Controversial book spotlights core courses



In 1991, after 27 years of writing film criticism, Columbia alumnus David Denby made a sentimental journey back to the campus where he first enrolled in 1961. His mind, saturated with the imagery and cultural memes of the movie business, had become hungry for substance. Denby's mid-life crisis thus took the form of re-enrollment in the core courses Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. The record of his experience was published last year as Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

The book is both a personal memoir and a meditation on the culture wars that have raged almost constantly from Denby's college days through the era of "political correctness." Are the wraiths of Dead White Males to dominate American intellectual discourse forever, even if an increasing proportion of American minds now comes from different groups -- and, if not, what is lost or gained?

Denby answered the question by weaving his observations of undergraduates together with his ongoing interior monologue, condensations of the required readings, and public arguments about the Western canon. He decided there is no "hegemonic discourse" in the canon, that the earliest Greek poetry can speak to denizens of the inner city, and that the very process of reading these texts contributes to acceptable solutions to problems with our own cultural politics. Media attention has been abundant, with about a dozen major publications discussing Denby's book.

Why is Great Books news? Perhaps the oldest baby boomers easing into their 50s are making more lasting policy decisions -- including replacing their elders in the task of sorting our common cultural baggage into keeper piles and throw-away piles. It's a heavy responsibility, and cultural critics are perforce leading the way. Denby's book also may create a sort of classics-envy among its readers, most of whom were probably exposed to at least some of the works covered in the Columbia courses but without the benefit of Columbia's inspiring teachers.

Critics have been largely sympathetic. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates approved of his "ecstasy of imaginative projection" and lauded Columbia's "splendid professors." Frank Kermode wrote in the New York Review of Books of "this unusually angled, vivacious, and candid commentary." Reviews have also appeared in Vogue ("Denby's fussy, generous enthusiasms convince") and The Economist ("a thoughtful, compelling case against putting together literary canons on the basis of skin-colour and gender").

However, as is usual with cultural criticism, complete consensus is absent. Donald Lyons in the Wall Street Journal took Denby to task for co-opting conservative values even as he disowns conservatism: "With such friends, does Western literature need enemies? With such enemies, does PC need friends?" Lyons asked.

Harvard professor Helen Vendler's review in the New Republic called the book "naive, amateurish and a folly," adding that "the arguments and the opinions expressed are too slipshod to be taken seriously." Vendler's critique extends beyond the book to the Columbia canon itself, which she says is not untrue to tradition or to modern realities but debases aesthetic values in favor of ethical, moral, and analytical approaches to texts.

The PC debate at Columbia appears to be resolving, at least in terms of gender, according to English and Comparative Literature Professor James Shapiro, who has taught the core since 1985 and is prominent in Denby's book. Race continues to be a vexed issue, but "the core can easily sustain and engage those kinds of questions," says Shapiro. "One of the ways of responding to that is for the university to send out a signal that this is not a backwater course." He hopes that Great Books has revived the faculty's interest in teaching the core and that the administration will understand that core teachers need to be rewarded with better salaries and working environments.

New faculty are required to teach sections of the core. Two assistant professors mentioned by Denby, Anders Stephanson in history (now associate professor) and Marina Van Zuylen in French literature, view teaching the canon as intense, demanding, and as rewarding as any upper-level undergraduate courses or graduate seminars they teach.

Of Great Books, Stephanson says, "I think it's been a great boon for Columbia, by actually showing what's good about this core. It's very genuinely reflective of what those two courses are about. It got a conversation going." Having taught both Lit Hum and C.C., Van Zuylen is so enthusiastic about them that, she says, "I would have paid [the school] to teach those courses." -- Valerie Brown


VALERIE BROWN is a free-lance writer based in Portland, Ore., who specializes in science and society issues. Her work has appeared in Environmental Health Perspectives and several Pacific Northwest publications.
PHOTO CREDITS: Jonathan Smith.