DATE: Wednesday, November 19, 1997          TAG: 9711180056

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E5   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: BOOK REVIEW 

SOURCE: BY CHARLENE CASON 

                                            LENGTH:   68 lines

BOOK ON U.S. CLASSICS BEARS MISLEADING TITLE

THE ESSAYS in Andrew Delbanco's ``Required Reading'' are esoteric and aimed at the well-read, who know enough about American literature to form arguments and who routinely make copious notes in every book they pick up.

``This book,'' writes the Columbia humanities professor, ``is about the idea that individual human beings can break free of the structures of thought into which they are born and that, by reimagining the world, they can change it.''

What Delbanco wants you to change is not so much what you think about ``the classics'' that you studied in school, but the whole concept of what makes an American classic.

Is ``Omoo,'' by Herman Melville, a classic? Maybe, but ``Moby Dick'' was the required Melville reading in high school and college.

What about Harriet Beecher Stowe's ``Uncle Tom's Cabin''? Would that be on your list of all-time favorite American classics? And what best seller did Abraham Lincoln write?

Delbanco gives 12 chapters of reasons why these authors, and others, should be considered the nation's best and most classic authors. He backs up his arguments with passages from some recognizable but mostly obscure works, each of which proves that ``the politics implicit in classic American writing are those of liberal democracy.''

Delbanco celebrates such authors as Melville, Stowe, Lincoln, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton and Zora Neale Hurston for their use of language, language that ``has an immense power to shape and constrain us.'' He writes that ``the world is a better place for their having written,'' and he believes that it is his responsibility ``to incite others to read them.''

What you end up with is not really a book that, as the subtitle implies, explains ``Why Our American Classics Matter Now'' but, rather, a list of what Delbanco personally considers to be classics, and why. His literary criticism is intended to convince educators that there is a need to have their students study more than Hawthorne, Twain, Crane, Hemingway and Wharton.

But he's preaching to the choir, since most high school and college curricula now incorporate a wide array of historical, colonial, feminist, gay, beat and ethnic works. The question is, should any of these ``alternative'' works be considered American classics?

In ``Required Reading,'' Delbanco writes, ``it seems a long time ago that teachers could distribute without embarrassment The Lifetime Reading Plan or some such guide to literacy and expect students to measure their progress toward adulthood by the number of checks beside the titles read. There is a certain comfort in the authority of lists. But since we may never again have such lists, the idea of the classic - if it is to be preserved at all - needs to be saved from the idea of the absolute.''

Many middle-aged and older Americans, seeing what their children and grandchildren are required to read for classes, may lament the diluting of the stew of literature on which they were nourished. But, if there is no longer going to be a definitive list of what constitutes American classics, why write a book with the misleading title, ``Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now''? MEMO: Charlene Cason, a former staff writer, is finishing work on an MFA

in creative writing at Old Dominion University. She lives in Edenton,

N.C. ILLUSTRATION: BOOK REVIEW

``Speaking Truth to Power''

Author: Anita Hill

Publisher: Doubleday. 374 pp.

Price: $24.95

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