--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Mark D. Nevins" <nevins_mark@...>
wrote:
>
> To put things in the most essential perspective, you're right, MRT,
it doesn't matter. When we live on a planet where a large number of
our fellow humans are literally starving to death or living under
extreme oppression, no, it really doesn't matter what anyone reads.
>
Well, book are books and life is life.
> That being said, if one is as lucky and priviled as I assume most
RARA AVIANS are, and one wants to partake of the greatest human
thoughts ever recorded, one should want to read the Bible, the works
of Homer and Shakespeare, etc. etc. If for no other reason than these
writers and the other "great books" have literally shaped the entire
discourse of western thought.<<
To some degree, yes. But many great books are notable for the fact
that people have followed their advice backwards...
<<There is a great conversation that begins with the Greeks, and
travels up through the Enlightenment, and forms the entire basis of
modern democratic society.>>
Well, political systems are an entirely different matter from what
we're discussing. I doubt that we are on a great path of progress.
Consider that we define progress ourselves, and that's cheating,
wouldn't you say?
<<You can ignore it if you want to, but up until the "canon wars" of
the 1980's, all educated people, even mildly educated ones, read these
texts.>>
And? The purpose of reading, one of the purposes, is to achieve some
understanding of realities that we do not experience ourselves? In
that department, I don't think all that reading has done much good.
Out of that came one of the most selfish and reckless generations ever....
<<It remains to be seen if the world will be a better place now that
schools no longer teach these texts.>>
But they do. That is what they teach, mainly. The same old books. Good
books, some are great books, but there is hardly a lot of new blood...
<<(In order to head off criticism that my position is somehow
culturally hegemonic, I'd also suggest that an intelligent person
should also be interested in non-Western texts--one of my own
> interests is the African novel--but to be fair those texts, for
good or for bad, were not a part of the "great conversation" that
forms the basis of the dominant culture of the last several hundred
years.)>>
There are many conversations going on at the same time. Man with
himself, man with his local milieu, man with whatever regime he
suffers, man with the universe, man with nature, etc. It is not one
conversation but many.
<<More to the point of this particular discussion group, spending time
reading Plato and Rousseau and J.S. Mill and George Eliot and yes
Austen (a writer with an admittedly limited scope but one who
essentially created an ironic manner of addressing social conventions
which has deeply influenced modern culture from the novel to the
sitcom) doesn't mean that one can't also read Hammett, Thompson, and
Bruen.>>
Mill could be read with much profit. Missing out on Austen (i.e., not
being forced but still free to read her) would not be so terrible.
<<I'm not at all arguing for a canon (and I have no idea how poor
Harold Bloom got dragged in here as a straw-man), I am just saying
that one doesn't need to choose, and that choosing not to read "the
classics" seems to me to be choosing to cut oneself off from what is
essentially the central nervous system of our civilization.>>
Harold Bloom didn't get dragged. He was one of the most vociferous
proponents of the Great Books. He also thought that the present
generation is more illiterate than his own, when the opposite is
transparently the case. Not reading or caring about Jane Austen is not
to be an illiterate. People read all kinds of things.
<<But, please, much as I love Goodis, I can't take seriously an
argument that says that reading Goodis or McCarthy is somehow a
substitute for reading Shakespeare or Homer. Why not read all of
them, and dabble widely?>>
Everything is fine, but you forgot to say _why_ you can't take it
seriously.
>
> Mark Nevins
> Who wonders if the occasional anti-academic tone on this List is
symptomatic of something even deeper . . .
This is not anti-academic, it's about a particular idea of what the
Great Books are and whether they should be the main course for
students. This has direct connections to our genre and to other
genres. Bradbury instead of Austen, now that would be cool.
Best,
pt
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