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.
Something I’d insist on, perhaps Quixote-like, is a timeline where the readings can live. I have in mind Western civ, plus world civ sampling, that focuses on the history of art and ideas (or value and meaning) more than on battles, much less on social-history hobbyhorses. A timeline is important because narratives can stick in the brain and turn into a kind of conversation. I can understand Locke better if I understand why he thinks he needs to justify his ideas about the good in a different way than Aristotle did (even if Locke is wrong).
The other useful thing about the timeline is using it to dramatize that human history wasn’t all that young by the time Socrates learned to talk. The archeological record is rich enough to hint at the vastness of what we have lost--and to hint in a vivid, gigantic-stone-monument way. Despite all our awfulness, humans have been doing clever things for a very long time.
As for the readings themselves, I would favor selections that would make students’ brains explode. Intellectual and cultural history are exciting and weird--and this should be exploited by everyone who aims to educate.
With this in mind, I would assign Plato but would lean toward readings like the *Euthyphro*, which is a mindbender for non-theists who think theists must be divine-command people and a mindbender for theists who assume (often wrongly) that their theist tradition is based purely on obedience. In addition to the *Euthyphro*, I would suggest an excerpt from the *Republic* to introduce the justice idea and reading the whole of the *Symposium* because love and the four-armed-monster humans are fascinating. I’d also use selections from Aristotle’s *Nicomachean Ethics* to introduce telos, arete, ethos, and eudaimonia; some of this will come across as weird because we have become weird in relation to Aristotle.
I’d dip into some lyric poetry to get at Dionysian madness and show that the Greeks weren’t made of unpainted marble. So the early punk rocker Archilochus--and Sappho with some actual readings instead of the trivia nugget about her sexuality. Those two will tee up a sampling of Catullus for later, giving the Romans a chance to let their hair down as well.
Other classical stuff: *Oedipus at Colonus* (because disgrace and decrepitude are more profound than murder and incest, which will come out anyway because the guy’s eyes are gouged out), Epictetus (*Enchiridion*), Lucretius (*On the Nature of Things*).
Periodic interludes on the world outside the West: Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Confucius, principles of Buddhism (Rahula still works), Ibn Khaldun (theory-of-history excerpts), Rumi.
Then possibly St. Augustine, definitely Boethius (*Consolation*), a sampling of Aquinas doing argumentation, *Beowulf* (with an eye on the beauty, sound, and emotional weight of the thing and not getting bogged down in “Christian or pagan?”), “The Wanderer,” *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*.
If I have to be brief with Shakespeare, then *Hamlet*, *As You Like It*, and *The Tempest*.
Some Milton (“When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”) and Donne (the valediction and the flea poem, to show his range).
Pope’s “Essay on Man” and “The Rape of the Lock.” Swift’s Gulliver somewhere other than Lilliput; Laputa seems useful. Smart kids can read *A Tale of a Tub*.
Epistemology thread: Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Then some unexpected latter-day corrective like Maritain.
*Candide* even though Leibniz is way cooler than Voltaire. The book invites thinking--and gardening.
Liberalism and its critics and frenemies (excerpts): Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau (his craziest state-of-nature and general-will moments), Wollstonecraft (on education), Burke, Marx, Rawls, Kirk, Lasch, Kolakowski.
Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Some Tennyson, Hopkins, and Arnold for later.
*Frankenstein*.
“The Overcoat.”
*Jane Eyre*.
*Madame Bovary*.
Final paragraphs of *On the Origin of Species*.
Bits of Emily Dickinson.
*Billy Budd*.
“The Open Boat.”
*The Death of Ivan Ilych*.
I suppose I’ll stop for now (kindly stop for death?) because this is already ludicrously long and because narrowing down twentieth-century selections would take a lot of thought. If the above seems ill-advised, I’m good with defaulting to Bloom even though I occasionally want to tell him to shut up.
Reading your comment, I felt a sense of nostalgia and warmth in my heart: Twenty years ago I read nearly all of what you suggest as part of my undergraduate studies at Hillsdale College. There, everyone read everything, whether BA or BS. You spent two years on just the core curriculum! While I don’t have their details at the ready these days, those works shaped me, and I have an intellectual range of motion I otherwise might not have gained. All that to say: I concur!
I’d be tempted to stop at 1899, or possibly earlier.
