I happily teach a Great Books course at the University of Virginia, but I occasionally worry that I am not keeping up with developments in popular culture. So once a year I try to attend the seminar given by movie critic Roger Ebert at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville. Thus I have to take my hat off to my mirror image David Denby, the movie critic for New York magazine, who clearly takes the deficiencies in his education more seriously than I do mine. Feeling that he had become too immersed in media culture, he enrolled in the two core-curriculum courses at Columbia University, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, courses he had taken thirty years before as an undergraduate. Great Books (Simon & Schuster, 492 pages, $ 30) is Denby’s account of his year-long return to the classroom.
