What is modernism?

When we hear the word, we may see the strange paintings of Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Vasily Kandinsky, or hear Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. We may automatically point to the writers Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.

But, aside from working with art forms that attempt to capture a perspective of the world, what do these people have in common?

How is Dali’s Surrealism similar to Picasso’s Cubism or Kandinsky’s purely abstract art?

How is Gershwin’s blending of Jazz and classical music similar to Stravinsky’s use of bitonality and non-traditional, inharmonic tensions that never get resolved?

How is a line like this, “Robert Cohn was once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton” similar to this “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”? We go from simple, clear prose to something trending towards convoluted.

Again. How is a line like this, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself in bed transformed into an giant insect” similar to one like this, “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.” In two lines we move from the substantive dirt—the filthy, insect-filled world—to the celestial heavens.

Yet, each of these cacophonous artists produced work generally lumped under the gigantic and general umbrella of modernism.

We like order and control and some way to grasp onto something that is a complex, big, and baggy monster. We impose dates or phrases like “interwar” period, making it neat, when it was not experienced as a neat movement. None of the artists woke up one day and said: “I’m a modernist!”

The term is useful when speaking in broad strokes, but it flattens the movement’s complex development.

SO, what do these artists have in common other than being artists who lived and produced during a specific time period? Because if that is the definition of modernism, technically C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien should be considered modernists and, yet, they’re not.

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You’ve reached our year-long study of the history of the novel, genre-by-genre, called the Architecture of the Novel. In this series, you’ll learn about the rules of each genre, how it developed over time, and receive foundational reading lists. Today, we are covering historical fiction.

First, a note on history and fiction

How do we know what is real versus what is not? How do we know what actually happened versus what has been passed down to us through tradition? How do we trust historical sources or books that claim to tell us history as it happened, when by nature of writing the author must choose a line of narrative to focus upon and leave out the intricacies or details of other corresponding narratives? How do we separate stylistic flair from fact? Patriotism or self-aggrandization? How much of history is fiction? What makes fiction historical?

This blending of two dichotomous genres—history and fiction—brings up many of these questions. They were questions that historian Thucydides asked between 431-400 BC when he was composing his history, The Peloponnesian War. At the beginning, he aims to distinguish his work from histories of those who preceded him:

Such, then, I found to be the nature of early events, although with difficulty in trusting every piece of evidence. For men accept one another’s accounts of the past, even about their native countries, with a uniform lack of examination . . . So devoid of effort is most people’s search for truth, and they would rather turn to what is readily available

. . . not believing that the past was more like what the poets have sung, embellishing with their exaggerations, or the prose chroniclers have composed more for attractive listening than truthfulness, in version that cannot be checked and for the most part have forfeited credibility over time by winning victories as patriotic fiction, but regarding my discoveries from the clearest possible evidence as adequate for what concern antiquity . . .

Thucydides is setting out to write a truly historical account, not based on myth or on a lack of examination prompted by ease, comfort, and uncritical thought. “The actions of war,” he relates, are not learned “from chance informant nor according to [his] own opinion” but based upon “examining what [he] witnessed and what [he] learned from others, with the utmost accuracy in each case” (13). He has done his research meticulously. This is where the facts lie.

However, he also admits moments of invention in relation to the historical speeches in which “recalling exact words” would be difficult:

Insofar as these facts involve what the various participants said both before and during the actual conflict, recalling the exact words was difficult for me regarding speeches I heard myself and for my informants about speeches made elsewhere; in the way I thought each would have said what was especially required in the given situation, I have stated accordingly, with the closest possible fidelity on my part of the overall sense of what was actually said.

He composes them based upon “the way I thought each would have said” (emphasis my own) and what would be “required in the given situation.” The speeches he records did indeed occur by the speakers, but the speeches are not exact transcriptions and, therefore, left to the critical and creative pen of Thucydides.

So, is The Peloponnesian War history or fiction, if parts of it are made up?

