What works of the humanities should undergraduates read?
some speculations
There are various discussions happening at the moment about the role of the humanities. Let’s simplify the question: what works of the humanities should undergraduates read?1 A lot of people want them to read literature in the sense of poems, plays, and novels.
Literature used to be more broadly defined. Johnson defined it simply: “Learning; skill in letters.” Rather than a Harold Bloom vision of the canon—Shakespeare and George Eliot—this is something akin to a “Great Books” syllabus, in which Darwin and Dickens sit side by side, or indeed Hooker and Herrick.2
Perhaps the best thing for the future of the humanities would be to have a slightly broader sense of the canon based on this simple definition so that a knowledge of Plato and Shakespeare are not seen as belonging to different departments of knowledge or separate syllabi, but all part of one essential tradition.
For this reason, I am perhaps less upset about the decline of the English literature degree than some other people. I have one. I think they are wonderful. But I knew people at university who had not read Descartes and the Gospels, which I think is non-negotiable. W.B. Yeats but not Montaigne? Really? The poets themselves have read the philosophers. We should be like them!
Indeed, I met a recently lecturer of English Literature who has only read twelve Shakespeare plays—one third of them. If she replaced the time she, and so many like her, spend not reading bloody Shakespeare with some David Hume—or, better yet, replaced some Literary Theory with, say, Adam Smith—then I think we’d start to see the benefit of the humanities very clearly indeed. I say this as a great advocate of reading Shakespeare.
It’s obvious that we need to keep the humanities in the university, it’s just not obvious right now how they ought to be kept. Perhaps we should try a more catholic syllabus.
Really, I don’t know though. What do you all think?
has written about competing ideas of the canon but I can’t remember where.
I read the Karp book but Hollis’s review is better. Karp didn’t really quite say what books he wants people to read. Hollis writes:
in calling for a renewed technological republic built on ownership and cultural cohesion, Karp and Zamiska leave a crucial question unanswered: what role will the humanities, the disciplines that cultivate "truth, beauty, and the good life,"play in this reimagined future? If shared culture, language, and storytelling are as essential to national solidarity as the authors argue, then those who teach these traditions deserve more than a footnote in their vision.
One of the first things you had to do at Oxford back in my day was to go and see the college President. God knows why. She asked about my literary interests. I told her that “literature” used to be a much broader concept, covering poems and plays but also history, theology, philosophy, essays and I wanted to study literature in that catholic manner. Well, she said, this is just the place for that.
She was wrong, of course. It was a formality, and she probably wanted to say something encouraging.
There was a syllabus. You might read those other works as background (although I knew people who had read neither Descartes nor the Gospels) but these were not the point of study. I did make a few rebellions—essays about Anglo Saxon literature that were largely about paintings, or an essay about Locke and Hobbes and gave no thought to their supposedly literary importance. (O youth! There is much to say!)—but mostly, I dedicated myself to the canon of the great poets and playwrights from Beowulf to Tennyson. Happily, I should add.
(There isn’t quite as much tension between these ideas as you might think—or as I might have thought—because you can just read more…Really, who stopped me reading Bentham as well as Wordsworth?)
I'm heavily in favor of a traditional liberal arts curriculum and am open to Bloom-ism or a more broad-based Great Books approach or an even more broad-based world-civ model. I spent a great deal of time and energy arguing in favor of these things when I was still in academia. Unfortunately, those of us who made these arguments did not persuade the people who needed to be persuaded (administrators and other faculty).
I'm for continuing the good fight where it can be fought, though, because I am not in favor of a thoughtless and post-literate world.
Mrs. Wills a.k.a. my present wife earned a B.A. in Australian Literature and Literature. 40 years later it's interesting to see what she thought of her degree. She got a really solid block of Austen, Eliot, Bronte's and she argues strongly that this is worth reading solely for the quality of the prose. The American literature she had mixed thoughts, the newer works didn't really move her but the Fitzgerald, Maddox Ford type authors did. She doesn't like poetry much but thought the range of English and other European poets gave her a good insight into metaphorical and allegorical thinking. Doesn't care for Shakespeare but agrees it is a must. Australian literature was hit and miss but some of the turn of the century writers like Handel Richardson, and later period writers like Hal Porter. She thought that the greatest value of much Australian fiction was as a historical record, the country had few people and fewer stories, so many authors wrote about the growth of the country. What was interesting was that she read virtually nothing political or philosophical.
She now works as a florist and is a voracious consumer of audio books. Her degree certainly flamed her passion for literature, and she did learn what a great work is and why. The relative narrowness of her studies i.e. novels, poetry and plays, suited her as she had a moderate interest in political writing.
The net result was that she learned how to understand prose, and write it well. She felt you had to be circumspect of the set ciriculum and have an idea as to what you wanted from the degree. When she likes a book she says it was good. Period. One of the few books she has ever effused over was The English Patient mainly because she thought it was so beautifully written.
Lastly she thinks a good literature degree should teach you about ideas that describe human behaviour and are transcendent. Miss. Havisham being a great example, or what dancing alluded to in Pride and Prejudice. when she talks about anything she reads or watches now she has a strong framework to compare them to.
Lastly she always jokes about any literature degree, you can't read everything.