The New Yorker December 20, 2021 pp64-68 |THE CRITICS|A CRITIC AT LARGE|”TOO GOOD FOR THIS WORLD” “What do we want from great-book courses?” By Louis Menand
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Cover of "THE LIVES OF LITERATURE, Reading, Teaching, Knowing" by Arnold Weinstein
In this piece Louis Menand an “American critic, essayist, and professor, best known for this Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001)” (Wikipedia.org) reviews books by Roosevelt Montas Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My LIfe and Why They Matter for a New Generation and Arnold Weinstein’s The Lives of Literature:Reading, Teaching, Knowing. Menand’s essay here is far-ranging, highlighting the evolution; of Universities, of the role of great literature and philosophy to a person and to society and of the scientific method.
Cover of "RESCUING SOCRATES HOW THE GREAT BOOKS CHANGED BY LIFE AND WHY HTEY MATTER FOR A NEW GENERATION" By ROOSEVELF MONTAS.
“In the old college system the entire curriculum was prescribed, and there were lists of books that every student was supposed to study-a canon. The canon was the curriculum. In the modern university, students elect their courses and choose their major. That is the system the great books were designed for use in." The great books are outside the regular curriculum.” The article references early volumes about great books like “Noah Porter’s Books and Reading:Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them? (1877). The title introduces the concept of putting some structure to the pursuit versus a humanistic approach employed by Montas and Weinstein and many others. The humanistic idea being that the pursuit in reading great books “is self knowledge. To ‘know thyself’...affairs of the heart and soul is the proper goal.” Weinstein calls what students learn in science courses, “‘information…life is more than reason or data’”
Menard points out “Humanists cannot win a war against science. They should not be fighting a war against science. They should be defending their role in the knowledge business, not standing aloof in the name of unspecified and unspecifiable higher things. They need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos.” Indeed the data show that students are moving away from undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, philosophy and religion. Degrees awarded (2012-2019) “annually in English fell by twenty-six percent, in philosophy and religious studies by twenty-five percent, and in foreign languages and literature by twenty-four percent.”
As it turns out, early books by Porter (1877), and Charles William Eliot’s Harvard Classics (1909-1910) were according to Menand for “adults who wanted to know what to read for edification and enlightenment, or who wanted to acquire some cultural capital.” In the end, data and affairs of the heart and soul may be remembered but only the latter are felt.
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