I love C20th literature, I’ve finished books by Debord and Derrida - so I don’t consider myself a cultural conservative - but I love the sweep of what you are proposing, because it gives perspective and a solid foundation.
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.
I think you’re right about mixing the humanities. When I finally got around to studying lit formally, I felt grateful for the reading I’d done in philosophy and theology (and also for the real-world experience I’d acquired in the Army and working lots of low-paying jobs).
But I will say that most grad students of English lit are already asked to read some philosophy in critical theory classes, and the results are often really disheartening. What universities now call training in critical theory is really just about finding ways to map philosophical jargon onto novels and poems. A person doesn’t need to have understood Foucault or Hamlet before applying some of Foucault’s key terms (madness, power, discourse, etc) to illuminate some new liminality in Hamlet’s queer rejection of normative desire. Sigh.
Critical theory, it seems, nowmeans something closer to using the waffle iron of (poorly understood) philosophy to reshape and transform the batter of (poorly understood) literature. A list of recent dissertations from almost any U.S. English department will give a sense of what I mean.
Anyway, I agree with you. Have you heard of the Auden course? A friend used to teach it at University of Oklahoma and the students seemed to love it. Link below:
Yeah I bet that went down really well. That's a proper syllabus! My feelings about Theory are that too many students get their philosophy from there and not from the original tradition which is too narrow, and as you say, often used for jargon purposes.
At NYU Shanghai, where I worked as a writing tutor this past year, the first-year cohort takes a course called Global Perspectives on Society, which is essentially a Chinese-Western (selected, abridged) great books course. Readings are arranged in thematic pairings, e.g., "Order and Chaos" - Genesis 1-2 and selections from Zhuangzi bks. 1 and 7 (with focus on the fable of the death of Emperor Chaos). I enjoyed following along and sitting in on a few lectures (before things got busy, alas...). The student population at NYUSh is about an even split between Chinese and (mostly Western) international students; since, as with the example I just gave, the readings were often familiar (if only ambiently) to one half of the room but not the other, they elicited surprising and fresh reactions and got thought-provoking discussion going. (At least one Chinese student was genuinely curious why God seemingly lies to Adam and Eve when he warns them that they will "surely die" by eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for example!) Something like that seems like a promising model for a global or at least multicultural humanities core: thematic organization rather than trying to do either cross-civilizational chronology (Confucius and Mozi, then jump to Plato and Aristotle, then jump back to Xunzi...) or civilizational blocks (Greco-Roman, then Indian, then Chinese...). Foreground the ideas and the common human concerns animating discussion across traditions, and trace historical connections along the way (and leave plenty for the students to piece together themselves).
English Literature foregrounds close reading and textual analysis from GCSE up. A student taking A-Level (a third of their school time) studies will study only a handful of texts and wider reading is not really a requirement. I think it's wildly ambitious to expect the average undergraduate to have read Descartes and The Gospels.
Quite a lot of places do have elements of this approach, though, even if Oxford did not. UCL for instance has a compulsory first year course (for the English BA) in which they read some Homer, Ovid, Plato, bits of the Bible, Virgil, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Montaigne, Marx, Rousseau, Darwin, Freud etc. These "Intellectual and Cultural Sources" are presented as material which may or may not be 'literature' in themselves but are essential for any proper understanding of English literature. For my part, I read Classics as an undergraduate, but just kept an eye on the English literature curriculum and made sure that I read most of the things they looked at if I hadn't already. I also went to some English lectures. Of course it's actually much easier to do that with English lit from another subject than with any other subject from English lit, because you don't need any technical skills to access most of the English lit curriculum yourself directly. But most countries are significantly less specialised than the UK (at least traditionally) is at tertiary / BA degree level anyway.
I mean, I love the Oxford syllabus, and you are expected to read these things at Oxford, of course. I think C.S. Lewis did all the reading to become an English don in a year or less, didn't he? (Having read a lot of it before anyway.)
I would like to see institutions pursue multiple different core humanities curricula based on specific theses about what is important and who belongs. For instance:
(1) The UChicago core program has seemed solid to me. I'm not entirely up to date on recent changes there, but the circa-2010 lists were great.
(2) The St. John's Great Books program also seems to remain good.
(3) I would like to see a Nussbaum post-Stoic-cosmopolitan-liberalism core developed: something like philosophy of Cicero, Ficino, Smith, Mill, Dewey, Sen, Nussbaum alongside fiction of Virgil, Dante, Austen, Dickens, Sinclair Lewis, Colson Whitehead, Susan Sontag.
