western canon. "Obviously, it wasn't just the learning that excited me, but the idea of reading the big books, the promise of enlargement, the adventure of strangeness. Reading has within it a collector's passion, the desire to possess . . . ."

Perhaps Western only in name, for as Denby points out in the first essay on the Iliad, the great Homeric poem hardly represents the culture as we understand it. The Greeks and their enemies had very different sets of values from those we profess to adhere to today. Plato, too, is hardly harmless and contains much that should be offensive and repugnant to our moralistic and self-righteous religious bigots who suppress Harry Potter books while ostensibly celebrating the "" The Republic has been the source of considerable antidemocratic theory, not to mention collectivized agriculture and eugenics, superior strains of individuals being used for the breeding of superior offspring. As an adult, Denby is struck by how harmful many of these ideas could be, Plato' goals requiring a " of self-suppression that we would find intolerable." Of course, when Plato wrote, Greece was falling apart. How could people disagree so violently when they share so much in common, emotions in particular: " pleasure, sorrow, exaltation." What Plato recognized, and was trying to prevent, was that when people have different interests, a difference in property or loyalty, the state disintegrates. The valuable core is Plato' realization that unity is required, and unity comes from everyone working as part of a common " organism," that shares a common art and culture and a political system that is viewed as working for the benefit of the people. All newly appointed faculty in humanities and social sciences are expected to teach one of the sections, but not everyone does so willingly.

Denby interviewed Siobhan Kilfeather, who had arrived with a Ph.D. from Princeton. She had a particularly strong interest in Irish literature and believed that nothing but works originally written in English should be taught; she was incensed that Irish writers had been considered English writers. It was her contention that the whole idea of a "canon" was nonsensical, and that such a contrivance took all of the works out of "context," that no argument was ever made in a vacuum and students would never understand Jane Austen unless they had read Fielding and Richardson first; that students did not have the requisite reading skills and would never appreciate the beauty of the language so what was the point. Denby countered her arguments quite well, I thought, noting that when the books were originally written and read there was no "context" as Kilfeather defined it, and that the whole notion of context "was an academic rather than a literary or reader demand -- an insistence on orderly exposition of influences and roots and so on, all of which had more to do with controlling the presentation of books in courses than with anyone's pleasure in reading them. . . .Readers! That's what undergraduate education should be producing. Kilfeather made the classic error of the academic left: She confused literary study (and her own professional interests) with reading itself." Kilfeather's basic argument seemed to boil down to: "They haven't been educated properly; therefore, let's not educate them properly." Denby decided to take the final exam with the students. It's a moment that provoked extraordinary fear in him, and despite his previous commitment not to, he couldn' help cramming. "Being examined is one of the things you become an adult to avoid. Once you pass twentyfive, you learn how to cover your weaknesses and ignorance and lead with your strengths. Every adult, by definition, is a corner-cutting phony; experience teaches you what to attend to and what to slough off, when to rest and when to go all out. . . .Taking an exam is the grown-up's classic anxiety dream." Afterwards he required a beta blocker, some alcohol, and "two fingers of Nyquil." This is really one of the most interesting books I have read in a long time, a sort of personalized intellectual romp through the Western intellectual tradition. I cannot recommend it enough.

An anecdote: Sidney Morgenbesser, professor of philosophy at Columbia, was smoking in the subway. A transit cop came up to the professor and demanded that he put out his pipe. "What if everyone smoked? the cop said reprovingly. "Who are you -- Kant?" the irritated professor asked, whereupon the policeman, misunderstanding "Kant" as something else, hauled Sidney Morgenbesser off to the precinct house.

[Ed Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great Books, huh? Well, this ain’t one of ‘em. Unnecessarily long and repetitive, especially as regards his constant complaints about leftists. Yes, he has a great point in not eliminating the classics just because x, y, and z, but I feel like he came back to it in damn near every chapter. Save yourself the time and effort by reading the reviews on this one, most of which are right on (especially the three-star and below ones).

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Attempting to cover a 4,000 year period in less than 500 pages is no mean feat, but Denby rises to the challenge of framing classical literature as instructional for all of life. His defense of the classics is occasionally weak, but its strong points lie in explaining why a) the liberal critiques of "Great Books" (a Western Canon) as tools of white hegemony and b) the conservative ideas that Great Books are a unified voice which give equal meaning to everyone are both silly in their own way. In Denby's mind, these books are great because they challenge us where we are and force us to examine our lives.

