Classic book
The ability of a classic book to be reinterpreted, to seemingly be renewed in the interests of generations of readers succeeding its creation, is a theme that is seen in the writings of literary critics including Michael Dirda, Ezra Pound, and Sainte-Beuve.
[1] Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas.
"):[6] The idea of a classic implies something that has continuance and consistence, and which produces unity and tradition, fashions and transmits itself, and endures.... A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time.In this same essay, Sainte-Beuve quoted Goethe (referring to the "classics" concept): "Ancient works are classical not because they are old, but because they are powerful, fresh, and healthy.
In The Sacred Wood he thought that one of the reasons "Dante is a classic, and Blake only a poet of genius was" because of "the concentration resulting from a framework of mythology and theology and philosophy".
[15] In 1920, Fannie M. Clark, a teacher at the Rozelle School in East Cleveland, Ohio, attempted to answer the question of what makes a book a "classic" in her article "Teaching Children to Choose" in The English Journal.
Clark says that "teachers of English have been so long trained in the 'classics' that these 'classics' have become to them very much like the Bible, for the safety of which the rise of modern science causes such unnecessary fears.
Clifton Fadiman thought that the works that become classic books have their start in childhood, saying that "If you wish to live long in the memory of men, you should not write for them at all.
[29] In 1920, John Erskine taught the first course based on the "Great Books" program, titled "General Honors", at Columbia University, and helped shape its core curriculum.
This resulted in junior faculty, including Mark Van Doren and Mortimer Adler after 1923, teaching parts of the course.
In 1937, when Mark Van Doren redesigned the course, it was already being taught at St. John's College, Annapolis, in addition to the University of Chicago.
[32] Over 100 institutions of higher learning in the United States, Canada, and Europe maintain some version of a Great Books Program as an option for students.
As the company website tells it, "appalled by the selection on offer, Lane decided that good quality contemporary fiction should be made available at an attractive price and sold not just in traditional bookshops, but also in railway stations, tobacconists and chain stores[40] ...We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public and staked everything on it.
"[40] Within the first year, they had sold three million paperbacks of then-contemporary authors, such as Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, and André Maurois.
[40] In 1954 Mortimer Adler hosted a live weekly television series in San Francisco, comprising 52 half-hour programs, entitled The Great Ideas.
These programs were produced by Adler's Institute for Philosophical Research and were carried as a public service by the American Broadcasting Company, presented by National Educational Television, the precursor to what is now PBS.
[41] In 1993 and 1994, The Learning Channel created a series of one-hour programs discussing many of the Great Books of history and their impact on the world.
