Are the Canon Wars Over?: Rethinking Great Books

??? COHPAnATIST ARE THE CANON WARS OVER? RETHINKING GREAT BOOKS Mary Ann Frese Witt Are the canon wars over? Who won? My brief answer is that, Uke some of our recent miUtary conflicts, they have fizzled out to a kind of stalemate punctuated by periodic saber rattling (or cannon firing) and name caUing from various factions. There is no question, however—to leap to a very different analogy—that the Great Books Canonic Cyclops was badly wounded by the wüy, motley band of multiculturaUst-deconstructionist -feminist-intertextologists. Unlike the cyclops of antiquity, however , this giant, ifreconstituted, has survived. Many of us grew up beUeving that the erstwhüe Great Books Giant was immortal. We now know, to paraphrase Valéry, that like the ideal of civiUzation he represented, he is mortal. The immortal disguise that beguüed us was a creation of the universities. The first American packaging of Great Books was made by Charles Eliot, former president of Harvard, in 1910 with the creation of his canon in the fifty-volume Harvard Classics. But the first Western CiviUzation course based on the reading of Great Books was, Mary Louise Pratt has noted, a course at Columbia caUed "War Issues," created when young American men were being drafted to fight in the First World War.1 The study of the intellectual heritage and cultural values of Western Civüization, it seemed, would create both an understanding ofthe United States' place in European civüization—thus serving to counteract American isolationism— and a sense of loyalty and devotion to the moral ideals represented by that civüization. In 1919, the course became the "Western Civüization" course still taught at Columbia. What were the ideals of Western Civüization and in what form were they to be transmitted? The canon makers at Columbia, and in the 1930s at the University of Chicago and St. Johns College, set out to answer those questions by developing curricula. Like canon makers before them, from QuintiUan to the Renaissance humanists, they created a list of books to serve as the core of an education. Unlike earlier canon makers, however, they seemed singularly unconcerned with language and style. Translation was apparently simply a given. Indeed the criteria for the choice ofbooks was not primarily literary, but included history, mathematics , science, phUosophy, and religion. Through the St. Johns program , it was stated, "the student earns his intellectual heritage from Homer to the present, and learns to be a free and responsible person" (LawaU 7). The cultivation offreedom and responsibüity, it would seem, were the end products of the great books education for Americans. Vol. 24 (2000): 57 CANON WARS AND GREAT BOOKS American-style packaging ofthe canon perhaps reached its culminating point with Mortimer Adler's "Synopticon," that vision of a compendium of leather-bound volumes on a shelf, volumes that, once read, would make one educated. Adler, again, was not interested in matters of aesthetics , style, and language. One criterion for being included among the "great books" was "availabiUty" in English (the fact of translation was elided). Were styUstic concerns decadent European husks to be discarded in the repackaging of the kernels for Americans? An anecdote about the Revised Standard Version ofthe Bible, pubUshed soon after Adler's creation of his Synopticon, went as foUows: A solid midwestern believer, unhappy about the publication of a new Bible, is said to have declared, "If the King James Bible was good enough for the Lord, it's good enough for me." The Great Books ofthe Synopticon must have given the impression that they too were dictated by God in EngUsh. Adler, in his How To Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education, published in 1940, was again inspired by war to formulate a moral purpose for the reading of the great books of the Western tradition. The result of a liberal education , in his view, is "free minds" and "free men": Free men wül be able to resist fascist propaganda, to exercise their judgment, and ultimately to save democracy. Knowledge inevitably leads to "right action." Reading the great books will "qualify men for their poUtical duties" (Adler 370). The moral ideaUsm enunciated by...