Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World [Anglais] [Broché]

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. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

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. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

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.

Denby's reasoning is solid, and the delight he takes in these books often charming. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

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 --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

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 --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

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. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

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.

In a New York Times best-seller, the film critic for New York magazine recounts returning to Columbia University as a student and his experiences reading the great books of Western thought and literature. Reprint. 75,000 first printing."

At the age of forty-eight, film critic David Denby, dissatisfied with his life within the media bubble, went back to Columbia University and took again the two famous courses in Western classics (Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization) required of all students--courses he first took in 1961. In recent years, collections of literary and philosophical masterpieces such as those taught in these courses have been reviled by the left as oppressive and exclusionary and adored by the right as bulwarks of patriotism. Denby, the film critic for New York magazine, wanted to dispel these cliches and to confront the books in their naked power; he wanted to find the self he had lost in a daze of media images.

In Great Books, Denby lives the common adult fantasy of returning to school with some worldly knowledge and experience of life. A gifted storyteller, he leads us on a glorious tour--by turns eloquent, witty, and moving--through the works themselves and through his experiences as a middle-aged man among freshmen. He recounts his failures and triumphs as a reader and student (taking an exam led to a hilarious near-breakdown). He celebrates his rediscovery or new appreciation of such authors as Homer, Plato, the biblical writers, Augustine, Boccaccio, Hegel, Austen, Marx, Nietzsche, and Virginia Woolf. He re-creates the atmosphere of the classroom--the strategies used by a remarkable group of teachers and the strengths and weaknesses of media-age students as they grapple with these difficult, sometimes frightening works. And all year long he watches the students grow and his own life and memories break out of hiding.

The result is an extraordinarily engaging blend of criticism, reporting, autobiography, and cultural commentary, a book about self-discovery. Denby offers a nonprofessor's look at life on campus; he addresses the vexing questions of political correctness and relativism, and he suggests that a larger crisis surrounds the teaching of the humanities. A liberal defending "the canon," Denby places literature in its revolutionary role as the source of powerful stories--the most powerful stories that we tell about ourselves. For the reader who once read these works, the book is a brilliant reprise; for the reader unfamiliar with them, Great Books offers an irresistible introduction. By the end, the great works are revealed again in their power to disturb and give pleasure. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.