I also want to plug University of Chicago’s Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults and 80 year old 4 year program for study of tgecGreatcBoojs, with
Oops. Fingers went wild there. A four year program for study of the Great Books, with a number of two-year follow-up series delving even deeper and wider. Offered both in person and remotely. It’s a wonderful community of lifelong learners and instructors.
I find it impossible to believe that someone could, with an open and critical mind, read and develop an understanding of these classics and still be a MAGA conservative. I therefore think conservatives’ fetishization of the classics is purely performative.
I think most MAGA types don't even pretend to love the classics. But there are more traditional conservatives, like Mark Bauerlein at the New College Florida, who I think genuinely love the classics and are under the delusion that Trump is a bulwark (er... no pun intended?) against the forces of wokeness and that they can use the Trumpist right to help restore a classics-oriented curriculum. "Delusion" is all I can say.
The problem I saw with Great Works courses that I took was just how eurocentric they were. So long as we're willing to grow our conception of what the canon is – and not defer non-European stuff to other departments and studies – I'm on board.
It's a complicated question. I think knowledge of non-Western works is important, but the Western heritage is (1) the cultural environment in which we live and (2) in a very real sense, the universal lifeblood of the modern world via the ideals of liberalism and human rights. The Bhagavad-Gita is a great work, but its philosophy in which everyone must follow his predestined path in life is more alien to us than even medieval Western works.
Join a seminar about the great books here. I am currently reading Ulysses in a facilitated seminar and have read the Iliad and the Odyssey, a book a week. Reading and discussing with a group is a terrific way to encounter the classics.
Thanks for these suggestions: I agree that a schedule and a group is motivating. I've taken continuing education online classes through Stanford University - don't need to be affiliated & I bet other Unis are doing this- (wanted to reread Middlemarch for 50 years - and this got me to do it!) (and a WONDERFUL class in the Emily Wilson translation of the Iliad - taught by the brilliant Dr. Wilson herself - through the Academy of American Poets - check out their classes if interested)
thanks for the information about classes through the Academy of American Poets. I've taken Stanford classes as well (doing Hamlet starting in July). Wilson has a new book of essays out, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea. Haven't read it yet, but looking forward to doing so
OOOOh I want to take that class (I want to read Hamnet - have not read it) and the class sounds very interesting. But told myself two classes is too much ($$ & time) taking the Jane Austen one (because I've taken 3 other classes from that professor and like her - started with Middlemarch). She lectures - then you head to small discussion groups - then everyone comes back for discussion. Have a good time. Noticed new Wilson book - people in the last class (300 plus attendees & more probably for recordings) were putting in requests for an Odyssey class from her.
Thank you for linking back to your Byron piece - really a terrific bit of scholarly reportage, of a much more complex and arduous life than I had understood.
There were very few books in my childhood home, but my father took me to get my first library card when I was six. He turned me loose in the library and said I could read whatever I wanted. He didn't even tell me to go to the children's section, so I didn't. I remember randomly reading the titles of everything in the adult section that was at a six-year old's eye level. I can remember pulling one book off the shelf no particular reason. I can still recall how the paper (smooth coated) felt, what the typeface looked like, and how the book (printed circa 1910) smelled. It was a book about daily life in ancient Rome. I had only the vaguest idea who Romans were, but I wanted to find out. That book led to reading more books on ancient history, art history, politics and so much more.
I pulled Jane Eyre off a shelf on another visit when I was a little older. I had never heard of it, and didn't know it was a classic. But I fell right into to the mind of Jane. There was a lot that I didn't understand about her world, but that made it even better -I had travelled into a mysterious place that excited my imagination even if it also mystified me.
I have re-read that book almost every year since then ( and I am now 79 years old). It's different every time, because I am different. My opinions about the characters have changed many times in many readings, but that's what makes some books worth re-reading again and again. Middlemarch, most of Dickens, much of W.B. Yeats, John Stuart Mill's essays, The Twelve Caesars (still relevant) ....to name a few. These books have been my friends and companions and are always there when I need them.
