Still Great After All These Years : GREAT BOOKS.<i> By David Denby (Simon & Schuster: $30, 493 pp.)</i>

You probably read some of the Great Books of the Western Canon in high school, others in college. Some bored you, some irritated you, some were skull-crackingly difficult. A few gave you a hint of what the excitement was supposed to be about. (This happened to me with Shakespeare’s plays, whose merits somehow shone, like diluted sunlight, through some of the foggiest English-lit lectures I ever endured.) A very few won your unstinting love and changed your life. But most you forgot.

Or did you?

Maybe something else lingered in your memory, apart from the literal contents of the books. If you aren’t a white male of European extraction, like me, did the shortage of works in the canon by women and people of color make you feel excluded and put down? If you are, on the other hand, did those thick volumes of Plato, Kant, Dostoevsky, etc., make you feel smug and justified as you settled into one of the swivel chairs of power?

David Denby, movie critic for New York magazine, had to plunge into the thick of the “culture war,” arcane and tiresome as it often is, when he went back to Columbia University at age 48 and took the same two Great Books courses--Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization--he had taken as a freshman in 1961.

Denby’s motives, in large part, were personal. He feared that his mind had become an “amorphous blur” of images from film and other mass media. “I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.” He worried about the same thing happening to his children. He wanted to understand why our civilization has fallen prey to crime, inequality and a “weakening of social sympathy.” Who better to consult than the writers and thinkers who created that civilization?

“You’re here to build a self,” announces one of the three Columbia professors who lead Denby and his 18-year-old fellow students from Homer through Virginia Woolf in “Lit. Hum.” and from Thucydides through Simone de Beauvoir in “C.C.” He isn’t exaggerating, as it turns out. Denby reads the Great Books as if his life depended on it; he reforges his political, religious and philosophical views in the heat of an enthusiasm that makes his own book high adventure.

If you’re like me, you find in rereading a book you read 10 years ago that it often seems a different book altogether. The better the book, the bigger the difference. Denby, revisiting these books after 30 years, wonders what the kids in his class are absorbing from their first brush with the classics. What remains of his own youthful reading, “as a residue of impressions and a framework for taste and sensibility, and even of action, I could not say. That was the mystery, wasn’t it?--the mystery of education.”

Education--”the struggle to enlarge yourself to take in a mind greater and more powerful than your own,” a task “as difficult for white males as for black, for men as for women”--is clearly more important to Denby than the issue of what belongs in the canon or whether there should be a canon, much less a Western Canon, at all.

In today’s academic climate, just stating this set of priorities amounts to taking sides. Not that Denby cares. As befits a critic, he’s a feisty, combative sort, though basically fair-minded. In literature as well as in film, he says, he is “drawn to energy, play, vivacity, speed, perversity”; he views the world as someone who has carved out a pretty good career in the Big Apple; and he lets these and his other biases show plainly.

Throughout “Great Books,” Denby is wary of his professors, despite their evident gifts. He’s tough on the 18-year-olds, deploring their PC reluctance to take moral stands and their insistence that literature, like life, should be fair. (“Oedipus didn’t know he was killing his father,” a student cries in dismay after reading Sophocles’ tragedy.) Inspired by Nietzsche, Denby indulges in “Limbaughesque rants” against “the whole sickly, self-pitying side of . . . American life, with its feel-good therapies, its euphemisms . . . its insistent cry of victimhood.” A “Take Back the Night” rally by women students against campus rape arouses only his scorn.

It’s instructive, though, to watch how the process of wrestling with the books keeps restoring Denby’s balance, curbing the feistiness, letting the fair-mindedness creep back in. Religious students’ views impress him more than he expects. He warms up to unlikely authors (St. Augustine, Hegel, Machiavelli) and sees flaws in masterpieces (Virgil’s “Aeneid,” Goethe’s “Faust,” Dante’s “Inferno”). A Jew, Denby is struck, reading the New Testament, by the “incomparable intellectual vitality” of Jesus.

The Great Books force him to reclaim and reexamine his past. “King Lear,” his favorite, suggests to Denby that he failed his mad and dying mother. Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan” reminds him of being mugged in New York’s Grand Central Station. In 1968--”under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” he realizes--”I threw a tomato at Ronald Reagan.” Despite the collapse of Communism, he submits, Karl Marx still has something to say to us.

Denby proves to be such a splendid reader that we may well conclude that education is wasted on the young. His vivid description of the books, of his struggle with them and of the fruits of that struggle are, in the end, his best argument for you and I to read (and reread) them and for colleges to continue teaching them.

He adopts, more or less, the conservative position that the Great Books are great, dammit, and should be cherished as our heritage for that reason alone, but he does so with a liberal rationale:

“The Western classics . . . are less a conquering army than a kingdom of untamable beasts, at war with one another,” Denby says. They are more likely to foster “skepticism and self-criticism” than chauvinistic pride. “The absence of books by blacks--and the small number of books by women--makes its own powerful statement about past oppression.”

Courses like Lit. Hum. and C.C. not only introduce us to the most “complex pleasures” our culture has produced, Denby insists, they “jar so many student habits, violate so many contemporary pieties and challenge so many forms of laziness that so far from serving a reactionary function, they are actually the most radical courses in the . . . curriculum.”