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A few years ago, my husband had to read a very complicated book for work. The author was coming to his workplace, and he was responsible for preparing interview questions. A week or so before the interview, he sat dejected and overwhelmed on the couch. He’d never read a work like this before. He was used to books that carried him through story — thrille…

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You’ve reached our year-long study of the history of the novel, genre-by-genre, called the Architecture of the Novel. In this series, you’ll learn about the structure of each genre, how it developed over time, and receive foundational reading lists for each. Today, we continue our three-part series on the epic tradition and the novel.

So far, we've covered the birth of the modern novel from the epic tradition:

Today, we will see the novel’s attempt to return to the epic tradition it abandoned. . .

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Welcome to our year-long exploration of the history of the novel, genre by genre: The Architecture of the Novel. In this series, you’ll discover how each genre emerged, the conventions that define it, and the key works that shaped its development. Today, we continue our study of the novel’s origins, examining the influential texts and narrative techniques that helped establish what we recognize today.

Last time, we discussed the development of the novel from its epic, Homeric origins up to what is widely considered the first modern European novel, Don Quixote. To navigate this historical timeline, we used the narratological concept of the chronotope, or “time-space”—how various authors chose or chose not to delimit the space and time their protagonists inhabit.

We go from alien and abstract chronotopes, where a protagonist could be anywhere at any time, and, over a few centuries, find ourselves reading Cervantes, who places his titular character in provincial Spain in the 16th century.

But why does it matter that we’re in 16th-century, provincial Spain for Don Quixote?

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Now, whether you believe God has abandoned the world or not, what Lukács is getting at is a deep fragmentation seated at the core of the novel that doesn’t exist in the epic. To understand that deep fragmentation, we first need to understand what the epic is and, only then, can we understand how the novel wrestles with this idea of a world “abandoned by God.” But, there is a historical road we must traverse to get from the epic to the novel, which is ultimately what the next Architecture of the Novel posts are about: (1) the birth of the modern novel from the epic tradition and (2) the return of the epic in the novel.

As you know, for this year-long series, I do two posts a month for each genre: the first for history and form, and, the second, its development. However, the epic and the novel are tightly woven together and have two distinct lineages. So, this pre-novel literary history will be our introduction post that will be followed by a post on the early European novel (at the end of May) and, then, the epic novel (at the end of June). In this post, what I hope to get at is, what the heck is a novel and how is it different from what came before it?

Let’s get started.

What constitutes an epic?

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You’ve reached our year-long study of the history of the novel, genre-by-genre, called the Architecture of the Novel. In this series, you’ll learn about the rules of each genre, how it developed over time, and receive foundational reading lists for each. Today, we close off our study of detective fiction.

In our last article, we learned about the unchanging form of the detective novel—that it is a story in search of a story. The entire progress of the detective story is to reconstruct the events of a crime that takes place before the narrative begins. Upon the accurate reconstruction of that crime, the story comes to a close. Although this form doesn’t change over time, time has produced many iterations of the crime and criminal, the detective and his partner (or lack thereof).

So, as Julie Andrews would say, let’s start at the very beginning; it’s a very good place to start . . .

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If you’re joining us on our pursuit of close reading, WELCOME! You’ve reached the paid subscriber book club and our journey through Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts.

In our journey with Virginia Woolf, we have learned a few things. First, we’ve had a general overview of Modernism by comparing two visual art masterpieces and translated those observations to the literary productions of the period.

Our next lesson was on the importance of a Modernist opening and the framework it sets up for the rest of the novel, specifically Between the Acts.

We then discussed the role of the artist (a VERY important concept in Modernism—think A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Orlando or To the Lighthouse, etc.) by a close reading of Miss La Trobe, our pageant director.

Today, we are discussing Modernism’s rejection of convention as the only means to see clearly.