There were certainly high and low points in this book. Discussions on Virgil, Boccaccio, Montaigne, Hegel (yes, Hegel!) and Beauvoir were particularly strong, but the remainder of the book, particularly discussions on race through Conrad's Heart of Darkness, did not contribute meaningfully to the broader goals of this book.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

(review originally written for bookslut)

Great Books by David Denby is by no means itself a great book, though it is entertaining enough, I suppose. Being the avid bookslut that I am, I am always fascinated by other people's lists of books. "100 Greatest Books of All Time," "100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century," "Sixteen Books to Read This Summer," -- I'm a sucker for them all. So it is no wonder that when I saw this book about the controversy over the dead-white-European-male-centrism of the "canon" lying in a bargain pile, I had to pick it up.

The premise of the book is certainly interesting. Started in 1991, when there was much public debate over whether the Western canon, as taught in universities around the country, oppressed female and non-white students by excluding works written by any author that was not white, European, male, and dead for a really long time. The author was disgusted by such arguments and evidently railed on about it quite a lot, because his wife was eventually driven to tell him to "put up or shut up." And put up he did. Denby enrolled at Columbia University and signed up for two full year courses, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilizations. By the time the year was over, he had read an impressive selection of works, ranging from Homer and Plato to The Bible, Marx and Engles, Austen and Woolf, Darwin, and Beauvoir. He then wrote about his reactions to the texts, his professors' approaches to teaching them, and the response of his classmates, which were predominantly in their first or second year of college.

As far as Denby sticks to his own reactions to the texts, I generally found the book to be very engaging. It was where he wandered off into all kinds of theories about how whole classes of people live and what they believe that started to grate on me. It's clear from the very beginning that Denby thinks the argument that students could be harmed in any way by being taught from an exclusively "Dead White European Male" canon is ridiculous. The fact that he believes this doesn't bother me, but the way he addresses the entire political Left and all liberals as if they all want to see the Western canon dismantled and abandoned got old fast. But this was just the beginning of Denby treating very large groups as a homogenous and offensive whole. Most of these arguments against what other people believe are dismissive, and are rarely accompanied by an explanation of what he, himself, believes. The one exception is Denby's obsession with the fact that he was once mugged (in New York City, where he lives, and he wasn't harmed, nor did he lose his wallet, only his cash). After dragging the issue through several chapters and a lot of presumptuous attempts to explain the motives of his muggers, he finally postulates that the solution to inner city crime is work. As if McDonalds opening fast-food chains in the ghetto would solve everything.

Now that I've gotten that rant out of the way, I can get back to what I actually did like about the book. I appreciated that he wasn't too proud to admit that some of the texts were difficult reading. I was also impressed with how honest he was about the prejudices and preconceptions he brought to many of the readings -- and the apparent joy he found in being proven wrong. I of course found a few books to add to my ludicrously long to-read list, but the most enjoyable part was reading his reactions to books I had already read, which were embarrassingly few and far between.

How to close? I enjoyed the book, but I also flung it across the room on occasion. If you're willing to wade through naive impressions of Take Back the Night marches and slanders against every political point of view, by all means, read this book. However I am of the opinion that the only reason this book was a New York Times bestseller is because it had the benefit of good timing and a unique premise. It offers interesting impressions but no new opinions. You want to know what it's like to read the Western canon? Email Jessa and ask her to make it the next Bookslut project. Until then (maybe even then, I'm not that cocky), you're better off reading them on your own.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can relate to Denby’s Great Books. I’ve been meandering through them for a few years now. But Denby is a little more structured in his approach. He returns to Columbia University to attend classes on the classics and what comes out is a travelogue through the Western Canon. It’s not an attempt at scholarly reflection. It’s about connecting with these monumental works in a way that gives them personal meaning and dimension. There are some insightful observations about the works themselves, but the focus is on his relationship with them.

As with any mention of classics that might comprise “the Western Canon”, there is the accompanying haughty disdain. The objections to the elevated importance of writings by dead white men. The objections to the myopic western perspective. Admirably, Denby does not shy away from these complaints and the university provides an interesting forum for this tension.

Some complaints are made by those who dismiss the classics without ever having read them. They simply chalk it all up to old stuff which doesn’t have relevance. It’s difficult to give much consideration to those complaints. But it’s hard to ignore objections by female students and students of other cultural and ethnic backgrounds to the systematic propounding of Western thought. For us alive white males, it’s easy to forget how this can make others feel even more marginalized in today’s world. But there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out. There is a lot of substance in those classics. It’s all a matter of degree to what extent pluralism trumps. It’s a debate that shouldn’t stop and it probably won’t.

