Great Books in the Undergraduate Curriculum

Kathy Eden

M any people in Morningside Heights, on the Upper Westside of Manhat- tan, where I live, know that great books have had a long history in the

undergraduate curriculum. When pressed to say how long, most will say very long; some will venture a rounded number of years; and some will even say either since 1919 or 1937, depending on how they understand the term "great books." Indeed, these two dates tend to recur in discussions of what is sometimes called "The Great Books Debate," sometimes "The Canon Debate." The earlier date, 1919, marks the inauguration of Columbia's course known as Contemporary Civi- lization; the latter, 1937, that of Literature Humanities. As currently configured, these sister courses, each a full year long, introduce Columbia undergraduates to a mostly European philosophical and literary tradition that begins in antiquity and ends in this century. I say "as currently configured" because, as I will have reason to explain later, the boundaries have shifted over time.

Even beyond the borders of Morningside Heights, then, some American educators and some educated Americans will single Columbia out for praise or blame, depending on their side in the debate, as the innovator of the "great books" cur r icu lum--an innovation that during this century helped to shape undergraduate curricula all over the country. I will return to Columbia's "great books" courses, and especially to Literature Humanities, as one longs tandingm and maybe even the longest s tanding--American example of such a curricu- lum; but first, I want to extend the history of teaching great books, often thought to have originated in Morningside Heights, back a couple of thousand years to the same antiquity that serves as the far terminus for Columbia's and most other courses of this kind. Since Hellenistic times at least, first Greek and then Roman literature professors provided lists of works in poetry and prose, in- cluding fiction, history, and philosophy that the young student should read. Perhaps the best known among these lists is provided by one Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also known as Quintilian.

Outlining in some detail the proper education for an orator, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria lays out an encyclopedic curriculum based, as he freely ad- mits, on the enkuklios paideia (1.10.1) or full round of learning of his Greek

Kathy Eden is Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, New York, NY 10027. This essay originated as an address to the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics at their NewYork City conference on 30 October 1999. Yale Uni- versity Press published Professor Eden's most recent book, Hermeneutics and the Rhe- toTical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception, in 1997.

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predecessors. The skeleton of this curr iculum forms in turn the backbone of the later trivium and quadrivium. An impor tan t par t of this encyclopedic edu- cation is reading or lectio, focusing no t only on how to read bu t also on what to read.

Quintil ian, in o ther words, can fairly be said to have des igned an early ver- sion of the "great books" course for the young m e n of the empire ; and several aspects o f his design meri t consideration. In the first place, as I have already hinted, Quintil ian shows every awareness that the enterpr ise itself is tradi- tional, that o ther professors before h im as far back as Aristarchus have drawn up such lists and that the overlap over t ime - -he re some three h u n d r e d years- - between his own list and theirs is considerable. He is also aware of some changes over time. So he comments that Aristarchus omit ted from the canon Apollonius of Rhodes , still a well-known p o e t a m o n g classicists, on the g r o u n d s o f con temporane i ty (10.1.54)---grounds that no longer ho ld when Quint i l ian is making his own syllabus, in which Apollonius is respectfully included. In fact, Quinti l ian draws special a t tent ion to this quest ion of the b lanket exclusion of con tempora ry writers, a controversial issue even in the first century. Unlike Aristarchus and even unlike some of his own colleagues, Quint i l ian covers the novi or moderns as well as the antiqui, the ancients. O n the o the r hand , he r e c o m m e n d s ext reme caution when assigning m o d e r n authors because judg- ments regarding their work, like those regarding any object viewed f rom too close-up, are m u c h more susceptible to er ror (2.5.26).

Without rejecting m o d e r n writers on principle, Quinti l ian fu r the r recom- me nds that in most cases these writers are more suitable for advanced stu- dents, those who already have some exper ience reading the ancients. Indeed , Quinti l ian designs his syllabus with only one eye on the writers to be included; the o the r he keeps fixed on his young readers. For he knows, like any g o o d teacher, the results of teaching the right book to the wrong students. So, in a n o t h e r caut ionary m o m e n t , one that Ben J o n s o n recycles with finesse, Quintil ian advises that younger readers should take on Livy ra ther than Sallust, even though Sallust is the greater historian (2.5.19). Reading "great books," in o ther words, is no t necessarily the same as reading the "greatest books."

