The Time Is Right for a ‘Great Books’ Revival
Excerpt: "In 1970, the poet, educator, and architect June Jordan posed the following question during a middle-school graduation speech in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn: “Where are the central, required courses that will teach us our real heritage of heroes and heroines, rebellion, and loving accomplishment?”
Questions like this are at the forefront of my mind lately. Like Jordan, I’m a writer who teaches students of all ages. As a literature professor at MIT, I’m working to develop Great Books programming—inspired by her dream of what a general curriculum might look like—that centers the history, poetics, and philosophy of science. Toward that end, I spent the past summer talking to physicists, poets, political scientists, materials-science engineers, and high-school teachers in English and robotics about the literary works that shaped their lives. You’ll recognize some of the authors whose names emerged from those conversations. Homer, Hansberry, Virgil, Whitman, Dickinson, and Dewey all made appearances. So did Melville and Morrison, Douglass and Du Bois.
The central theme of our list was invention—the dance between the examined life and the art of self-creation. A number of these colleagues and friends are now working with me to build a program that will live at MIT but also be available to the general public: a set of living documents and dynamic conversations, open access, available to all.
...These timeless containers of human wisdom and experience are for everyone, no matter your background or professional aspirations. They belong to us all: to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ralph Waldo Ellison alike. And not unlike Ellison—who interpolates the words of Herman Melville in the first pages of his 1952 classic, Invisible Man—I am interested in an approach to reading and teaching in which canonization does not serve as a hermetic seal, shielding a work from contact, but rather as an occasion for new interpretations, riffs, and reimaginings. This is the project we now take up together: using all the instruments we have available to us as readers and writers, engineers and artisans, scientists and poets, to find our way into these texts. And to build another world from what we find there."