(4) A Francophile core that put Bachelard before Foucault; Descartes, Gassendi, Montesquieu, Montaigne, Merleau-Ponty prominently; the Annales school for the history around all of it; fiction from de Troyes to Balzac to Zola to Huysmans to Proust to Houllebecq; Roman law.
(5) A Steven B. Smith Modernity and its Discontents Straussian sort of core, teaching a sequence of controversies, with Caramuel to match Pascal even if he's now unpopular, Thucydides against Plato, Machiavelli against Ficino, Herder against Kant or Voltaire, Berlin against Arendt, always with the fiction and politics of the time for context.
(6) A radical romantic postmodernist core that begins with shamanism and mysticism and "legitimate peripheral participation" anthropology and sociology, emphasizing the chthonic Greeks per Jane Harrison and the Dionysian per Nietzsche, Hamann and Herder for anti-Enlightenment romanticism, Kafka and Pynchon and Heidegger, perhaps working to Laplanche and Butler in psychology and philosophy.
I think there is an appetite for each, though organizing them and developing distribution strategies for each corresponding latent demand is difficult, and given a few more minutes I would think of others. Above all the humanities should be teaching skills for effective deliberation, since they're the core skills for leadership and execution in our political system, and I think this is done better by allowing students to make distinctive commitments and champion them than by teaching them all the same curricula.
I don't know. I'd suggest three books. Joyce's Portrait of the Artist (on dogma, transcendence, and the protean bildungsroman, as a template ...). Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters (on hypocrisy, collaboration, mutual support, friendship, and the culture industry). Octavia Butler's Dawn (for imagination, adaptation, inertia and overcoming). Possibly also Theodore Dreiser's The Titan (empire-building, seizing the moment, becoming a monster). To me, the canon, i.e., Shakespeare et al, isn't teaching, it's framing a wall plaque like doctors hang on the wall of their office. It's like teaching Latin and the Bible used to be. Perhaps some will trampoline from my grouping above to the canon. Ok, great for those few. Don't stuff the rest with it. And keep this list short, please.
I recently graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in English. The worst possible thing the humanities can do right now is sacrifice its own integrity and “adapt.” The students most likely to enter university interested in literature and then stay in a literature program are students who want a rigorous program. Students who want to read and write seriously want to do as the greats did, not as whatever tech moguls and anxious news outlets urge. I agree with a theory forward program, and worked with my department administration before graduating making recommendations to keep the undergraduate program challenging and focused on literature, not literature and creative writing or literature and technology.
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.
We have to do what we can on Substack. It's no replacement but it might help nudge the culture...
Something I’d insist on, perhaps Quixote-like, is a timeline where the readings can live. I have in mind Western civ, plus world civ sampling, that focuses on the history of art and ideas (or value and meaning) more than on battles, much less on social-history hobbyhorses. A timeline is important because narratives can stick in the brain and turn into a kind of conversation. I can understand Locke better if I understand why he thinks he needs to justify his ideas about the good in a different way than Aristotle did (even if Locke is wrong).
The other useful thing about the timeline is using it to dramatize that human history wasn’t all that young by the time Socrates learned to talk. The archeological record is rich enough to hint at the vastness of what we have lost--and to hint in a vivid, gigantic-stone-monument way. Despite all our awfulness, humans have been doing clever things for a very long time.
As for the readings themselves, I would favor selections that would make students’ brains explode. Intellectual and cultural history are exciting and weird--and this should be exploited by everyone who aims to educate.
With this in mind, I would assign Plato but would lean toward readings like the *Euthyphro*, which is a mindbender for non-theists who think theists must be divine-command people and a mindbender for theists who assume (often wrongly) that their theist tradition is based purely on obedience. In addition to the *Euthyphro*, I would suggest an excerpt from the *Republic* to introduce the justice idea and reading the whole of the *Symposium* because love and the four-armed-monster humans are fascinating. I’d also use selections from Aristotle’s *Nicomachean Ethics* to introduce telos, arete, ethos, and eudaimonia; some of this will come across as weird because we have become weird in relation to Aristotle.
