XVIII Fulbright International Summer School in the Humanities
Moscow State University, June 23–27, 2015
Great Books and Critical Readings
Teaching the “great books” (the “classics,” the “canon,” “monuments of tradition X”) has never been more difficult, or more necessary. Like writers themselves, literary texts (works of art in general) are not born “great.” They achieve and maintain their status through complex processes of interpretation and reinterpretation whereby readers (re)discover the relevance of what was to what is. In a global context––with students coming to our classrooms from all over the globe and heading out into a world of increasingly shared knowledge in science and business, “great books” have (or should) become the property of a global intellectual community as it strives to define itself as a complex whole.
Building a global canon of literature is an educational priority and a challenging, sensitive, self-contradictory venture in cultural politics, particularly since “literature” embraces not only fiction and poetry, but philosophy, historiography, and social thought. Educators face issues of selection and value judgment, of interpretation, and of engaging their various audiences. They also must contend with the minutiae of historical realities (some of which may no longer exist), difficulties that arise in translation (linguistic and cultural), and transformations of a work from one medium to another. Teaching the “great books” cannot be the sole prerogative of philologists, if ever it was one.
There is also another important and delicate aspect to consider: the Great Books project was born in the US in the pre-global era. How must the Great Books project be modified for use in a globalized context in educational traditions as different as the Russian or Chinese?
In 2015, participants of the XVIII Fulbright Summer School in the Humanities will consider questions surrounding courses in critical reading of (and writing about) “great books” across the disciplines, particularly at the university level. We will survey existing course models and explore how they might be transformed to function trans-nationally and trans-culturally. Regarding relevance, we will examine our role as negotiators between our students, the generation of “millennials,” and the world’s intellectual heritage, between local issues and cosmopolitan impulses, between aesthetics and politics. Finally, we will reconsider the role of close reading in the context of this global intellectual agenda.