7
" Whether white, black, Asian, or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past. It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes. For there is only one ‘hegemonic discourse’ in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can't begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead. "
― David Denby , Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
8
" So the obvious, then: the liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people’s lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble. "
― David Denby , Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives.
14
" Great literature, obviously, could not rescue anyone from so grievous a fore-shortening of perspective. It was naïve and false on my part to think that the stu-dents would be rescued by Western classics. I knew perfectly well that great books work on our souls only over time, as they are mixed with experience and transformed by memory and desire and many other books, great and small. At some time later, the perception of a ‘choice between freedom and sex’ would dis-solve into absurdity. But for a while, the idea worked its mischief. "
― David Denby , Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
16
" Which, all in all, is rather deflating and dismaying, since many of us would be loath to nominate Prussia in 1815, with its censorship, its lack of representative bodies, as our ideal of freedom. Indeed, if Prussia was Hegel’s ideal, he may well have approved, despite his dismissal of the morality of the East, the paternalistic and authoritarian Singapore—approved it far more than he would modern America, with its liberty bordering at times on chaos, its commercialized hedonism, its temper split between derision and sanctimoniousness. "
― David Denby , Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