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You’ve reached our year-long study of the history of the novel, genre-by-genre: The Architecture of the Novel. In this series, you’ll learn about the rules of each genre, how it developed over time, and receive foundational reading lists for each. Today, we begin our exploration of one of the most beloved and popular genres of all, the detective novel.

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You’ve reached the fourth post in our Architecture of the Novel series and the final post on the BILDUNGSROMAN, a cornerstone of the novel. This post builds upon a prior one:

In the following article, I will walk you through the two forms of the bildungsroman and how those forms change depending on the culture in which they are written. We are going on a tour of Britain, France, Germany, and America. If you’re joining us, WELCOME! If you’ve been here since the beginning, thanks for returning!

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If you’re joining us on our pursuit of close reading, WELCOME! You’ve reached the paid subscriber book club and our journey through Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts.

In our journey with Virginia Woolf, we have learned a few things. First, we’ve had a general overview of Modernism by comparing two visual art masterpieces and translated those observations to the literary productions of the period.

Our next lesson was on the importance of a Modernist opening and the framework it sets up for the rest of the novel, specifically Between the Acts.

Today, I’ll be providing another close reading that deals with the concept of the artist and the outsider, along with a list of questions for our sections.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Great Books and the decline of the English major. If we want to strengthen the humanities—especially literary studies—we need a clearer, shared understanding of what an English major is, what it does, and why it matters. That begins with establishing a common core: a strong, recognizable spine of study that can support and make room for works beyond it.

But, this list IS NOT nor should be for those in the “ivory tower” or students at Columbia and Harvard or other graduate or undergraduate studies around the world. This is a list we all need. A foundation we can all build and build upon.

So, I’ve done some research.

I’ve gone back through courses I’ve taken and perused syllabi from other universities in order to compile a starter Great Books list.

Along with this list, I’ve included five thematic questions that can be asked of every book. The same five questions applied to every book. As you read one and move onto the next, you can see how the author and time period answers that question with all its nuance or lack thereof. Over time, you will slowly start to see how elements of literary history developed, how authors riff off of one another, and how, paradoxically, a society and worldview can be so distant and yet so familiar.

This list is by no means comprehensive (I’m only focusing on Western civilization), but it is a great place to begin.

The List

The Iliad, Homer

Set during the Trojan War, this epic centers on Achilles and the destructive consequences of rage, pride, and honor. The poem examines the heroic ideals of ancient Greece, the tragic costs of war, and the fall of a nation. It is an essential text, consistently alluded to throughout the Greek works and riffed upon by Virgil in the Aeneid, Augustine in his Confessions, and, even, Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse.

Amazon: I highly recommend Emily Wilson’s translation | Bookshop: The Iliad

The Odyssey, Homer

This picks up after the events of The Iliad. Troy has fallen and one of the greatest heroes in the Trojan War must get home. After the 10 years of fighting, Odysseus gathers his men and sets sail for Ithaca. But, the journey will take him 10 years and this “man of many ways,” famed for his cunning, must face monsters, vengeful gods and goddesses, sensual temptations, and the underworld, before he can be reunited with his wife and son.

Amazon: I recommend Emily Wilson’s translation | Bookshop: The Odyssey

The Oresteia, Aeschylus

Though no longer in the world of the epic form, we certainly still have epic characters in this Greek tragic trilogy (say that five times fast). In fact, like The Odyssey, which details the events of Odysseus’ journey home, The Oresteia follows another hero of Greece upon his arrival home: Agamemnon of the House Atreus. But, Agamemnon is in big trouble. Though a famed warrior, in order to get to Troy a decade prior, he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia and, big shocker, his wife is not too happy about it. Upon his arrival, she murders him and this vengeance begets more vengeance as her son aims to then avenge his father by killing his mother. This trilogy of Greek tragedies is an origin story of the legal system in Greece where vengeance turns to justice.

