How Now, Great Books?
Great Books Going Online
Coming to a library near you ...
Beginning in January of next year, Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World will be available electronically, in its entirety, at libraries and institutions. Through an agreement between Britannica and Ingram Digital, the Great Books will be published on Ingram’s “eBook” platform, MyiLibrary, and will be accessible by PC.
Long-lost videos on the art of reading with Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren will also be available.
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The Great Books & Postmodernism “Rightly Understood”
We tend to think that because the great authors of the great books of the past must have been racists, sexists, and classists and, of couse, not as technologically advanced or as productive as we are, they have nothing real to say to us.
But through "postmodernism rightly understood," there's a better way of situating the "great books" in higher education today.
It doesn't point to some uncritical veneration for the best that's been thought and said in the past. But it does show why that thought might teach us what we need to know about our real greatness that's very tough for us to learn in any other way.
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“The Great Conversation” (The Classic Essay for The Great Books by Robert Hutchins)
Robert Maynard Hutchins’s book-length essay "The Great Conversation" was written for the first edition of Great Books of the Western World.
Here we publish a lengthy excerpt from this widely praised treatise online for the first time and offer up the whole essay as a free download.
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The Great Books as Renaissance (Why Greatness Stopped With Goethe)
For two and a half millennia, from Homer’s Iliad to Goethe’s Faust, the foundation of Western literature was the epic, and built upon it, the tragic and the poetic. The whole edifice was enveloped in a world of myth, by turns classical and Christian, in which the divine and the human met, in which the gods became as men and men as gods.
These forms and these myths permitted the portrayal of greatness in a way which is hardly possible today.
But all is not lost ... a renaissance is possible ... and the great books can play a role.
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A Fun Read, but Incomplete (A Review of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books)
As a staff member of the Great Books Foundation, I’m delighted with the unlikely appearance of Mr. Beam’s book – unlikely because its topic does not strike me as one that many publishers would be willing to take on at a time when there are so many other pressing political and educational issues at stake.
I found it a pleasure to read and did so nonstop.
But there are two serious problems with the book . . .
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The Great Books: A British Perspective
In both the U.S. and the U.K., after the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s, a great deal of confidence has been lost; the confidence to permit students access to the very best. That is a tragedy, and in Britain the poorest now often lose out the most.
America is very lucky that from the Harvard Classics to Britannica's Great Books of the Western World it has had such able public defenders of the canon.
America has had Earl Shorris's 'Clemente Course in the Humanities' and the Great Books Foundation. Britain has no equivalents.
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My Britannica Great Books Set: How I Got It, What It Means to Me
I have a 22-year-old copy of the Britannica Great Books (BGB). They anchor the bottom of my largest set of bookshelves (in part, to prevent my toddler from tipping them over on herself) even though they have not always fared well on the bottom of shelves.
I have had (and not always enjoyed) a long and complex relationship with those books.
I hardly ever open them, but I could never part with them.
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The Great Books: How Many, Which Ones, and Are They Always Useful?
How useful is it for students to read original sources versus secondary sources?
Sure, the idea of reading the original and only the original has an appeal.
But teachers must balance that benefit against the likely cost — that students will tune out. It seems wiser to start from the student’s present mental location, and tempt him down a path of thought that most likely leads to understanding the great ideas, which will in turn lead to a desire to read the great books themselves.
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Democracy, Great Works, and a Liberal Education
I have been the president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, since June 1991. The college believes, as our video here explains, that the way to a liberal education lies through a direct and sustained confrontation with some of the finest works in which the greatest minds of our civilization have expressed themselves.
Our schools need to have a conviction that some things are better, more fundamental, more worthy of study than others.
The content of the curriculum matters, not just for the good it contains, but because great writing, wonderful original works, exciting experiments, all fuel the desire to learn.
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That Book About Great Books (A Review of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books)
There is the usual quota of errors in Alex Beam's new book.
Among those that jumped out at me are his belief that interim U.S. senators are appointed by the President; that there was a Native American leader called Chief Joseph Seattle; that Gibbon wrote of “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”; that a bluestocking and a bluenose are the same thing; that Cooper Union is in Union Square; that in 1952 the tax-filing deadline for Americans was April 15. Yeah, small potatoes; still …
It is proper to ask, jocularly, of course, "Is this one a Great Book?" Well, I’ll say this: A Great Idea at the Time shares certain of the features of a Great Book, as type, pages, binding, &c.; it lacks others, such as thesis, argument, conclusion, and wit.
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