[Nicolas Shump · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written account of Denby's decision to go back to Columbia University to re-take their "Great Books" program. The best parts are when he relates the books to people and events in his life. Thinking of Hobbes after being mugged on the subway, memories of his mother when reading King Lear, etc.
He spends too much time dichotomizing his perspective as a middle aged man to that of his young classmates. He is also took quick to discount the leftist revisions of the canon. I don't think he contextualizes the time period when Great Books programs like Columbia's began and how things have changed by the 1990s.
An interesting read, Denby obviously loves the Great Books. The best parts are when he tries to synthesize the works into his own life. Hobbes, Lear and his mother, Jesus and Denby's Jewish heritage, etc. He spends too much time dichotomizing his old perspective with the young students. He's also too quick to discount the leftist revisions of the canon. I think he also doesn't historically consider the Great Books and its goals versus the perspective of the 1990s. However, his closing chapters are very powerful and this book is worth reading. I used this considerably when I taught Western Civ at KU.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

The scene that drove the book for me is the subway mugging experienced by Denby himself. The scene is reminiscent of the scene in Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” where a black campus activist threatens a shooting. Taken alone these scenes might signify nothing more than middle of the road crime and/or anger, but when confronted directly by a writer, seem to trigger a program in the brain for protection, for stricter adherence to the rules of law and order, to disgust with a perceived lack of personal discipline in society. I am working on a theory of the same with my father, who once listened to Pete Seeger and Simon & Garfunkel and married an anti-war, clean water activist, but then, in the mid-90s, when merely told the story by a student of how he (the student) had wanted to shoot my father for his harsh grading, stopped reading NYT and started reading “the Journal”, stopped going to his “liberal” church and instead sought out evangelical congregations, and started donating money to Bush’s first election campaign and has been voting the Republican ticket ever since.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book came out about the same time that my (adult) daughter started at Columbia. I think that I became aware of the book because I loved Denby's reviews in the New Yorker. It was such an incredible opportunity to share his and my daughter's experience. I love this book because it opened me up to so many different writers and enhanced my knowledge.

[Gina Leone · Rating 5 out of 5]

A unique perspective on the role of education, literature & reading, across an historical timeline. It shows on one hand how far we, as a global society have come; but equally how some parts of human nature are the same.

He demonstrates how we, as readers & learners, can read & reread throughout our life; & take away thoughts & ideas that help us evolve & understand ourselves & each other better.

[Beth G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had mixed feelings. The author is often condescending and judgmental towards his young Lit Hum classmates, praising himself for being more mature than first-year college students. Does he expect a gold star?

If you can ignore his obnoxious tone, though, the book is an interesting survey of how the Western canon can be taught.

[Ericka Clou · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book lists many classics, some that I've previously read, and some that I stopped to read before continuing with Denby. The commentary on the books is not amazing and veers off into memoir, but it's motivational and gives it the feeling of actually attending the class. Overall, I really enjoyed it.

First Semester:
Chapter 1- The Iliad by Homer (read previously)
Chapter 2- The Poetry fragments of Sappho (read 2018)
Chapter 3 & 5- The Republic of Plato (also read Apology, Meno, and Euthyphro 2018)
Chapter 4- The Odyssey by Homer (read previously)
Chapter 6- Oedipus Rex (read 2018)
Chapter 7- The Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics, and Politics by Aristotle- not yet
Chapter 8- The Oresteia and Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (read 2018)
The Bacchae and Medea by Euripides- in progress
Chapter 9- The Aeneid by Virgil - previously read
Chapter 10/11- Holy Bible: New International Version (read 2017)
Chapter 12- Confessions by Augustine (read 2018)
City of God- not yet
Chapter 13- The Prince and The Discourses by Machiavelli

Still in progress...

[Benjamin Atkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking work that becomes more engaging as it progresses. I initially picked this up out of jealousy. Having embarked on a personnel exploration of classic literature 4 years ago, the thought of being able to explore these works in the context of college classes at Columbia is very appealing. My expectation was that I would really enjoy the first half of the book covering mostly works that I had read over the past few years and "endure" the second half covering works I was less familiar with. In addition to not having read the second half works, they were not necessarily ones that appealed to me (focus on philosophy more than literature). I did enjoy the first half and the discussions of the books as well as Denby's ability to personalize the major themes-showing how they resonate to a modern reader. I appreciated his frustration in the college freshman's inability to recognize the universality of these themes.