I’d dip into some lyric poetry to get at Dionysian madness and show that the Greeks weren’t made of unpainted marble. So the early punk rocker Archilochus--and Sappho with some actual readings instead of the trivia nugget about her sexuality. Those two will tee up a sampling of Catullus for later, giving the Romans a chance to let their hair down as well.
Other classical stuff: *Oedipus at Colonus* (because disgrace and decrepitude are more profound than murder and incest, which will come out anyway because the guy’s eyes are gouged out), Epictetus (*Enchiridion*), Lucretius (*On the Nature of Things*).
Periodic interludes on the world outside the West: Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Confucius, principles of Buddhism (Rahula still works), Ibn Khaldun (theory-of-history excerpts), Rumi.
Then possibly St. Augustine, definitely Boethius (*Consolation*), a sampling of Aquinas doing argumentation, *Beowulf* (with an eye on the beauty, sound, and emotional weight of the thing and not getting bogged down in “Christian or pagan?”), “The Wanderer,” *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight*.
If I have to be brief with Shakespeare, then *Hamlet*, *As You Like It*, and *The Tempest*.
Some Milton (“When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”) and Donne (the valediction and the flea poem, to show his range).
Pope’s “Essay on Man” and “The Rape of the Lock.” Swift’s Gulliver somewhere other than Lilliput; Laputa seems useful. Smart kids can read *A Tale of a Tub*.
Epistemology thread: Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Then some unexpected latter-day corrective like Maritain.
*Candide* even though Leibniz is way cooler than Voltaire. The book invites thinking--and gardening.
Liberalism and its critics and frenemies (excerpts): Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau (his craziest state-of-nature and general-will moments), Wollstonecraft (on education), Burke, Marx, Rawls, Kirk, Lasch, Kolakowski.
Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Some Tennyson, Hopkins, and Arnold for later.
*Frankenstein*.
“The Overcoat.”
*Jane Eyre*.
*Madame Bovary*.
Final paragraphs of *On the Origin of Species*.
Bits of Emily Dickinson.
*Billy Budd*.
“The Open Boat.”
*The Death of Ivan Ilych*.
I suppose I’ll stop for now (kindly stop for death?) because this is already ludicrously long and because narrowing down twentieth-century selections would take a lot of thought. If the above seems ill-advised, I’m good with defaulting to Bloom even though I occasionally want to tell him to shut up.
Reading your comment, I felt a sense of nostalgia and warmth in my heart: Twenty years ago I read nearly all of what you suggest as part of my undergraduate studies at Hillsdale College. There, everyone read everything, whether BA or BS. You spent two years on just the core curriculum! While I don’t have their details at the ready these days, those works shaped me, and I have an intellectual range of motion I otherwise might not have gained. All that to say: I concur!
I’d be tempted to stop at 1899, or possibly earlier.
I love C20th literature, I’ve finished books by Debord and Derrida - so I don’t consider myself a cultural conservative - but I love the sweep of what you are proposing, because it gives perspective and a solid foundation.
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.
I think you’re right about mixing the humanities. When I finally got around to studying lit formally, I felt grateful for the reading I’d done in philosophy and theology (and also for the real-world experience I’d acquired in the Army and working lots of low-paying jobs).
But I will say that most grad students of English lit are already asked to read some philosophy in critical theory classes, and the results are often really disheartening. What universities now call training in critical theory is really just about finding ways to map philosophical jargon onto novels and poems. A person doesn’t need to have understood Foucault or Hamlet before applying some of Foucault’s key terms (madness, power, discourse, etc) to illuminate some new liminality in Hamlet’s queer rejection of normative desire. Sigh.
Critical theory, it seems, nowmeans something closer to using the waffle iron of (poorly understood) philosophy to reshape and transform the batter of (poorly understood) literature. A list of recent dissertations from almost any U.S. English department will give a sense of what I mean.
Anyway, I agree with you. Have you heard of the Auden course? A friend used to teach it at University of Oklahoma and the students seemed to love it. Link below:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/29/w-h-audens-syllabus-and-other-news/
Yeah I bet that went down really well. That's a proper syllabus! My feelings about Theory are that too many students get their philosophy from there and not from the original tradition which is too narrow, and as you say, often used for jargon purposes.
I laughed when I read the bit about the waffle iron of philosophy. How true, sadly.
At NYU Shanghai, where I worked as a writing tutor this past year, the first-year cohort takes a course called Global Perspectives on Society, which is essentially a Chinese-Western (selected, abridged) great books course. Readings are arranged in thematic pairings, e.g., "Order and Chaos" - Genesis 1-2 and selections from Zhuangzi bks. 1 and 7 (with focus on the fable of the death of Emperor Chaos). I enjoyed following along and sitting in on a few lectures (before things got busy, alas...). The student population at NYUSh is about an even split between Chinese and (mostly Western) international students; since, as with the example I just gave, the readings were often familiar (if only ambiently) to one half of the room but not the other, they elicited surprising and fresh reactions and got thought-provoking discussion going. (At least one Chinese student was genuinely curious why God seemingly lies to Adam and Eve when he warns them that they will "surely die" by eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for example!) Something like that seems like a promising model for a global or at least multicultural humanities core: thematic organization rather than trying to do either cross-civilizational chronology (Confucius and Mozi, then jump to Plato and Aristotle, then jump back to Xunzi...) or civilizational blocks (Greco-Roman, then Indian, then Chinese...). Foreground the ideas and the common human concerns animating discussion across traditions, and trace historical connections along the way (and leave plenty for the students to piece together themselves).
Scholar's Stage has a non-western canon - https://scholars-stage.org/a-non-western-canon-what-would-a-list-of-humanitys-100-greatest-writers-look-like/
thanks!
English Literature foregrounds close reading and textual analysis from GCSE up. A student taking A-Level (a third of their school time) studies will study only a handful of texts and wider reading is not really a requirement. I think it's wildly ambitious to expect the average undergraduate to have read Descartes and The Gospels.
This is my complaint!
Quite a lot of places do have elements of this approach, though, even if Oxford did not. UCL for instance has a compulsory first year course (for the English BA) in which they read some Homer, Ovid, Plato, bits of the Bible, Virgil, Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Montaigne, Marx, Rousseau, Darwin, Freud etc. These "Intellectual and Cultural Sources" are presented as material which may or may not be 'literature' in themselves but are essential for any proper understanding of English literature. For my part, I read Classics as an undergraduate, but just kept an eye on the English literature curriculum and made sure that I read most of the things they looked at if I hadn't already. I also went to some English lectures. Of course it's actually much easier to do that with English lit from another subject than with any other subject from English lit, because you don't need any technical skills to access most of the English lit curriculum yourself directly. But most countries are significantly less specialised than the UK (at least traditionally) is at tertiary / BA degree level anyway.
I mean, I love the Oxford syllabus, and you are expected to read these things at Oxford, of course. I think C.S. Lewis did all the reading to become an English don in a year or less, didn't he? (Having read a lot of it before anyway.)
I would like to see institutions pursue multiple different core humanities curricula based on specific theses about what is important and who belongs. For instance:
(1) The UChicago core program has seemed solid to me. I'm not entirely up to date on recent changes there, but the circa-2010 lists were great.
(2) The St. John's Great Books program also seems to remain good.
(3) I would like to see a Nussbaum post-Stoic-cosmopolitan-liberalism core developed: something like philosophy of Cicero, Ficino, Smith, Mill, Dewey, Sen, Nussbaum alongside fiction of Virgil, Dante, Austen, Dickens, Sinclair Lewis, Colson Whitehead, Susan Sontag.
(4) A Francophile core that put Bachelard before Foucault; Descartes, Gassendi, Montesquieu, Montaigne, Merleau-Ponty prominently; the Annales school for the history around all of it; fiction from de Troyes to Balzac to Zola to Huysmans to Proust to Houllebecq; Roman law.
(5) A Steven B. Smith Modernity and its Discontents Straussian sort of core, teaching a sequence of controversies, with Caramuel to match Pascal even if he's now unpopular, Thucydides against Plato, Machiavelli against Ficino, Herder against Kant or Voltaire, Berlin against Arendt, always with the fiction and politics of the time for context.
(6) A radical romantic postmodernist core that begins with shamanism and mysticism and "legitimate peripheral participation" anthropology and sociology, emphasizing the chthonic Greeks per Jane Harrison and the Dionysian per Nietzsche, Hamann and Herder for anti-Enlightenment romanticism, Kafka and Pynchon and Heidegger, perhaps working to Laplanche and Butler in psychology and philosophy.
I think there is an appetite for each, though organizing them and developing distribution strategies for each corresponding latent demand is difficult, and given a few more minutes I would think of others. Above all the humanities should be teaching skills for effective deliberation, since they're the core skills for leadership and execution in our political system, and I think this is done better by allowing students to make distinctive commitments and champion them than by teaching them all the same curricula.