Amazon: The Oresteia | Bookshop: The Oresteia

The Histories, Herodotus

Called the “father of history,” Herodotus recounts the causes and events of the Greco-Persian Wars while also exploring the customs and cultures of the people in the surrounding territories of Greece and Persia. His work blends storytelling, anthropology, investigation, political reflection, and, as such, attempts to understand history not through epic myth nor through tragic plays, but through observation and inquiry. His influence can be seen much later in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Balzac’s Comedie Humaine.

Amazon: The Histories | Bookshop: The Histories

The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides

Along the lines of Herodotus, Thucydides details the war between Sparta and Athens and the beginning decline of Greece (specifically Athens) as a dominant world power. His scope is much smaller than Herodotus and a bit more refined. As a former Athenian general during the wars and exiled due to failure, he had a privileged perspective by which to tell this history. During his exile, he traveled extensively to gather information from both sides. He is able to detail specific numbers of troops and ships, as well as recreate the soaring rhetorical speeches during the pivotal moments of the war or siege.

Amazon: The Peloponnesian War | Bookshop: The Peloponnesian War

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The Aeneid, Virgil

Here we return to the epic. As The Iliad and The Odyssey detail the strength and might of Greece and its warriors, so too does Virgil’s Aeneid with Rome. This is Rome’s origin story. But, all things lead back to Homer. A survivor of the Trojan War, a son of Troy, Aeneas escapes the carnage and brings a small band of Trojans to Italy to create a New Troy. The poem emphasizes the virtues of the Roman civilization: piety, duty, loyalty, and imperialism.

Amazon: The Aeneid | Bookshop: The Aeneid

The Bible: Genesis & John

As we shift to Rome and what will become a Judeo-Christian framework instead of a Greek mythological framework, it’s important to have key understandings of the Judeo-Christian worldview.

• Genesis details the creation of the world, God’s once perfect relationship with man, and then the fall of man and the origin of sin, as well as the promises of the Messiah.

• The Gospel of John presents the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the answer to the problem of sin created in Genesis. It details Christ’s teachings and, as one of the four Gospels, it is essential to shaping Christianity and, therefore, much of the literature of the Western world.

Confessions, Augustine

This spiritual autobiography recounts Augustine’s journey from a restless and ambitious youth to salvation through Christ. Drawing on themes and imagery from the Bible, it also echoes Aeneas’s journey—particularly his departure from Carthage and his renunciation of personal desire for a higher purpose. The result is a beautiful work of introspection and one of the earliest examples of autobiography.

Amazon: The Confessions of St. Augustine | Bookshop: The Confessions

The Inferno, Dante Alighieri

With Virgil as his literal guide, Dante journeys through the nine circles of Hell meeting classical and Christian figures (who are from in the works I’ve listed above). It is a fantastically creative, haunting, and beautiful journey of self-discovery and hard-earned wisdom and (like many other works listed) is one of the most influential texts for the Modernists.

Amazon: The Inferno | Bookshop: The Inferno

Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

Considered one of the first novels, this episodic story follows an an aging man too influenced by the chivalric romances he reads. One day, our protagonist decides to live as a knight-errant searching the world for quests: to save a princess, to fight a fantastical creature, to earn glory and honor. The problem is, he lives in an extremely unromantic world, and instead of seeing it for what it is, imbues his surroundings with his imagination. The term quixotic comes from this character.

Amazon: Don Quixote | Bookshop: Don Quixote

Hamlet, Shakespeare

This tragedy tells the story of a Danish prince seeking revenge for his father’s murder. Within it, Hamlet must reckon with a ghost, the woman he loves, his friends, and his own family as he navigates between contemplation and action and wrestles with how to discern the truth. This is one of the heartbeats Western literature.

Amazon: Hamlet | Bookshop: Hamlet

Pride and Prejudice, Austen

This novel tells the story of Elizabeth Bennet, as she navigates society, marriage, and comes to terms with her own independence in early nineteenth-century England. It also happens to be considered one of the greatest love stories of all time.

Amazon: Pride and Prejudice | Bookshop: Pride and Prejudice

To read how this fits into the bildungsroman genre, check out this Architecture of the Novel post.