By the end of the first century of the C o m m o n Era, then, "great books" courses already had a long history in the undergradua te curr iculum. As I have also suggested, Quintilian's version holds m u c h in c o m m o n with his Greek predecessors. Offsetting these commonal i t ies are some equally significant changes. One already m e n t i o n e d is the inclusion of con tempora ry authors. Ano the r for Quintil ian is the inclusion of Roman alongside Greek authors. In contrast to the scriptural canon of the early church, in o the r words, the liter- ary canon of the schools r emained open and flexible. On several occasions, Quinti l ian repeats that his list is no t mean t to be exhaustive. Any writer who measures up to an admittedly high s t anda rd - -a h igh literary s tandard is eli- gible. In Greek, the term for that measure is kanon. Long before ecclesiastical

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debates over the scriptural canon, Hellenistic grammar ians like Aristarchus used precisely this term to refer to their reading lists o f great books. A writer they d e e m e d kanonikos--that is, one who measures u p - - Q u i n t i l i a n is likely to call optimus, a m o n g the best. Only in the next century will this same writer bear the m o r e familiar title classicus, a classic (Aulus Gellius, 19.8.15). In the later Latin West, on the o the r hand , Church Fathers such as August ine will refer to an authorized text of scripture as canonica, canonical (e.g., De doctrina christiana, 2.8.12).

Readily accepting the legacy of a great books course f rom his Greek prede- cessors, Quinti l ian also accepts the responsibility of reevaluating the reading material o f that course in l ight o f its place in an encyclopedic R o m a n educa- tion. Critically receptive to the traditional p rogram of teaching a list o f "g rea t books," he is no less critical of the writers included. And he labors to instill this same critical att i tude in his students. For criticism, in the radical sense o f "making judgments" f rom the Greek kritein, belongs no t jus t casually bu t for- mally to the reading practices of ancient educat ion in the Greco-Roman world. Students were encouraged no t only to read and to in te rpre t what they read, bu t also to criticize or evaluate it. And, if beginners were expec ted to make only the more local j u d g m e n t s conce rn ing this figure of speech and that fig- ure of thought , surely some of these beginners developed into m o r e advanced, more critical readers fully able to j u d g e the part in context o f the whole.

Quintil ian's list of "great books," cons idered for the m o m e n t no t as what the ancients read but as what they wrote, provides compel l ing evidence that at least some Roman readers ref ined and developed their literary j udgmen t s . For all Greek and Roman students regularly pract iced reading, as Quinti l ian 's p rogram makes absolutely clear, in t andem with writing. T h r o u g h the exer- cise of imitatio or imitation, literary p roduc t ion c o m p l e m e n t e d literary recep- t i o n - r h e t o r i c reversing, so to speak, hernleneutics. Before b e c o m i n g a "great books" writer on Quintilian's list, that is to say, the young Virgil was a "great books" reader instructed in his own writing to imitate those he read. In fact, professors of literature, like Quinti l ian and like many of us, are arguably only the custodians of literary canons, which, it is likely, are made by writers. Inte- grating their reading into their own writing, writers secure the part icipat ion of their intellectual and artistic predecessors in a literary dia logue that contin- ues over time and constitutes the subject mat ter of most "great books" courses.

A quick scan of an ancient reading list helps to make this point . Imagine one that in its early weeks covers Homer , Aeschylus, Plato and Virgil. Aeschylus, as we know from the Oresteia, not only carefully read his H o m e r but reworked the story of Agamemnon ' s h o m e c o m i n g from Odyssey 3 and 11 to dramatize issues on the minds of his own contemporar ies , no t least o f which was the blessing and bu rden of democracy. Plato, in turn a careful reader of H o m e r and Aeschylus and a resolute enemy of ancient democracy, uses all the strate- gies of the poets to argue against their inclusion in the literary canon that

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buttresses the educat ion of his own ideal city, an aristocracy of character; while Virgil, having read the epic and tragic poets, as well as the phi losophers , rein- vests his own reading in writing a narrative deeply roo ted in a strikingly differ- en t society. In no two cases does the literary dialogue take the same, which is to say, a predictable course, bu t like all really constructive dialogues reflects somewhat unpredictably the synergy of the various interlocutors .

This unpredictability, which seems to be the only cons tant in the ancient practice o f reading, accounts for how an au thor like Plato speaks meaning- fully to an au thor like August ine or Montaigne, despi te the differences in their religious, political, and m o r e generally cultural situations. It accounts for Quintilian's watchful guardianship of Plato's status in the curr iculum, even though Plato himself rejected jus t such a curr iculum. I repeatedly draw my own students ' a t tent ion to the fact that Plato enters the "great books" list thor- oughly antagonistic to it. Indeed , writers who take what we migh t call s t rong ideological positions are productively unders tood and even imitated by writ- ers with vastly different presuppos i t ions and beliefs. T h i n k of August ine 's magnificently complex rewriting of Virgil's Aeneid, a "great book" he first read in a school curr iculum jus t like Quintilian's.

