{"id":11813,"date":"2021-12-17T18:19:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-18T01:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=11813"},"modified":"2021-12-18T18:23:06","modified_gmt":"2021-12-19T01:23:06","slug":"the-meh-courses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2021\/12\/17\/the-meh-courses\/","title":{"rendered":"The Meh Courses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The New Yorker<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s So Great About Great-Books Courses?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

The humanities are in danger, but humanists can\u2019t agree on how\u2014or why\u2014they should be saved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Louis Menand<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Roosevelt Mont\u00e1s was born in a rural village in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States when he was eleven years old. He attended public schools in Queens, where he took classes in English as a second language, then entered Columbia College through a government program for low-income students. After getting his B.A., he was admitted to Columbia\u2019s Ph.D. program in English and Comparative Literature when a dean got the department to reconsider his application, which had been rejected. He received a Ph.D. in 2004 and has been teaching at Columbia ever since, now as a senior lecturer, a renewable but untenured appointment. He is forty-eight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arnold Weinstein is eighty-one. Although he was an indifferent student in high school, he was admitted to Princeton, spent his junior year in Paris, an experience that fired an interest in literature, and received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1968. He was hired by Brown, was tenured in 1973, and is today the Richard and Edna Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature. These two men started on very different life paths and ended up writing the same book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are even being published by the same university press, Princeton. Mont\u00e1s\u2019s is called \u201cRescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation\u201d; Weinstein\u2019s is \u201cThe Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing.\u201d The genre, a common one for academics writing non-scholarly books, is a combination of memoir (some family history, career anecdotes), criticism (readings of selected texts to illustrate convictions of the author\u2019s), and polemic against trends the author disapproves of. The polemic can sometimes take the form of \u201cIt\u2019s all gone to hell.\u201d Mont\u00e1s\u2019s and Weinstein\u2019s books fall into the \u201cIt\u2019s all gone to hell\u201d category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both men teach what are called\u2014unfortunately but inescapably\u2014\u201cgreat books\u201d courses. Since Weinstein works at a college that has no requirements outside the major, his courses are departmental offerings, but the syllabi seem to be composed largely of books by well-known Western writers, from Sophocles to Toni Morrison. At Columbia, undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental great-books courses: Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy, for first-year students, and Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, for sophomores. These courses, among others, known as \u201cthe Core,\u201d originated around the time of the First World War and have been required since 1947. Mont\u00e1s not only teaches in the Core; he served for ten years as the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at TNY<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker What\u2019s So Great About Great-Books Courses? The humanities are in danger, but humanists can\u2019t agree on how\u2014or why\u2014they should be saved. By\u00a0Louis Menand Roosevelt Mont\u00e1s was born in a rural village in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States when he was eleven years old. He attended public schools […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}