Crime & Punishment, Dostoevsky

Considered one of the earliest crime novels, Dostoevsky chooses to study not a detective but the psychology of the criminal. Raskolnikov, in the first 50 pages, commits a murder believing himself intellectually superior to ordinary morality. Logically the crime makes sense, but his conscience fights back as guilt and paranoia begin to overwhelm him (especially as an inspector and his friends seem to sniff him out). This novel does a fantastic job of portraying a mind in disarray and is considered an proto-Modernist novel.

Amazon: Crime and Punishment | Bookshop: Crime and Punishment

Middlemarch, George Eliot

Set in a provincial English town and guided by a narrator with the insight of both historian and scientist, this novel follows Dorothea Brooke, a young woman driven by a desire to do great good. Yet her idealism is often misplaced, leading her toward choices that limit rather than fulfill her ambitions. Alongside her story runs that of Dr. Tertius Lydgate, who arrives from Paris hoping to practice medicine free from the corruption of larger cities, only to find himself entangled in the same social and moral complexities. As idealism collides with reality, the town emerges as a web in which one person’s decisions ripple through many lives.

Amazon: Middlemarch | Bookshop: Middlemarch

To the Lighthouse, Woolf

Woolf knew her classics and—as is her modus operandi—she loves placing them in a new light. This novel takes the epic and brings it down to regular, quotidian life, as it portrays the inner lives and relational nuances of the Ramsay family while they and their guests visit their seaside home. Broken into three parts, the novel is set before and after World War I. Woolf uses shifting perspectives and contemplates the role of art, memory, time, and the search for meaning while borrowing and alluding often to the great works before her.

Amazon: To the Lighthouse | Bookshop: To the Lighthouse

The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot

In this truncated Great Books list, we have moved from epic to tragedy, history to autobiography, and from play to novel. It is only fitting, then, to end with another masterpiece—one that concludes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Those fragments are the pieces of great literature reshaped and made new, a way of enduring in a modern world that often feels fragmented, arbitrary, and without meaning.

Amazon: The Waste Land | Bookshop: The Waste Land

Poetry Foundation: The Waste Land

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The Five Questions To Ask of Each Book

The list covers the following genres—epic, tragedy, autobiography, spiritual odyssey, poetry, the novel, sacred text, and history. It visits Greece, Italy, Russia, Britain, and America. Its scope is wide, so it’s important to have some moorings. Here are some guiding questions:

1. How does this work approach the tension of WORDS and DEEDS?

2. How does this work approach or define the INDIVIDUAL and the COLLECTIVE?

3. What does this work suggest it means to live a GOOD LIFE?

4. How does this work present TRUTH or KNOWLEDGE and how is it discovered?

5. How does this text view the WORLD?

Each of these questions can be asked of every text (though I suggest choosing 1-2 questions to begin with). If you begin reading the work with this in mind and then progress through the list of works, you will start to see how different authors, nations, and eras answer, reframe, reorder, and emphasize different principles. And, what makes this even more interesting and fun is if you ask this question as well:

6. How does this text borrow or repurpose the last text?

And, if you are able to answer that question, you’ll see a long chain of influence from the ancient Greeks to the Modernists.

Also, join me and on Substack Live (March 24th at 12 pm PST), as we discuss the Great Books and their impact on our lives.

*please not that I am an Amazon Affiliate which means that any purchase made using one of the Amazon links will earn me a small 4.5% commission from Amazon’s coffers rather than yours.

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1. Do an extremely close reading of the opening five paragraphs

2. Give you a step-by-step guide to support close reading on your own

3. Give you an extensive list of the novel’s many themes, tensions, and motifs.

4. Provide you with focus questions for the next 7 scenes of the novel, to set you on your way

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Course 370A.1: Great Books?

