What's So Great About the Great Books? Quotes

“even if the reactionaries win out in the short term—even if the worst happens and they extinguish everything but the books by old White guys—then eventually it is these very books that will someday lead them out of the darkness.”
― Naomi Kanakia, What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature

“Honestly, I am glad that reactionaries love the Great Books—they’ve invited a Trojan horse into their own camp.”
― Naomi Kanakia, What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature

“They were nerds hoping to get a date by yammering about Tolstoy or Laurence Sterne.”
― Naomi Kanakia, What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature

“If we judged classics by their universality of appeal, then Harry Potter and Murder on the Orient Express would be two of the greatest classics of our era.”
― Naomi Kanakia, What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature

“These are also not things you’ll learn if you major in English.”
― Naomi Kanakia, What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature

“There are many intelligent, well-educated readers who have an instinctive aversion to the Great Books, like my wife. In fact, she once said to me, “Doesn’t it give you pause that the Nazis were really into them?”
― Naomi Kanakia, What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature

“of ridicule by most cultured people. The Great Books movement has never been anything but a quirky fad.”
― Naomi Kanakia, What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature

“At its core, the Great Books movement is an educational fad, rooted in mid-twentieth-century aspirations and anxieties, and it’s a fad whose time passed,”
― Naomi Kanakia, What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature

“The literary canon, to paraphrase the definition used in 1993 by John Guillory in his landmark study Cultural Capital, consists of all the books that get taught in college.”
― Naomi Kanakia, What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature