Thursday, July 08, 2004
(1:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The "Great Books" Approach
M. Gauche's post on Kafka today reminded me of a project that I have had in mind for some time. I have long thought that the "Great Books" approach is good in principle, but that in practice it is unlikely to engage young learners. All the works are too "obvious" in such lists as that for St. John's College -- for a list to be truly effective, it has to be very deeply biased, very constricted. In addition, I propose that such a list must be based not on canonical "texts," so that one ends up reading one or two obvious books from the great authors, but that it should instead be based on authors, whom students read in their entirety, or as close as they can get. These authors should be chosen with bewilderment explicitly in mind -- beyond gaining the supposed "wisdom of the ages" that the works should contain, students should learn to be confused by texts.
The list of five authors (or four authors and one anthology) that I propose is limited in many respects. I recognize that it contains no women and no non-whites (well, kind of), but because of contingent factors in my personal reading history, I cannot in good faith include such authors on my idiosyncratic list -- they would be "obvious," required. As with my list of 21 books, I invite any and all readers to contribute such insightful comments as "You included x? Come on!" Here we go:
- The Hebrew Bible -- Note that I do not include the New Testament. Students should be forbidden to read the New Testament until they are sufficiently familiar with the Hebrew Bible that the interpretive choices made by New Testament authors appear as profoundly strange as they really are. There are a lot of stories and passages in the Hebrew Bible that people don't read, and I think that those are the best parts. The question of whether it's inspired by God will be, of course, bracketted.
- Sigmund Freud -- My professor of Hebrew Bible once said that the texts of Freud are uniquely open to creative readings, and in that respect are now like Scripture. Freud may be something to be surpassed, but there's something about the original texts of Freud -- so naively anti-philosophical, so naively convinced of a "scientific" basis for the outlandish theories -- that perhaps uniquely expose some of the open wounds of modernity.
- Friedrich Nietzsche -- I read a lot of Nietzsche over the course of a year, enjoyed him, and thought I was done with him. I'm beginning to realize more and more that I probably never will be. (It may well be necessary to read Nietzsche before the New Testament now, to place Nietzsche between the Testaments as a new Apocrypha.)
- Franz Kafka -- When I attempted to formulate this list at a recent party, Kafka got the most questioning (only the first four were on the list). I select Kafka because of his obscurity, because he was an effective official in an insurance office, because he laughed out loud as he presented his works, because he wanted everything burned.
- Thomas Pynchon -- We need a representative of literary modernism, the most productive and interesting literary movement since the Elizabethan theatre, and we might as well take the most extreme case. His texts are rich, and more importantly, they present the temptation to "decode," something that can only be overcome if it is thoroughly submitted to. I submitted to that temptation with The Waste Land; I choose Pynchon over Eliot because I believe that there is more remaining after the decoding stage in The Crying of Lot 49 than there is in The Waste Land. Once the students have reached that point, they will be equipped to read the Great American Novel, Gravity's Rainbow.