Yeah, I certainly agree directionally with this.
Cool. It wasn't meant to be more than directional.
This is the list I gave a group of rising high school seniors this week:
•Njal’s Saga
•Beowulf
•Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
•Tristram Shandy
•Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus
•Emma
•Middlemarch
•Bleak House
•The Way We Live Now
•Dubliners
•Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography
•To the Lighthouse
•Hitler (Kershaw)
•Tree of Smoke
•The Left Hand of Darkness
•Lincoln at Gettysburg
•Snow Crash
•How Democratic is the American Constitution?
•The Human Stain
•Between the World and Me
•The Sell-Out
•Pachinko
20
Very nice! How much will they read?
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect non-Christians to have read the Gospels.
for those studying literature I think it is
I figure they have at least 60 years to complete the reading
This is another well-written piece. I love the idea of a painting as an emotional mirror.
Thank you!
This is wonderful. Loved this call for a broader, braver humanities syllabus.
I don't know. I'd suggest three books. Joyce's Portrait of the Artist (on dogma, transcendence, and the protean bildungsroman, as a template ...). Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters (on hypocrisy, collaboration, mutual support, friendship, and the culture industry). Octavia Butler's Dawn (for imagination, adaptation, inertia and overcoming). Possibly also Theodore Dreiser's The Titan (empire-building, seizing the moment, becoming a monster). To me, the canon, i.e., Shakespeare et al, isn't teaching, it's framing a wall plaque like doctors hang on the wall of their office. It's like teaching Latin and the Bible used to be. Perhaps some will trampoline from my grouping above to the canon. Ok, great for those few. Don't stuff the rest with it. And keep this list short, please.
Plato, 'Republic'
Aristotle, 'Physics'
Descartes, 'Meditations'
Linnaeus, "Reflections on the Study of Nature"
Hume, 'Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'
Kant, "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics"
'Beowulf'
'Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh'
'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'
Like, all of Shakespeare (Chaucer if you want to, but he's kinda pervy)
Behn, 'Oroonoco'
Bunyan, 'Pilgrim's Progress'
Defoe, 'Robinson Crusoe'
Cervantes, 'Don Quixote'
Milton, 'Paradise Lost'
'The Declaration of Independence' and 'The Constitution of the United States of America'
Equiano, 'The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano'
Wollstonecraft, 'Vindication of the Rights of Men' and 'Vindication of the Rights of Woman'
Coleridge, 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'
Blake, 'Jerusalem'
Shelley, 'Frankenstein'
Wordsworth, 'The Prelude'
Poe, 'The Raven'
Melville, 'Moby-Dick'
Twain, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
Braddon, 'Lady Audley's Secret'
Tennyson, 'Charge of the Light Brigade' and 'Crossing the Bar'
Dickens, 'David Copperfield,' 'Hard Times,' and 'Great Expectations'
Carroll, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking-Glass'
Collins, 'The Moonstone'
Bronte, 'Jane Eyre'
Eliot, 'Middlemarch'
Nietzsche, 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'
Verne, 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas' and 'The Clipper of the Clouds' (a.k.a., 'Robur the Conqueror')
Abbott, 'Flatland'
Wells, 'The Time Machine,' 'The War of the Worlds,' and 'The War in the Air'
Doyle, 'The Sign of the Four' and 'The Lost World'
Gilman, 'Herland'
Woolf, 'Mrs. Dalloway'
Forster, "The Machine Stops"
Huxley, 'Brave New World'
Orwell, 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'
Golding, 'Lord of the Flies'
Oliver, 'Late Bloomers'
This was just what I came up with off the top of my head.
This would certainly be a good start! Nice list
(Library's upstairs, I had 15 minutes, and admittedly, I work on the romance. You see it in this list, for sure.)
I recently graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in English. The worst possible thing the humanities can do right now is sacrifice its own integrity and “adapt.” The students most likely to enter university interested in literature and then stay in a literature program are students who want a rigorous program. Students who want to read and write seriously want to do as the greats did, not as whatever tech moguls and anxious news outlets urge. I agree with a theory forward program, and worked with my department administration before graduating making recommendations to keep the undergraduate program challenging and focused on literature, not literature and creative writing or literature and technology.