The philosophy professor posed big questions to the 90 students gathered in Boylston Hall: “Why did Austen create such an unlikable heroine?” she asked. “Why read novels at all?” And finally, as the 75-minute lecture ended, “What will become of Emma—and what will become of you?”
The students burst into applause.
Big questions? I'd say small questions.
I'd ask — instead of "Why read novels at all?" — why go to college to read a novel and to listen to a professor comment on the likability of characters and whether we identify with them. That sounds like a local reading group that barely gets off the ground.
That reminds me. Last night I dreamed I was a law professor again.
It was one of those dreams where I am extremely tired in the dream and fighting to stay awake. I heard a noise coming from behind my shoulder and turned around to see a student blowing one of those party blowouts at my ear. Back to the WSJ article:It’s all distinctly old school. Hotly contested terms like “Western Civ,” “Great Books” and “the canon” appear nowhere in the course description. But the curriculum begins with “The Odyssey,” travels forward in time to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and then backward to end with “The Iliad.” In between are assignments on Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Baldwin, Dante and Plato.
In their applications and in interviews, students expressed the urge to be forced to tackle classics they otherwise wouldn’t read, the need to combat frayed attention spans and the desire for an antidote to The Machine. Several mentioned with disdain that people who aren’t in the class wondered why they didn’t “just Chat the books,” i.e., use AI.
“A lot of what we get out of this class is the human experience, and you can’t get that out of AI,” said Peggy Urdan, a government and neuroscience major from Lexington, Mass. “The only way to get anything out of this class is to not use AI.”
ALSO: I can see the course is essentially the traditional Great Books course, but in case you — like me — were wondering what books deal most directly with the human being's desire for an antidote to The Machine, I asked The Machine (Grok), and the #1 choice was E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops.
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk — that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus....
Runners up: Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano; Yevgeny Zamyatin, We; George Orwell, 1984; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; Ira Levin, This Perfect Day; Ayn Rand, Anthem; Dave Eggers, The Circle.
My next prompt: "Replace those sci-fi choices with books that could be assigned in a Harvard University "great books" course."
The new selection — which I like better (I've read all but 2) — is Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener; Franz Kafka, The Trial; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Charles Dickens, Hard Times; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Albert Camus, The Stranger; Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
Posts
40 comments:
(There's a large, blank space after "party blowouts at my ear.")
I like this:
" students expressed the urge to be forced to tackle classics they otherwise wouldn’t read, the need to combat frayed attention spans and the desire for an antidote to The Machine."
Shouldn't they have read most of the course books in high school? Certainly Home, Shakespeare, and Plato, was well as some of that refined suggestion list..
"There's a large, blank space after "party blowouts at my ear.""
Thanks. The video I wanted to embed was disabled from embedding. I've found a different one. Just wanted to illustrate what the thing called a "party blowout" is (because I only just learned the term this morning)(we all know the thingy, but who knew the term?).
>said Peggy Urdan, a government and neuroscience major from Lexington, Mass. “The only way to get anything out of this class is to not use AI.”<
Very profound, Peggy. And I'm sure, a thunderbolt revelation to you and your peers.
Here, Peg, let me really blow your mind: The only way to get anything out of any class is to not use AI.
This is why the students want to get into this class and why they go to college: "In their applications and in interviews, students expressed the urge to be forced to tackle classics they otherwise wouldn’t read, the need to combat frayed attention spans...."
IOW, discipline.
I add four books to Ann's list:
1984 by George Orwell
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian, S.J.
Frankenstein, Part II by M. Reese Kennedy (Harvard, '79)
I'm partial to Tal Ben-Shahar's Harvard "Happiness 101". It might be more useful to uber-depressed kids these days. Happiness per TBS is really simple. *Simplicity*.
There should be no such thing as an "easy A". Anywhere. Ever.
Big questions the size of small questions.
You, a law professor again!
Jesus.
My Columbia buddies and I talked about this article over beers the other night, Like all CC students, we took the mandatory Contemp Civilization and Literature Humanities courses, which encompasses reading all these great works.
Only a book a week ? Those Harvard kids are such lightweights.
@FWBuff
LOL
It is a lie universally acknowledged that the antidote to the Machine is to be found at Harvard.
“That reminds me. Last night I dreamed I was a law professor again.” Certainly preferable to my wife’s and my dreams that we are law students again and unable to find the classroom where the final exam for which we are unprepared is being given. What’s with that anyway? (Rhetorical. I really don’t want to know.)
When in the course of reading long texts, do you use a bookmark or dog ear the page? Do you draw emoticons in the margins for selfie-amusement?
Should "read" also be italicized? I probably don't want to know the answer.
"Why read novels at all?" was succinctly answered by Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey" (which I was rereading between Chicago and San Jose last night).
But, you know, what did she know about it? Just another DWA.
Not sure how "Notes from the Underground" is a "rage against the machine". Think the same of the "The stranger" or "The invisible man". Or Joyce.
Ayn Rand has to be the worst novelist to achieve the most lasting popularity.
Why pay lots of money to go to college to read law when you can read at home? Oh, right., credentials.
"I'd ask — instead of "Why read novels at all?" — why go to college to read a novel and to listen to a professor comment on the likability of characters and whether we identify with them."
Did everyone here have a bad night's sleep or something? All so eager to dump on freshmen who are taking delight in a course fostering discussions that you all so eager to dismiss as sophomoric -- but they're freshmen for crying out loud. And the reading list is crazy -- and, BTW, not hearing anyone bitch about the quality of the books -- when you recall that this would be one of four courses these kids were taking (Harvard does four per semester as the norm). Any college humanities course today that isn't completely woke BS should be celebrated, especially if the students are looking to take it precisely because it isn't pablum.