The great thing about "great" books is that as long as we are free to read them and think for ourselves, we are also free to decide how great they feel to us (or not) and why we feel that way.
Your own great books may not be the same as mine, and may not be by anyone famous at all. But they are yours.
Karl Marx should not have admired Balzac. Great literature really is for everybody, if what counts under the rubric might shift a bit over time. The "greats" often thrust their warts in our faces too but that doesn't mean we shouldn't read them, and profit from the reading. It's a shame that a book like this needed to be written.
My 2026 Reading goal was to revisit the classics. I feel like I should disclose my weird eclectic background: took four years of Latin in high school culminating in reading the Aeneid, majored in French Literature in college (with more practically oriented Spanish coursework), and then went to medical school. I feel like after high school I had given up on the English language novels and some of the "greats" in translation because I was so heavily in to my Romance language coursework.
I can't imagine what my career, and general brain would be like without the book-heavy humanities major. This year I've read Far From the Madding Crowd, Middlemarch, and I'm working on the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey right now. I'm caught off guard by how relevant the classics seem. (Middlemarch in particular I feel like really impacted me, and I wish I had read it before dating anyone or choosing a career, though perhaps it would have gone over my head if I had read it sooner!) The more I read the classics, I'm as confused that modern "conservatives" feel that they have any kind of ownership of them as I am that the "liberals" would reject them.
As I said, I really need to reread Middlemarch! I recently finally read EW's Odyssey translations, which I have somewhat conflicted feelings about. (Going to read the one by Daniel Mendelssohn next.)
It was very interesting to hear her talk about her translation choices (and I feel inadequate to capture it - and full of hubris to say anything at all about it) - frequently the reasoning behind changes were what she felt that they would have meant to the Greeks. I don't feel like she was cavalier. Her major choice to set it in iambic pentameter was because she felt the rhythmic nature of the original was important - but was natural for Greek the way iambic pentameter was/is for English. Listening to her read in Greek was amazing as well.
Thank you for this piece. The best critique I read of the Wilson translation isn’t that it is too modern but that her translation misses the essence of experience of what it means to be a soldier in war. Thus it is oddly less modern because it misses the enduring nature of the war experience. (I think this captures the critique. I wish I could find a link.)
Forwarding this to my gf. She was a professor in the English dept (actually the chair for several years) until she got so burned out on the woke wars that she almost quit. The classics department found out she was leaving and found a way to bring her in. She loves it there.
This took me back to grad school days, when I was routinely confronted with the sexism -- and sometimes outright misogynism -- of authors in the Canon of my field of study. ("Canon" was always capitalized.) I struggled at first to not throw my hands up and stop reading. But I eventually realized that (a) the authors were a product of their time; and (b) still had important stuff to say about societal questions and problems. I mean, there was a reason these writings were considered canonical! So I put an exclamation point in the margins next to the sexist parts, and kept plowing along, engaging with the ideas. I'm glad I did. This book sounds like a good read and an interesting perspective. Thanks!
The "great books" tradition begins with the Iliad, and that poem is aptly described as a Trojan Horse for the reactionaries of Hillsdale College and the like. Thus:
-- Achilles in the name of justice, a human good, prevails over Agamemnon, Zeus's anointed, and therewith divine will;
-- Achilles rejects the "heroic code" as irrational;
-- Hector dies in guilt and regret for rejecting a military strategy first urged by Andromache (a mom);
-- Zeus (whose authority rests on physical power) owes his throne to the mysterious power of the physically powerless Thetis (a mom);
-- Zeus respects Athena and expresses biting contempt for Ares;
-- Achilles responds ultimately to Priam's likeness to Peleus (Achilles' father), not to promises of wealth or posthumous glory.
-- Etc.
Homer founds a philosophic tradition in a set of issues for reflection and inquiry. MAGA implicitly rejects that tradition.
