Wither the Great Books? Or Whither Great Books? (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Kenneth Sammond

This seminar askes us the explore the relevance, merits, and demerits of the great books approach to literature, its use of shared inquiry, its rootedness in a forming and reforming canons, and its consideration that certain works are intrinsic to cultural inheritances and/or our shared humanity.

“Great Books” implies a culture, a canon, and a way of discussing texts, along with various critics/defenders (Spivak 2023, Renkl 2023, Montás 2021, Mani 2016, Denby 2014, Deresiewicz 2008, Bloom 1987, Said 1983, Hutchins 1953, etc.). Groups that foster the great books approach to education use “shared inquiry,” an opinion-driven discussion/exploration rooted in evidentiary analysis of common texts read beforehand by all participants. Discussion leaders guide these inquiries using open-ended “how” and “why” questions related to the content of the text(s) at hand but are disallowed from providing answers, and they cannot argue right or wrong (“About Great Books”).

The canon and the culture most often aligned with great books is rooted in white male authors and discussants who are inclined to reinforce or reinstate gender, racial, social, and other systems that oppress others and privilege some.  This alignment was true the great books were first pitched in the 1950s (Beam 2-4) and it often remains ingrained in that canon and culture now at many colleges and universities.

In short, we have the open-ended methodology of shared inquiry at odds with a proscriptive canon and culture.  Ultimately, this seminar ask whether the great books approach should wither in the fertile fields of university engagement, or if we should ask whither and how this approach can and should flourish in these fields?   

• How can this approach include morphing canonicity of different areas of literary study, embracing the ways that they intersect and evolve? 


• How can a this approach intersect and complicate both narratives and counternarratives within given social, political, gender, and religious/mythic identities?


• What are the benefits of the shared inquiry approach and how can it be adapted to the modern university?


• How can the canon become more dynamic in the ways that it represents the human condition?  And what are the benefits of such an approach?


• How does a dynamic canon represent the human condition?  And what are the benefits of such a canon?  How can they examine conflicting canons’ “evident yet elusive capacity to illuminate our shared humanity” (Montás) and our shared inhumanity?


• What kind of civic benefits are possible in a dynamic great books’ education approach?   What are some of the limits?


• How can shared inquiry enable us to exceed and critique identity politics, which are often rooted in their own canons and culture?


• How can a dynamic great books approach complicate/interrogate national and ethnic narratives?