Great Books and “the Basic Questions of Human Existence”

Six professors walk into a lecture hall…no, no, this isn’t the beginning of a joke! It’s the beginning of the Fall 2024 semester, and 130+ students are gathered for the first Great Books class of the year. Hollis Robbins, dean of the College of Humanities, opens the first class with an actual joke: “Welcome, students, to Great Books! First of all, studies show that when you have a Great Books class on your transcript, you’re more likely to get a good, high-paying job straight out of college.” Uncertain chuckles ripple through the high-ceilinged room. Although her tone is lighthearted, there is a seriousness to her message. There’s a good reason that deep humanistic inquiry has been a mainstay of higher education for hundreds of years; the modern students entering this course are picking up the strands of this tradition whether they’re aware of it or not.

Great Books is an innovative course offering freshman students the chance to dive directly into canonical works and to grapple with perennial human issues. Six professors and four advanced graduate student teaching assistants teach six carefully curated books over the sixteen weeks of the semester. Says Margaret Toscano, associate professor of World Languages & Cultures, “these books are examples of texts that help us deal with the basic questions of human existence.”

Drawing on foundational texts as well as contemporary analyses of our most pressing social issues, top faculty from five different Humanities departments guide students through deep consideration, shared inquiry and active dialogue around some of humankind’s most challenging perennial questions. How do we navigate moral dilemmas asking us to choose between our conscience and religious beliefs, and obedience to the rule of law? What is legitimate authority and what is legitimate resistance? How do we know what we know, what are the limits of our knowledge, and how does new knowledge develop? How do we cope with family conflict about generational expectations and upward mobility? What is love, and what do different kinds of love, for families and friends, require of us? How does the way we frame our scholarly questions affect our answers and the social impact of our work? And for that matter, what constitutes a “great book?” In essence, Great Books is a crash course in the key problems and resources of cultural value and human understanding – all rolled into one tour-de-force romp through nearly 3,000-years of intellectual history.

Richard Preiss, associate professor English, notes, “Richard III is the kind of Great Book your parents sent you to college to read, a core text of western civilization that politicians expect colleges to teach, the kind of Great Book everyone in adult life will expect you to know. Yet we’ll discover that most of those people don’t really know it at all: as we’ll read it, and close-read it, and delve deeper into it, we’ll find that in addition to being a morality tale of ambition, power, and corruption, it’s also a play about desire, difference, and identity and ghosts, and strawberries, and about the nature of sex, and the nature of death, and the nature of children, and the nature of time, and the nature of monarchy, and theater, and history, and how totally messed up these concepts are when you really think about them.”

Avery Holton, associate professor of Communication, emphasizes that from our engagement with Great Books, we can come to better understand the crucial role of human agency in the face of chaotic systems like the technological ones we’re all immersed in today. “We’re going to ask what it means to all of us to be part of that system. We don’t have to accept everything that’s put in front of us on platforms, and we can, in fact, hold those platforms to account. We don’t have to accept the misinformation, the scamming and hacking that we might encounter. We can choose what to search for and how to interact in those spaces while also pushing the platforms themselves to look inward and make changes.”

The course is structured between a lecture-hall format on Tuesdays and an intimate discussion-based small group format on Thursdays, giving students a taste of multiple learning modalities. Gathered in a pale blue classroom with light from an adjacent atrium filtering through a frosted window, students in one such discussion class reflect on linguistic principles from Life and Language Beyond Earth. The class questions the assumptions and prerequisites that would need to exist for alien languages to develop and extends the line of questioning to consider human languages. A lively discussion about language as both bridge and barrier ensues: the insufficiency of words to capture strong emotions, the way that emojis function as work-arounds to carry emotional nuance in combination with texts, and the innate desire to play with words.

From the students’ perspective, a semester-long course with such dense literary material might seem daunting. But Lexi Nicholas, a first-year Pre-Business student, is enthusiastic. “Personally, I love the discussion part of this class. It usually relates to what we talked about in the lecture, but it is designed to make you think differently and more in depth about both the reading and the lecture. With the lectures, discussions, and help from the professors, the challenging texts in this class become easy to understand and much more engaging than they would be otherwise. I would absolutely recommend Great Books to anyone who not only likes to read great books, but also likes to dig deeper into the texts and engage in captivating discussions with their peers about the material.”

This fall, the course materials include Antigone by Sophocles, Richard III by William Shakespeare, The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chestnutt, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility by Jennifer M. Morton, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, by Max Fisher, and  Life and Language Beyond Earth by Raymond Hickey.

As a complement to the semester-long course for students, the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center is offering a one-night Evening with Great Books event for the public to engage with these stellar faculty and texts. “I wish I could take this class myself,” says Scott Black, Director of the Tanner Humanities Center, “and so for both selfish and civic reasons, the Tanner is hosting a public event featuring a kind of taster-menu of the books through lightning talks by the professors. This is one of the ways we’re bringing the expertise, excellence, and excitement of the Humanities to our community. Why should students have all the fun with such a great course?”

2024 is the College of Humanities’ second year offering this incredible undergraduate course, and based on the enthusiastic response from students, it will be in the catalogue for many years to come.