Antiquitopia

There is an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the Great Books movement and "middlebrow" culture in the U.S. As someone who teaches a quintessential "great books" course, Literature of the Humanities, at Columbia University--not quite a "middlebrow" culture--I found the article interesting. I found the following few paragraphs interesting and strangely ironic: In my early 20s, when I was starting out as a graduate student in the humanities, I hosted a small gathering at my apartment. It didn't take long for my guests to begin scrutinizing my bookshelves. (I do the same thing now, of course, whenever I am at a party.) I remember that there were numerous battered anthologies, at least a hundred paperback classics, the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (acquired as a Book-of-the-Month Club premium), probably six copies of PMLA, and several shelves of books that I had retained from childhood, including the Time-Li...

The end of comedy is self-parody, and its wisdom is self-understanding. (Mark van Doren, Shakespeare 67) With this line, Mark van Doren writes about the play within a play, "Pyramus and Thisbe" within A Midsummer Night's Dream . "Pyramus and Thisbe," however, does not really parody A Midsummer Night's Dream so much as it does his slightly earlier play, Romeo and Juliet . Parodying his highly successful early tragedy on love within the hall-of-mirrors comedy, van Doren claims, Shakespeare has reached a new level of self-awareness as a poet, seeing that the whole is greater than the parts. This whole is not just the play itself with the parts being the various characters, the various soliloquies or exchanges and poetic reflections, but the play itself is the part within the whole of plays; one play as a single entity interacting with all other possible plays, latent or actualized, by the poet himself, who is just one part of another greater whole: Never ag...