The 130 books list is more balanced. Historically, such lists tend to exclude non European non male authors . Thus they reflect the experience of a fraction of humanity. That is their main limitation however they reflect aspects that are universal.
The fact that these old books are still around and will continue to be read for centuries going forward is the proof of their value. They are vastly entertaining for the most part, and increase one's understanding of people and everything they are involved in. Every presidential candidate should be required to submit their tax returns and a list of the books they have actually read. Thanks for this review.
I was a faculty member (or 'tutor', as faculty call themselves) at St. Johns College in Annapolis - the Great Books School. Yet, my background (Aerospace Engineering and Oceanography) actually helped me appreciate what I was reading. I (like my students) could sense the profundity. Coming upon something in Aristotle you see to be profound, though written in (shall we say) rather arcane prose, is a moving experience. Not so much at that instant as later. A few moments. A decade.
You don't wake up one morning and say, "Gee! I'm grown up now!" You look back, a decade later, and muse "That was when I was really beginning to grow up."
I don’t understand the conservative resistance to expanding the canon. Why can’t Tale of Genji be considered a Great Book for Great Book courses, for example? Is there no timeless wisdom or beauty outside the minds of White Men? Of course there is. People who object to teaching great books object to this idea—not the value of great books or Greco-Roman wisdom.
FYI, there are several non-Western books on the Fadiman/Major list Kanaka includes as the appendix to this book, including Genji, Sei-Shonagon's "The Pillow Book" (which I love), the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Rubayat of Omar Hayam, and others. I don't think there's any serious objection to teaching those (or to teaching women like Jane Austen or the Brontës).
What's a bad idea is to add a token woman or minority to a syllabus for the sake of inclusion. This happened to me once in my college years (1980s) when I took a class at Rutgers on 18th C French literature. The syllabus included a novel by a woman named Marie Riccoboni that ... wasn't terrible exactly, but very mediocre compared to the other books we read (Voltaire's Candide, Prevost's Manon Lescaut, Laclos's Liaisons Dangereuses, Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro). It stuck out like a sore thumb quality-wise, and several students (in all-female class btw) said it was boring. Good example of how NOT to do inclusion. Likewise, a couple of years ago I saw a post by a professor of Russian literature who was concerned that he was somehow contributing to the oppression of women by having only male author in his class on 19th Century Russian poetry. His solution was to include a female poet who is just way, way out of the league of the other poets in the same course (and to suggest that she had been unjustly neglected because of sexism). It's funny too because if you move on to 20th Century Russian poetry, women more than hold their own -- in fact there's a general consensus that two of the four greatest 20th C Russian poets are women. So, basically: "DEI" has to be done right!
Oh, you reminded me of the obligatory "Women and...." Day on the syllabus that so many of my professors inserted. And then when we raised questions before or after "Women and...." Day, we were (a) told to hold our thoughts for The Big Day or (b) reminded that women had already been discussed on "Women and..." Day. 🤬
Now that I'm more familiar with 18th C French lit (I've done a very deep dive into it as research for my own novel set in France between 1783 and 1795), I actually think you could do a fascinating course on women in 18th C French lit, maybe both as characters and as authors! But yeah, "add a token woman and stir" is the worst possible approach.
Your article really peaked my interest in Kanakia’s book. Thank you.
I also want to plug University of Chicago’s Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults and 80 year old 4 year program for study of tgecGreatcBoojs, with
Oops. Fingers went wild there. A four year program for study of the Great Books, with a number of two-year follow-up series delving even deeper and wider. Offered both in person and remotely. It’s a wonderful community of lifelong learners and instructors.
Thanks!
I find it impossible to believe that someone could, with an open and critical mind, read and develop an understanding of these classics and still be a MAGA conservative. I therefore think conservatives’ fetishization of the classics is purely performative.