In my view, consequently, the reading of great books in ou r colleges has a complex history of its own that does no t duplicate any o the r history one could narrate. Like their teachers, s tudents---and especially the s tudents who be- come wri ters-- integrate their reading experiences with the same variability that Montaigne found to characterize their o ther experiences. Which is no t to say that teachers do no t provide some early principles and practices for inte- gration. We do, and they are of ten the ones we have learned f rom our own teachers. But this is always only par t o f any particular reader ' s history o f read- ing or of the history of reading m o r e generally. Th ink once again o f one of the best known personal histories o f reading, Augustine 's Confessions, a work frequently on the "great books" list. The story of Augustine 's j o u r n e y to God is f rom beg inn ing to end a reader 's journey. Like one .marking the stages of the Cross, August ine reconstructs no t only what he read bu t in what order. Not Quintilian's Livy before Sallust bu t rather, as recalled in the Confessions, Plato before Paul. And Augustine feels certain that this order, like everything else orderly, reflected God's purpose. The divine maker of Augustine's "great books" list, in o ther words, fully apprecia ted the pedagogical advantage o f context and of the gradual familiarizing of the unfamiliar th rough carefully control led encounters .

Without necessarily taking God as their model , most teachers exploi t the advantages of context. Indeed, many opponen t s of the great books approach discredit these courses precisely because they lack context , in this case the historical context that situates the works u n d e r discussion in their own time and place. This criticism is sound; for given the grand sweep of the "great books" course, i t cannot su r round the Iliad or the Symposium with anything

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like the fuller context possible in a more specialized course devoted to ar- chaic literature and society or ancient Greek philosophy. On the other hand, it can introduce students not only to reading in context, but, as I will elabo- rate momentarily, to reading in a context completely appropriate to their own situations in an American educational institution. First, it is worth remember- ing that Quintilian calls his educational program the Institutio Oratoria. As the Latin term for "education"--institutio--sets in high relief, learning, and read- ing as the activity that so often enables learning, routinely take place in an institutional setting. Both Columbia's "great books" course, as I claimed ear- lier, and Quintilian's list of "great books" in the Institutio belong to the same extended history of education as institution.

Which is emphatically not to say that Columbia first-years study the history of education. Hardly. What they do study is a carefully constructed reading list which carries in its design not only the critical evaluations of literature profes- sors as far back as Aristarchus but also the artistic imprimatur through imita- tion of centuries of writers. As a consequence, each work on the list is read in the context of the works preceding i t - -no t an historical context of the kind opponents prefer, but nevertheless a context responsive to a history of institu- tional reading from its Hellenistic origins to its later flowering in American undergraduate education.

Which is also not to say that Columbia's "great books" course resembles Aristarchus' in every detail. Indeed, as we have already seen, it is fully in the tradition of these courses to change. And like Quintilian's list in relation to that of Aristarchus, Columbia's own Literature Humanities syllabus has changed considerably over time. Some number of books on the list today were there in 1937, including the Iliad, the Oresteia, Oedipus the King, the Symposium, the Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, Montaigne's Essays, Don Quixote, and the first part of Goethe's Faust. Indeed, until 1952, Columbia's "great books" course ended with Faust. Many other books have come on over the years; and still others have come and gone. Beginning in the early 1950s, the Literature Humanities staff (agree- ing with Quintilian over Aristarchus) also decided on the addition of more contemporary works. Now, as a result, we spend almost the entire last mon th on nineteenth and twentieth-century authors.

Another notable change, this one occurr ing in th.e early 1940s, was the inclusion of texts from both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. The founders of the course, it appears, assumed that religious texts be longed rather to the nonacademic traditions that might inform the students' reading but did not belong in a literary curriculum. Before long, the assumption of familiarity lost ground to the pressing need for a biblical context for the works of the second semester. The reading of scripture, in o ther words, is so funda- mental to the history of reading after the fourth century and informed so much of what was written that such works as the Confessions, the Inferno, and Faust were thought to be nearly incomprehensible outside of a fuller history

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of reading that included reading scripture. Since the 1940s, then, students of this particular "great books" course have read scripture together. In the mean- time the assumption that scriptural texts do not belong in literary curricula has itself lost ground.

