Todd Shy in The American Scholar:
It would be tempting to put Naomi Kanakia’s new book on the crowded shelf of recent works that have sought to defend the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly the humanities. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (2021) is the most logical precursor to set it beside. But in championing Great Books, Kanakia is not staking out ground in campus curriculum debates. Instead, she addresses the lay reader, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” the nonacademic reader who, like Kanakia, may have spent formative years reading science fiction or fantasy more than literary fiction or philosophy. A convert to the Great Books in her 20s, Kanakia wants the Gone Girl reader (her example) to at least consider moving on to Proust and Middlemarch.
In What’s So Great About the Great Books?, she is trying to win converts, not slay opponents. Kanakia acknowledges upfront that the category is not timeless and unobjectionable. The Great Books began as a series of 20th-century initiatives that shaped core curricula at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. It led to the production of the influential Harvard Classics series (which launched Montás’s own Great Books journey) and went on to inspire The New Lifetime Reading Plan (1960) by Clifton Fadiman, whose revised version became Kanakia’s own reading roadmap. We should add Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994) to this genealogy.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.