I think most MAGA types don't even pretend to love the classics. But there are more traditional conservatives, like Mark Bauerlein at the New College Florida, who I think genuinely love the classics and are under the delusion that Trump is a bulwark (er... no pun intended?) against the forces of wokeness and that they can use the Trumpist right to help restore a classics-oriented curriculum. "Delusion" is all I can say.
The problem I saw with Great Works courses that I took was just how eurocentric they were. So long as we're willing to grow our conception of what the canon is – and not defer non-European stuff to other departments and studies – I'm on board.
It's a complicated question. I think knowledge of non-Western works is important, but the Western heritage is (1) the cultural environment in which we live and (2) in a very real sense, the universal lifeblood of the modern world via the ideals of liberalism and human rights. The Bhagavad-Gita is a great work, but its philosophy in which everyone must follow his predestined path in life is more alien to us than even medieval Western works.
Join a seminar about the great books here. I am currently reading Ulysses in a facilitated seminar and have read the Iliad and the Odyssey, a book a week. Reading and discussing with a group is a terrific way to encounter the classics.
https://www.symposiuminstitute.org/
Seminars also through Classical Pursuits, including a week long summer program
http://www.classicalpursuits.com/
Thanks for these suggestions: I agree that a schedule and a group is motivating. I've taken continuing education online classes through Stanford University - don't need to be affiliated & I bet other Unis are doing this- (wanted to reread Middlemarch for 50 years - and this got me to do it!) (and a WONDERFUL class in the Emily Wilson translation of the Iliad - taught by the brilliant Dr. Wilson herself - through the Academy of American Poets - check out their classes if interested)
thanks for the information about classes through the Academy of American Poets. I've taken Stanford classes as well (doing Hamlet starting in July). Wilson has a new book of essays out, Crossing the Wine Dark Sea. Haven't read it yet, but looking forward to doing so
OOOOh I want to take that class (I want to read Hamnet - have not read it) and the class sounds very interesting. But told myself two classes is too much ($$ & time) taking the Jane Austen one (because I've taken 3 other classes from that professor and like her - started with Middlemarch). She lectures - then you head to small discussion groups - then everyone comes back for discussion. Have a good time. Noticed new Wilson book - people in the last class (300 plus attendees & more probably for recordings) were putting in requests for an Odyssey class from her.
Thanks!
Thank you for linking back to your Byron piece - really a terrific bit of scholarly reportage, of a much more complex and arduous life than I had understood.
Glad you enjoyed it! Very proud of that piece.
There were very few books in my childhood home, but my father took me to get my first library card when I was six. He turned me loose in the library and said I could read whatever I wanted. He didn't even tell me to go to the children's section, so I didn't. I remember randomly reading the titles of everything in the adult section that was at a six-year old's eye level. I can remember pulling one book off the shelf no particular reason. I can still recall how the paper (smooth coated) felt, what the typeface looked like, and how the book (printed circa 1910) smelled. It was a book about daily life in ancient Rome. I had only the vaguest idea who Romans were, but I wanted to find out. That book led to reading more books on ancient history, art history, politics and so much more.
I pulled Jane Eyre off a shelf on another visit when I was a little older. I had never heard of it, and didn't know it was a classic. But I fell right into to the mind of Jane. There was a lot that I didn't understand about her world, but that made it even better -I had travelled into a mysterious place that excited my imagination even if it also mystified me.
I have re-read that book almost every year since then ( and I am now 79 years old). It's different every time, because I am different. My opinions about the characters have changed many times in many readings, but that's what makes some books worth re-reading again and again. Middlemarch, most of Dickens, much of W.B. Yeats, John Stuart Mill's essays, The Twelve Caesars (still relevant) ....to name a few. These books have been my friends and companions and are always there when I need them.
The great thing about "great" books is that as long as we are free to read them and think for ourselves, we are also free to decide how great they feel to us (or not) and why we feel that way.
Your own great books may not be the same as mine, and may not be by anyone famous at all. But they are yours.
