Volume 43, Number 14 · September 19, 1996
The Pleasure of the Text
By Frank Kermode
Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
by David Denby
Simon & Schuster, 493 pp., $30.00
David Denby is the film critic of New York magazine, a man by his own admission professionally deformed by movies. Off duty he is normally busy with everything a successful journalist, husband, and father living in New York is likely to be busy with. Not the kind of man, one might think, who comes home from the office or the theater and selects the Iliad or The Social Contract or The German Ideology for his evening's relaxation. But somehow Denby fell to thinking that there was something lacking in his intellectual life, and something wrong with the intellectual climate of his society. He recalled his student days at Columbia, where, in 1961, he had been required to take two 'core' courses, Literature Humanities, or Lit Hum, and Contemporary Civilization, or C.C. Back in those days it was no doubt possible for young persons to find these courses tedious or exacting, but nobody had thought of calling them politically oppressive. By 1991 this was a commonplace judgment. Partly to test that judgment, partly out of a desire to find out what effect the experiment might have on 'a settled man who was nevertheless unsettled,' Denby went back to Columbia and enrolled in both courses. When he came to the end of them he wrote up his experiences in this 'adventure book.' The result will probably irritate a fair number of people, most of them inside the academy; their stock responses are unlikely to include due praise for this unusually angled, vivacious, and candid commentary.
Review, 3452 words
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