Today, discussions about “The Great Books” or “The Classics” in higher education are often fraught with political and emotional undercurrents. In fact, when one of my graduate professors ran a two-semester Great Books course, he chose not to title it simply “Great Books” or “The Great Works of Literature.” Instead, to keep students from potentially boycotting the class, the course was called “Great Books?”

It’s amazing how much power punctuation has. The simple addition of the question mark meant the course was not just about “The Great Books,” but about whether they should be considered great in the first place

In the early 20th century, when English departments and the English major were in their infancy, this would have been unthinkable. Question the canon? No way. There was an inherent belief that books—literature, philosophy, history, drama, etc.—had longevity for a reason. It was posited that certain texts were read, and should continue to be read, because they not only (1) revealed and resonated with the human condition, but also because they (2) provided links to the past and the history of Western culture.

There was an understanding that the ancient great works were read by the authors of other great works, who then inspired future great works: an uninterrupted chain of human thought, riffing off previous human thought to prompt more of the same. Morrison doesn’t exist without Woolf, who doesn’t exist without Dostoyevsky, who doesn’t exist without Augustine, who doesn’t exist without the Bible or Homer. Dante doesn’t exist apart from Virgil, who doesn’t exist apart from Homer. Austen doesn’t exist without Richardson, who doesn’t exist without Montaigne. George Eliot doesn’t exist without Herodotus.

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T.S. Eliot, in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” describes this process well. Tradition is the quotidian life we are surrounded by, but to understand it (or to write about it), the artist must have a historical sense that involves

“a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the history sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence.”

Tradition and the Individual Talent PDF

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The writer (or the English major) must be “acutely conscious of his place in time” (emphasis mine). Where we stand now and where we have come from. No artist, Eliot says, can be valued “alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, amongst the dead.”

Not only were these “great” authors inspired by other “great” authors, but these “great” works were read by the movers and shakers of history and its various spheres: economics, politics, domestic life, etc. Napoleon was a reader of the great works. Wordsworth, who helped change the conception of poetry, was a reader of the great works. Winston Churchill was a reader of the great works. If we want to understand their policies or some of their choices (whether we like them or not), we can examine what they read and how they responded to that reading. George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, wrote, “we are imitative beings. We cannot, at least those who ever read to any purpose at all . . . help being modified by the ideas that pass through our minds.”

And if we are shaped by what we read, doesn’t it follow that our cultural leaders—and, therefore, our culture—is shaped by reading, too? Our expectations are altered, our worldview, our value judgments. In fiction, we see what the world either could or should be. Reading inspires. It convicts. It can create a community of like-minded people who then try to effectuate their worldview onto the world: Christians and the Bible, Communists and Das Kapital, Modernists and Freud, etc. Don’t we want to understand the worldviews competing for space in our heads?

To get rid of the great books is not only to get rid of our cultural history, but also our conversations across time. The great works are time capsules of the cultures in which they were produced, distinctly familiar and yet apart.

That is, until the Canon Wars of the 1980s and 90s.

These wars challenged the unspoken understanding that the great works should be the spine upholding cultural history and communicating the human condition.

The literary scholars of the 1980s and 90s, who were teaching at the universities, began to ask: who gets to decide what is considered great? Who gets to decide which writers are valued and upheld? Who is relegated to a dusty shelf? Why are all these great books written by (what now feels like an extremely clichéd phrase) “dead, white men”? Isn’t our culture oppressive, and don’t the great works encourage that? The questions go on.

I’m not discounting these questions. They bring up interesting and often unsavory elements of our history. We should think critically about why we read what we do and how we evaluate it. We should explore great works that have been relegated to dusty shelves only because of their authors’ race or gender. However, instead of having a critical conversation that allowed for more texts to be incorporated, we threw the baby out with bath water. Sayonara, canon.

I return to T.S. Eliot’s essay. Discussing the role of criticism, he says that we must “be aware also that [artists] must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them” (1351, emphasis my own). The Canon Wars amputated the great works and made it a dirty word. The canon, that cultural spine of history that was the raison d’être of the English department and English major, was shattered, and a body cannot stand, cannot move without a spine.