Readers, read on!
JE is a great way to start.
Karl Marx should not have admired Balzac. Great literature really is for everybody, if what counts under the rubric might shift a bit over time. The "greats" often thrust their warts in our faces too but that doesn't mean we shouldn't read them, and profit from the reading. It's a shame that a book like this needed to be written.
My 2026 Reading goal was to revisit the classics. I feel like I should disclose my weird eclectic background: took four years of Latin in high school culminating in reading the Aeneid, majored in French Literature in college (with more practically oriented Spanish coursework), and then went to medical school. I feel like after high school I had given up on the English language novels and some of the "greats" in translation because I was so heavily in to my Romance language coursework.
I can't imagine what my career, and general brain would be like without the book-heavy humanities major. This year I've read Far From the Madding Crowd, Middlemarch, and I'm working on the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey right now. I'm caught off guard by how relevant the classics seem. (Middlemarch in particular I feel like really impacted me, and I wish I had read it before dating anyone or choosing a career, though perhaps it would have gone over my head if I had read it sooner!) The more I read the classics, I'm as confused that modern "conservatives" feel that they have any kind of ownership of them as I am that the "liberals" would reject them.
As I said, I really need to reread Middlemarch! I recently finally read EW's Odyssey translations, which I have somewhat conflicted feelings about. (Going to read the one by Daniel Mendelssohn next.)
I have read them both. I too am conflicted about Wilson's, enjoyed Mendelsohn's. Have read Fitzgerald's.
Looking forward to getting into Middlemarch, but not yet.
Do you have a favorite Odyssey translation?
Fagles. But I am definitely going to read Mendelssohn.
I understand people who find the Wilson translation more accessible and dynamic but I personally think it modernizes a little too much.
It was very interesting to hear her talk about her translation choices (and I feel inadequate to capture it - and full of hubris to say anything at all about it) - frequently the reasoning behind changes were what she felt that they would have meant to the Greeks. I don't feel like she was cavalier. Her major choice to set it in iambic pentameter was because she felt the rhythmic nature of the original was important - but was natural for Greek the way iambic pentameter was/is for English. Listening to her read in Greek was amazing as well.
Thank you for this piece. The best critique I read of the Wilson translation isn’t that it is too modern but that her translation misses the essence of experience of what it means to be a soldier in war. Thus it is oddly less modern because it misses the enduring nature of the war experience. (I think this captures the critique. I wish I could find a link.)
Forwarding this to my gf. She was a professor in the English dept (actually the chair for several years) until she got so burned out on the woke wars that she almost quit. The classics department found out she was leaving and found a way to bring her in. She loves it there.
I am so glad you wrote this. Thanks. A good ending!
This took me back to grad school days, when I was routinely confronted with the sexism -- and sometimes outright misogynism -- of authors in the Canon of my field of study. ("Canon" was always capitalized.) I struggled at first to not throw my hands up and stop reading. But I eventually realized that (a) the authors were a product of their time; and (b) still had important stuff to say about societal questions and problems. I mean, there was a reason these writings were considered canonical! So I put an exclamation point in the margins next to the sexist parts, and kept plowing along, engaging with the ideas. I'm glad I did. This book sounds like a good read and an interesting perspective. Thanks!
Just out of curiosity, what's your field of study?
There's actually a lot of proto-feminism as well as sexism in the classics -- you just need to know where to look!
I'd recommend Thomas Hardy to start -- my favorite Victorian proto-feminist.
The "great books" tradition begins with the Iliad, and that poem is aptly described as a Trojan Horse for the reactionaries of Hillsdale College and the like. Thus:
-- Achilles in the name of justice, a human good, prevails over Agamemnon, Zeus's anointed, and therewith divine will;
-- Achilles rejects the "heroic code" as irrational;
-- Hector dies in guilt and regret for rejecting a military strategy first urged by Andromache (a mom);
-- Zeus (whose authority rests on physical power) owes his throne to the mysterious power of the physically powerless Thetis (a mom);
-- Zeus respects Athena and expresses biting contempt for Ares;
-- Achilles responds ultimately to Priam's likeness to Peleus (Achilles' father), not to promises of wealth or posthumous glory.