So, here's some advice -- take a deep breath, maybe go outside for a walk and clear your heads. Maybe that might help you stop with the bitchiness.
When the Students were white and christian, then the Universities job was to "Challenge them" and demand "they think new thoughts".
Now that the students are liberal/left then the Universities job is to make them comfortable, or plead with them to try new things. Hope this book doesn't trigger you, and do you like the character? Because that's the guiding star - do you like the character.
This dynamic change has been discussed before. "The Closing of the american mind"?
Hotly contested terms like “Western Civ,” “Great Books” and “the canon” appear nowhere in the course description.
Yeah, 2026 we're not Western Civilization. More like a weird hodge-podge of Judaism, Puritanism, and liberal/leftism.
>Hombre said...
my dreams that we are law students again and unable to find the classroom where the final exam for which we are unprepared is being given. What’s with that anyway? (Rhetorical. I really don’t want to know.)<
Too bad; I'll tell you anyway. It is nothing unique (I, for one, have it one or two times a year - and it is close to a nightmare). It is a well-known dream called...guess what, The Examination Dream. It is discussed extensively in the psychoanalysis literature. It occurs primarily, not surprisingly, in people who were good students and who are goal-oriented. I'm sure that many people in this group have experienced it.
Hey Begley,
Can I watch your Frankensteyn movie instead of reading the book?
John Henry
Good to have them reading some books. How much does the course cost? The books are free on Gutenberg, Kindle, library. You can get plenty of knowledgeable discussion of them on YouTube and podcasts.
What the hell is the point?
John Henry
Tik-Tok served me up Charlie Kirk last night and a U of Iowa 4th year English major. He was really pissed that Charlie says most college is a scam. (Charley's not wrong)
Charlie Kirk: "english major huh? What's the last Dickens book you've read?"
Shithead: "Non-responsive answer"
Chaerley repeats the question
Student accuses Charley of a trick question
Charley: "OK, who is Jane Austen?"
Shithead: "Never heard of her"
Charley: "Never heard of her?"
Shithead: "Yeah, yeah, she wrote Harry Potter."
Charley: "I rest my case. You have just proven that college is a scam."
Quoting from memory.
John Henry
I used to teach an MBA capstone course at SNHU called "Business, Government and the Environment" (Environment really meaning society in general)
I used Atlas Shrugged as the text. I would get occasional complaints to the program director about this. Once in a while about the content. Mostly about how I expected them to read the whole thing in a single 12 week term.
My Director always backed me up on this telling them to suck it up.
John Henry
"The Machine" isn't necessarily to be taken to be a literal machine. It can also refer to the machine-like nature of modern society and the feeling that human beings are losing their individuality and humanity and becoming machines. That's very much a part of "Notes from Underground." Include the mechanical nature of bureaucracy and business and Kafka's "The Trial" and Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" come into view. Camus's novel, Ellison's novel, and Tolstoy's short novel fit into the same "existentialist" tent. Such a syllabus would be quite typical of a 1960s lit course. Joyce is more of a stretch.
Tsk, tsk…no women except Ayn Rand and the obligatory Austen. So retrogressive and counterrevolutionary, I might even be tempted to take it.
'Hotly contested terms like “Western Civ,” “Great Books” and “the canon” appear nowhere in the course description.'
Apparently works from outside "the West" aren't included either. There's only so much a course can include, but the more things change ...
What does it take to not be a "machine" or a part of "the Machine"? Is it possible? Is it desirable? Is it something Harvard or even the "Great Books" can teach you? And if you're already at Harvard, aren't you already a mechanical part of the Machine? Excellent sheep, etc.
Are you a retired law professor dreaming you're a practicing law professor, or are you a practicing law professor dreaming you're a retired law professor?
Let's see, I have one more elective to fill out my schedule. Which one?
"The queering of the feminist dialetic for 19th century central African writers"
"Reading and discussing the greatest writers who ever lived"
Readoing Ayn Rand is like some popular streaming series - idiotic story line, but some great scenes and set pieces embedded in. Succession is an example of that. Ayn Rand is worth reading to get to the brilliant dialogues and discussions embedded in the stories.
If the freshmen are discussing sophomoric ideas, are they advanced beyond their years?
OK, listen up. You freshmen have to read Bartleby the Scrivener and be ready to discuss it this Friday.
"We would prefer not to."
I read Ulysses this Fall so you don’t have to. I decided I would do it and make it to the end regardless of how much I liked or didn’t like it (and didn’t like was the clear winner). So if you have always wondered if you missed something and should read it, unless you’re a glutton for punishment like me don’t do it. And to make it through with a modicum of understanding what the hell was going on in the book I did turn to AI and even Cliff’s Notes (AI did not exist when I was a First Year in 1977-78, and I never before used Cliff Notes). The class sounds good to me if they drop Ulysses from the syllabus.
Press is a strange animal. There are lots of heavy reading classes at Harvard that aren't focused on reflecting on yourself. But this class gets press.
Every time I read articles in the press about anything I know about personally, they're either totally wrong or oddly skewed in some way that makes them basically wrong. (The WSJ seems markedly better than other outlets about this. Why? What does the WSJ do differently? What is the difference in editors?)
"Every time I read articles in the press about anything I know about personally, they're either totally wrong or oddly skewed in some way that makes them basically wrong. "
You're speaking truth there, sister. I remember doing murder trials that the media was covering, and reading the paper or watching the news and wonder what trial they were watching.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith. Also: No italics, even briefly. Use asterisks for emphasis. And don't play with the format by changing fonts or using boldface or all caps. Never include more than one extra line break between paragraphs.