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Guidance in the observation of detail should come early. Have each student describe, for example, the similarities and differences of two houses near the classroom (affluent teachers have been known to pass out tokens for transportation to distant houses), and then assign to classmates X, Y, and Z the task of rewriting the descriptions by A, B, and C for greater accuracy and detail. For fairness and other advantages, a further step adapted from interactive core programs would have the descriptions and evaluations further evaluated in class discussion."

Just reading about it makes me want to bolt to the nearest registrar's office and hand in a drop slip. Imagine having to actually perform the assignment.

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Toward the end of the book, Woodring takes time out to sing the praises of the core program at Columbia College, a series of mandatory courses covering seminal humanities texts spreading from Homer to Camus. This program became the subject of controversy first during the canon debates, over the number of female and non-white authors on their syllabuses, then later as featured in David Denby's 1996 "Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World," in which Denby -- then a reviewer for New York magazine -- returned to Columbia to read great books and muse about the culture wars.

Yet for Woodring, the core seems to be about a more enlightened form of elbow-rubbing. "A Manhattan or Albany lawyer," he states, "who hears another in the firm allude to idols of the cave with reference simultaneously to Bacon and Plato recognizes a fellow graduate of Columbia College." Sure: They're at the water cooler. They exchange a couple of secret handshakes and a laugh about "The Golden Ass." Meanwhile the rest of us can't get a cup of water without being subjected to their insufferable erudition. I don't mean to suggest to that the world wouldn't be a better place if all college graduates had, as Woodring puts it, "read carefully under tutelage the same epics, dramas, satires, and philosophic and political essays," but rather to illustrate how easily literariness morphs into pretension.

What is strangest about this book is that while cobbling such a passionate argument for a new inclusive spirit in literary studies, Woodring has written a book with such obviously limited appeal. Even he himself says in the introduction that the book would address issues most pertinent to those whom "might choose to attend an annual meeting of the Modern Language Association." Choose to go to the MLA conference? I didn't know people did that.

And yet, I hesitate to dismiss the book out of hand. No one can doubt that he has thought an awful lot about the meaning of literature. And many of his conclusions and suggestions are apt and admirable -- though in the end, I wonder what they add to the debate.
salon.com | July 21, 1999

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