Great Books

In my comments, "Sheldon" linked to this interesting essay by Jonathan Rose, a brilliant historian of reading. One could refine some of Rose's positions a bit--there's a strong high-culture bias in some strands of Marxism, for example*--but his point about the "radical" possibilities inherent in the purportedly "conservative" Western tradition is perfectly correct. *--My father once showed me a copy of an English Marxist textbook designed to teach Greek to the proletariat.

Comments

[Bob]

Rose is right, but the problem is getting working-class students interested enough to take the great works of the past seriously. If they're forced by an instructor to read Shakespeare, the Greeks, etc, they'll do it, and probably love doing it, but they'll almost never do it on their own. In fact, most privileged people wouldn't either, today, no doubt because there are so many other temptations. Rose refers to TA Jackson, but Jackson was brilliant in many areas - he wrote very good books on Darwin, Marxist dialectics, and Dickens -- and can hardly be taken as representative.