Two further changes are worth mentioning. One that has occurred gradu- ally since the 1970s is the migration of philosophical texts from the Literature Humanities syllabus to that of its older sister, Contemporary Civilization. A student in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s would have expected to read Lucretius, Descartes, and Spinoza alongside Sophocles, Virgil, and Cervantes. Gradually and like Quintilian with only one eye on their authors and the o ther on their students, instructors teaching the course and thereby responsible for its sylla- bus, saw the wisdom of Virgil before Aristotle. Whereas Columbia's Literature Humanities course began by introducing students to both story and a rgument as literary modes of expression, over time it narrowed its focus to narrative and dramatic literature and left Contemporary Civilization to initiate more advanced students into what many since Plato have thought to be the more difficult task of reading argument.

The most recent change, however, a change of the 1990s, has come in the wake of the same "great books" debates that have motivated essays like this one. Unsettled by controversy regarding canonicity and unable to reach agree- ment about a text to follow To the Lighthouse, the teaching staff decided to leave the last work of the year open to the instructor's cho ice - -a decision that has since prompted even more discretionary moments in a collective reading list. In my own view, this retreat from the collective nature of the enterprise, moderate though it is, grows out of a mistaken identification of issues of can- onicity with those of commonali ty or community. For while in practice and even to some extent in principle these issues are related, they are by no means identical.

From the start, as I noted earlier, educational canons, in contrast to reli- gious canons, have been both flexible and, in the hands of concerned teach- ers, responsive to changes in students' needs. For this reason, as we saw with Quintilian, reading "great books" is not the same thing as reading the greatest books. Indeed there are some great and maybe even some of the greatest books that would be out of place in such a curriculum, ei ther because they are too long-- th ink of War and Peace or too allusive--think of Finnegans Wake or maybe even because they don ' t resonate with what comes before or after.

The canonical status of what gets read, however, stands apart from the com- monality of an educational enterprise like Columbia's "great books" course, where 1,000 students and over fifty instructors are reading the same book at the same time. While feeling the pressure of the canon debates, this aspect of many "great books" courses answers to a somewhat different pedagogical con- viction that some of my readers may share: the conviction that learning as part of a community carries benefits uncircumscribed by any particular curricu-

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lum. On the basis of this conviction, Quinti l ian makes what must be one of the earliest a rguments for public over private schooling (1.2.1-29).

While no t identical, the issues o f educat ional canonicity and educat ional communi ty or commonal i ty are related. To conclude, I would like to reflect briefly on this relation. These days, Amer ican undergradua te insti tutions edu- cate an unp r e ceden t ed diversity of s tudents - - s tudents so diverse that perhaps the most meaningful commonal i ty a m o n g them is that they are all s tudents at an American undergradua te institution. This is not, however, a trivial com- m o n denomina tor ; for by becoming students they participate in a long and complex history, no small part of which is g r o u n d e d in reading, and no small part of that, as I have tried to outl ine, in reading "great books." Inevitably, this kind of reading has shaped and will con t inue to shape bo th readers and the educat ional settings in which they are read. What shape ei ther will take, as I confessed earlier, is in my view unpred ic t ab le - -unpred ic t ab le bu t no t neces- sarily incomprehensib le . Indeed, only by in t roduc ing students to courses with longstanding traditions that reach back into the history of r e a d i n g - - a history that coincides with the personal history of no one s tudent or g roup of StUo den t s - -can we prepare them to th ink critically about their own format ion as readers both in their educat ional inst i tut ion and out o f it.

Part of unders tand ing what they read (it bears repeating) is unde r s t and ing how readers before them have read. For how the young August ine read Virgil is no t incidental to how we or our s tudents read ei ther August ine or Virgil. Another par t of unders tand ing how they read is appreciat ing how different their reading of Virgil may be no t only f rom Augustine 's bu t f rom o the r stu- dents in their class, f rom students in o the r classes, and even f rom their own previous reading of Virgil in high school or elsewhere. Needless to say, "great books" courses cannot and should no t peddle this unders tanding . They can only engage students in a process m e a n t to outlast the insti tutional sett ing that fosters i t - -an engagemen t that reaches forwards as well as backwards. For "great books" courses, as I see them, are as m u c h about reading and wrifing's future as about their past. And a celebrated "great books" writer, who also h a p p e n e d to be a "great books" reader, tells us why. "Folks don ' t realize," Goethe recalls in his Conversations with Eckermann (22 January 1830), "how m u c h time and effort it takes to learn to read. I've been at it for eighty years, and I still can ' t say that I've comple te ly got the hang of it." ("Die gu ten Leutchen, fuhr er fort, wissen nicht, was es Einem fuer Zeit und Muehe gekostet, um lesen zu lernen. Ich habe achtzigJahre dazu gebraucht , u n d kann noch j e t z t nicht sagen, dass ich am Ziele waere.")