-- Etc.
Homer founds a philosophic tradition in a set of issues for reflection and inquiry. MAGA implicitly rejects that tradition.
And Zeus sure could be petty and vengeful. 😊
"A Trojan Horse," eh? I see what you did there ;)
But fascinating points -- I completely forgot about Hector rejecting Andromache's proposed strategy.
The 130 books list is more balanced. Historically, such lists tend to exclude non European non male authors . Thus they reflect the experience of a fraction of humanity. That is their main limitation however they reflect aspects that are universal.
The fact that these old books are still around and will continue to be read for centuries going forward is the proof of their value. They are vastly entertaining for the most part, and increase one's understanding of people and everything they are involved in. Every presidential candidate should be required to submit their tax returns and a list of the books they have actually read. Thanks for this review.
I was a faculty member (or 'tutor', as faculty call themselves) at St. Johns College in Annapolis - the Great Books School. Yet, my background (Aerospace Engineering and Oceanography) actually helped me appreciate what I was reading. I (like my students) could sense the profundity. Coming upon something in Aristotle you see to be profound, though written in (shall we say) rather arcane prose, is a moving experience. Not so much at that instant as later. A few moments. A decade.
You don't wake up one morning and say, "Gee! I'm grown up now!" You look back, a decade later, and muse "That was when I was really beginning to grow up."
The Great Books are like that.
I don’t understand the conservative resistance to expanding the canon. Why can’t Tale of Genji be considered a Great Book for Great Book courses, for example? Is there no timeless wisdom or beauty outside the minds of White Men? Of course there is. People who object to teaching great books object to this idea—not the value of great books or Greco-Roman wisdom.
FYI, there are several non-Western books on the Fadiman/Major list Kanaka includes as the appendix to this book, including Genji, Sei-Shonagon's "The Pillow Book" (which I love), the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Rubayat of Omar Hayam, and others. I don't think there's any serious objection to teaching those (or to teaching women like Jane Austen or the Brontës).
What's a bad idea is to add a token woman or minority to a syllabus for the sake of inclusion. This happened to me once in my college years (1980s) when I took a class at Rutgers on 18th C French literature. The syllabus included a novel by a woman named Marie Riccoboni that ... wasn't terrible exactly, but very mediocre compared to the other books we read (Voltaire's Candide, Prevost's Manon Lescaut, Laclos's Liaisons Dangereuses, Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro). It stuck out like a sore thumb quality-wise, and several students (in all-female class btw) said it was boring. Good example of how NOT to do inclusion. Likewise, a couple of years ago I saw a post by a professor of Russian literature who was concerned that he was somehow contributing to the oppression of women by having only male author in his class on 19th Century Russian poetry. His solution was to include a female poet who is just way, way out of the league of the other poets in the same course (and to suggest that she had been unjustly neglected because of sexism). It's funny too because if you move on to 20th Century Russian poetry, women more than hold their own -- in fact there's a general consensus that two of the four greatest 20th C Russian poets are women. So, basically: "DEI" has to be done right!
Oh, you reminded me of the obligatory "Women and...." Day on the syllabus that so many of my professors inserted. And then when we raised questions before or after "Women and...." Day, we were (a) told to hold our thoughts for The Big Day or (b) reminded that women had already been discussed on "Women and..." Day. 🤬
Now that I'm more familiar with 18th C French lit (I've done a very deep dive into it as research for my own novel set in France between 1783 and 1795), I actually think you could do a fascinating course on women in 18th C French lit, maybe both as characters and as authors! But yeah, "add a token woman and stir" is the worst possible approach.
They read it at St. John's, fwiw. At least in the Eastern Classics Masters Program.