Fortunately, the second-half fall-off never came. I was already mentally prepared to dismiss the effort (even thinking about how I would write this review). Instead, I experienced some of the most challenging discussion of western thought I have experienced. Denby, is able to look beyond the traditional left/right political/academic dichotomy in a way that makes his arguments as appealing to the (right) as I assume they are to the left (him). I suspect though that many of his peers on the left may be less accepting than I am. Of particular interest was the discussion begun in the chapter on Marx and Mill and culminating in the chapter on Nietzsche regarding the nature of the western canon as it is perceived by the current generation in light of various influence (cultural and gender-based). I have as little interest in Nietzsche as any writer represented in this work but his position that truth is a matter of perspective, provides a perfect basis for the best chapter of the book.

If you are interested in a good overview of the western canon, a reflection on it's relevance and an intelligent discourse on it's composition, I would highly recommend Great Books.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over four hundred and fifty pages, this one took me a long time to read, but it was worth it. Denby, former New York Times critic and now New Yorker film critic, writes of his reading experiences when he audits a couple of literature classes he had taken at Columbia University in the early sixties. I read this book rather belatedly, as it was published in 1996, but it’s never too late to learn of someone’s love affair with literature. There are so many things I could talk about: the number of masterpieces that he and his colleagues read; the brilliance with which Denby writes of his feelings, his insights, his criticisms of the authors, the teachers, his fellow students (then and later).

Denby states here what I believe is the thesis of his book.

“Great literature, obviously, could not rescue anyone from so grievous a foreshortening of perspective. It was naïve and false on my part to think that the students would be rescued by Western classics. I knew perfectly well that great books work on our souls only over time, as they are mixed with experience and transformed by memory and desire and many other books, great and small. At some time later, the perception of a ‘choice between freedom and sex’ would dissolve into absurdity. But for a while, the idea worked its mischief” (402).

His great experiment of attending classes as a forty-eight-year-old man that he had taken as an eighteen-year-old youth ends in the determination that personal growth is found partly through a lifetime of reading. We don’t just put these writers on the shelves after finishing school. We reread them again and again, these great books, and our lives are instructed by them, are informed by their eminence. From the Greeks to Virginia Woolf, to the scriptures, we are taught and retaught the great lessons of human existence. Can we learn them and relearn them well enough to continue the species?

[loafingcactus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to this as an audio book and as such it was charming to have a survey of some great books. I doubt I would have had the patience to read it- if I were going to read something about these books I would either read something of higher quality or read the books themselves.

I think Denby was fair in his analysis of his fellow students and himself, but I still found myself irritated by his discussion of his fellow students. Criticizing young people with zero life experience or education is shooting fish in a barrel, and having your ideas criticized in the major media is not something a college freshman should expect to have happen to them. I think that was in poor taste, if not morally wrong. He also would have done well not to imagine himself as a woman; his general analysis of the "womens issues" topic was enough without that grating presumption.

All in all however I think it was an enjoyable and intelligent book, and I appreciated the author's restraint in holding the quite perfect Nabocov quote to the very end.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Denby's exploration of the Western Canon is engaging and thoughtful. I found myself reliving my own experience with required Humanities and Classical Civilization classes as an undergraduate. Despite Denby's claim that his book is not an academic venture, he definitely inserts himself into the discourse. Sometimes, these frank discussions are enlightening. Other times, his attempts at literary analysis are embarrassing. I found this especially true in the chapter on Conrad in which Denby openly fights critical essays written by two great academics, namely Chinua Achebe and Edward Said. I just kept thinking, "Denby has guts to take on Said, because I sure wouldn't attempt it." Despite such misplaced enthusiasm from this movie reviewer, the book was a fabulous read and highly enjoyable, especially if you have read the great literature of Western civilization. I also appreciated Denby's exploration of the legitimacy of such a canon. Certainly, great world and female literature deserves to be studied as well.

[Mads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was once stranded with just this book in my bag--and how I loved it. I'm familiar with Denby's work in New Yorker but I have to say that I love Anthony Lane's movie reviews better than Denby's, although I remember a particularly incisive article that Denby wrote about Charles Darwin. Because of this book, I re-read the Iliad very very closely and realized how awesome it really is. It was only in my second reading that I realized that the Iliad's first word is "rage." Bloody, brutal thing that poem. I came to appreciate the phrase "rosy-fingered dawn" mentioned in the movie "Red Thin Line" after re-reading Homer. It was also in this book that I initially became aware of The Society of the Spectacle.

[Kimberly Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. I was hoping for a new reason to take another look at the "classics." He didn't offer me a good one and in fact made me less interested in going back to these and I ended just being irritated by his "rich white male" perspective.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was ready to go back to school after reading about Denby's adventures.