Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T14:24:23.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - “What Is a Classic?”

Variations on an Ancient Theme

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2020

Peter Kivisto
Affiliation:
Augustana College, Illinois
Get access

Summary

This article interrogates the idea of a classic, locating its significance in sociology in terms of its understanding in far-ranging fields of human inquiry and exploration, particularly philosophy, art, and literature. It explores the question: Why do “classics” remain important whenever social scientists, novices or veterans, reconsider their discipline’s history and likely future?

Alan Sica is a Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University, where he is the Founder and Director of the Social Thought Program. He has served as Editor of Contemporary Sociology and Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Theory Section. He is the recipient of the ASA’s History of Sociology Section’s Distinguished Achievement Award. His books include Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order (1988), What Is Social Theory? The Philosophical Debates (1998), and The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties (2005).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adams, John, and Jefferson, Thomas. 1959. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. Ed. by Lester, J. Cappon. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. 1897. Selections from the Prose Writings of Matthew Arnold. Ed. with notes and intro. by Lewis, E. Gates. New York: Henry Holt and Co.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. 1935 [1869]. Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Baehr, Peter. 2016. Founders, Classics, Canons: Modern Disputes Over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociology’s Heritage, 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Baehr, Peter and Mike, O’Brien. 1994. “Founders, Classics, Canons: Modern Disputes over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociology’s Heritage.” Current Sociology 42(1): 1148.Google Scholar
Barzun, Jacques. 1988. “Of What Use the Classics Today?Perspective (1) (Winter): 112.Google Scholar
Barzun, Jacques.2002. “Of What Use the Classics Today?” In Murray, Michael (ed.), A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from His Works (pp. 412423). New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Beam, Alex. 2008. A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of Great Books. New York, NY: Public Affairs.Google Scholar
Bennett, Arnold. 1909. Literary Taste: How to Form It. New York: George H. Doran.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co.Google Scholar
Bloom, Harold.2000. How to Read and Why. New York: Scribner.Google Scholar
Boswell, James 1992 [1791]. The Life of Samuel Johnson. With an introduction by Claude, Rawson. New York: Everyman Library/Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Bovie, Smith Palmer. 1956. Virgil’s Georgics: A Modern English Verse Translation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brinnin, John Malcolm. 1959. Gertrude Stein and Her World. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Chugerman, Samuel. 1939. Lester F. Ward: The American Aristotle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Clements, Keith (ed.). 2010. The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom, and Society 1938–1944. London, UK: T & T Clark.Google Scholar
Coetzee, J. M. 2001 [1991]. “What Is a Classic? A Lecture.” In Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986–1999 (pp. 116). New York: Viking/Penguin Group.Google Scholar
Collini, Stefan. 2000. “The Later Social Criticism of T.S. Eliot.” In Micale, Mark S. and Dietle, Robert L. (eds.), Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture (pp. 207229). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Murray S. 1971. “That’s Interesting: Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology.” Philosophy of Social Science 1: 309344.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Murray S. 1986. “‘That’s Classic!’ The Phenomenology and Rhetoric of Successful Social Theories.” Philosophy of Social Science 16: 285301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eliot, T. S. 1940. Review of Karl Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. The Spectator, June 7, 1940, p. 782.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. 1945. What Is a Classic? An Address Delivered Before the Virgil Society on the 16th of October 1944. London, UK: Faber and Faber Limited.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. 1948. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London, UK: Faber and Faber Limited.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. 1964a. Selected Essays. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. 1964b. “Modern Education and the Classics.” In Selected Essays of T.S. Eliot (pp. 452460). New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World.Google Scholar
Gilreath, James, and Wilson, Douglas L. (eds.). 1989. Thomas Jefferson’s Library: A Catalogue with the Entries in His Own Order. Washington, DC: Library of Congress.Google Scholar
Hemingway, Ernest. 2015. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 3 1926–1929. Ed. by Sanderson, R., Spanier, S., and Trogdon, R. W.. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lamb, Charles. 1935. “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.” In The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (pp. 146150). New York: Modern Library.Google Scholar
McCullough, David. 2001. John Adams. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Ankhi. 2010. “‘What Is a Classic?’: International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question.” PMLA 125(4) (October): 10261042.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Ankhi.2014. What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Mullins, Phil, and Jacobs, Struan. 2006. “T. S. Eliot’s Idea of the Clerisy, and Its Discussion by Karl Mannheim and Michael Polanyi in the Context of J. H. Oldham’s Moot.” Journal of Classical Sociology 6(2) (July): 147156.Google Scholar
Rosenbaum, Ron. 2006. The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups. New York, NY: Random House.Google Scholar
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. 1964 [1850]. Sainte-Beuve: Selected Essays. Trans. and ed. by Francis, Steegmuller and Norbert, Guterman. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Schoenbaum, S. 1991. Shakespeare’s Lives. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sica, Alan (ed.). 2005. Social Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Present. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon/Pearson.Google Scholar
Sica, Alan. 2013. “When Sociology Reached the Masses.” Contemporary Sociology 42(3) (May): 315323.Google Scholar
Sica, Alan 2016. Book Matters: The Changing Nature of Literacy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
St. Clair, William. 2004. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude 1922. Geography and Plays. Introduction by Anderson, Sherwood. Boston, MA: The Four Seasons Company.Google Scholar
Strauss, Leo. 2013. Leo Strauss on Maimonides: The Complete Writings. Ed. with an introduction by Kenneth, Hart Green. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Trilling, Lionel. 1939. Matthew Arnold. New York NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Trilling, Lionel 2000. “On the Teaching of Modern Literature (1961).” In The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays (pp. 381401). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Tom. 2016. “The Origins of Speech: In the Beginning Was Chomsky.” Harper’s Magazine 333(1995) (August): 2540.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×