In this light, Nathan Heller’s infamous New Yorker article The End of the English Major fascinates me because the main argument he gives is an economic one: English majors can’t make money. Unfortunately, this is trite. He addresses a symptom rather than the problem.

The death of the English major, at face value, is a branding crisis. A “brand purpose” is a company’s fundamental reason to exist beyond financial gain. But, to determine that purpose, there must be a shared language and value agreement amongst all the brand’s stakeholders. By tossing out the canon and its inherent value, we tossed out our common language and means of communicating within a (1) singular English department, (2) across national and international English departments, and (3) to all those outside of academia. To study literature in one university should look similar to studying it in another. It should be instantly recognizable.

If the English major doesn’t even know what it is or what it offers, how can anyone else? The Canon Wars became the Tower of Babel. An originally united modus operandi now dispersed, diluted, and weakened. If there is no agreed-upon curriculum, no backbone to hold up and connect students of literature across the United States, internationally, and across time, then what are we even talking about? Of course the English major is dying; the English department killed it.

And, ironically, though literary studies have been bludgeoned by enemies within, the very thing to save it could be an enemy without: artificial intelligence. Substack is a fantastic example of this. Most of us here desire to move away from mind-numbing technology and pursue long-form essays, sustained thought, and train our brains to think critically as a means of fighting the seductive ease of AI. It seems like more than ever in recent history, people are turning back to the great books, rejecting the lies that a culture of ease and comfort has told us: that these books are bad because they are too hard, too intimidating, too complex, too male, and too white. If the end of the English major is indeed upon us, the resurgence of autodidactic literary culture is on the rise outside the walls of the ivory tower. And, thank God.

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So, why read the great books?

Not because they are beyond criticism or written by infallible people. Not because the canon is sacred or closed.

We need people to continue having those conversations with the past. Though T. S. Eliot was talking about the critic and the artist, I think his sentiments can apply to all readers—fledgling and adept, graduates of English programs or autodidacts. In reading these great works, we have one foot in the past, one foot in the present, and our eyes towards the future because we are aware of and appreciate the long chain, even amidst its flaws. This century’s most talented authors—Colson Whitehead, Maggie O’Farrell, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, etc.— are doing that. How can they produce our culture’s great works apart from the historical chain of great works, reframing the old to create the new, and leaving it for future readers once we are gone?

We read the great works because they are a record of a long argument about what it means to be human amidst a changing historical landscape. We read them because the chain of influence shapes every novel, political speech, movie, television show, and cultural debate we participate in, whether we realize it or not. We read them because, without them, we are historical amnesiacs, mistaking our ideas for originality when really they are inherited. We read them because they remind us we are not the first to suffer, to love, to revolt, to doubt, to believe, to build, to destroy. We read them because it allows us to read ourselves, read our communities, read our culture writ large. We read them because it gives us a common language. We read them to learn how to think by looking at how others thought; to evaluate our own thinking in light of them. Great books allow us to dialogue with the past. In that way, it’s the closest thing we get to time travel.

The solution to the Canon Wars wasn’t amputation but expansion, a living canon that can be argued over, revised, but still anchored in the recognition that some works speak across time, history, and culture with unusual force.

Now, the question should not be whether these works are great, but rather, do we want to be?

So, you want to read the Great Books or understand the canon more? Substack offers so many opportunities.

• I’ll be chatting on Substack Live with on March 10th at 1 pm PST about slow reads and our favorite novels and on March 24th at 12 pm PST with about the Great Books and how they changed our lives.

• Join me as I take you through THE HISTORY OF THE NOVEL, one genre at a time throughout 2026. Paid subscribers get an in-depth history of the genre-of-the-month alongside a reading list and, at the end of the month, how each novel on the list helped develop the genre as a whole.

• Join The Middling Place Book Club as we go through Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.

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