Now in its second year at the University of Utah, Great Books in the Humanities introduces first-year students to foundational literary and philosophical works from across world civilizations, alongside recent scholarship that deepens our understanding of enduring questions. At an evening reception at the Fort Douglas Commander’s House on October 16, campus and community members gathered to hear from this year’s Great Books faculty about their books and their approaches to teaching them to students.

According to Scott Black, Director of the Tanner Humanities Center and Professor of English, the Great Books course presents “a survey of works that have defined our world, our culture, and society, which give an overview of the broad range of work we do in the College.” In this spirit, the Commander’s House evening event offered the wider community “a tasting-menu of a world-class education in the humanities” offered in the College. Beginning in 2024, Black serves as the course coordinator for Great Books in the Humanities. 

Seven faculty members from different departments in the College of Humanities teach Great Books. Each faculty member leads the plenary lecture portion of the class for their chosen book, while all faculty lead their own discussion sections for all of the readings. Hollis Robbins, Dean of the College of Humanities, began plans to introduce the course in August 2022, and it has since become a popular course for students across the University. Collaboration across College departments has been crucial for the success of Great Books. According to Robbins, “Great Books was designed as an opportunity for new students to learn from seasoned faculty, and for our seasoned faculty to learn from each other.” 

Margaret Toscano, Associate Professor, World Languages and Cultures:
Sophocles, Antigone, c. 441 BCE. 

Antigone is a sequel to Oedipus the King, in which the titular tragic hero unknowingly kills his father, marries his mother, and upon learning the truth of his actions, exiles himself from Thebes. After one of Oedipus’s sons, Polyneices, is killed in an ensuing civil war, his sister, Antigone, seeks to give him a proper burial. However, in an effort to consolidate his power and restore political order, the new king, Creon, forbids this. Antigone defies Creon’s law in a demonstration of family loyalty and religious piety, which undermines Creon’s authority in ways which he only comprehends too late—after Antigone has been executed, and his own son and wife have both killed themselves in despair.  

From Aristotle’s foundational work of literary theory, the Poetics (335 BCE), Toscano situated Sophocles' play as myth, rather than history. Whereas history tells us what happened, myth tells us what might have happened, illustrating ancient Greek civilization’s belief in both fate and the power of human choice. Central to Aristotle’s theorization of tragedy is the importance of knowledge, choice, and recognition in a tragic hero’s fate: Creon is warned of the folly of his decree but insists upon it, nevertheless, only to suffer the anguish of failure and regret. For nearly 2,500 years, Sophocles’ play has compelled us—through the ill-fated clash of Antigone’s devotion and Creon’s authority—to reflect on the contradictions of loyalty and political order. 

Richard Preiss, Associate Professor of English: 
William Shakespeare, Richard III, c. 1592.

Richard III is the culmination of Shakespeare’s series of plays about the dynastic civil conflicts now known as the Wars of the Roses. One of Shakespeare’s longest and most complex tragedies, it shows the accumulation of generations’ political crimes and ambitions into a single figure:  Richard III is scheming and ruthless, feigning reluctance to rule and religious piety. However, he is also burdened by the knowledge of his own precarity and others’ resentment of him. In his self-destruction, Richard III shows how all-consuming ambition can reveal one’s profound contingency and vulnerability. 

Preiss highlighted the themes of deception, delay, and indirection in Richard III’s ambition through close readings of select passages. In particular, genealogy and heredity appear to undermine rather than strengthen the legitimacy of his rule. His dilemma is both exceptional and universal, and like Antigone, Richard III shows the timeless dialectic of fate and choice in the tradition of Western tragedy. 

Hollis Robbins, Dean of the College of Humanities and Professor of English:
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, 1901. 

The writer Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) was mixed-race and could pass for White, but chose to live as Black. His work explicitly takes up questions of racial identity and belonging in late 19th- and early 20th-century America. His novel, The Marrow of Tradition, is often read in this direct context, as a response to 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs Ferguson, which established the “separate but equal” doctrine of racial segregation and related legal and social structures known as Jim Crow. The novel also alludes to the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, in which white leaders incited mob violence against a prosperous black community and a supportive local government, resulting in a political coup. 

At issue in Plessy was the question of what counts as freedom of association in a shared space. The case was triggered by Louisiana’s racial segregation of train cars. In connection with this pivotal case, Robbins drew attention to a passage in Chesnutt’s novel, where two men meet and greet each other in a train. They are of different races, but their actions and dialogue give the reader no further clues as to their identity. Instead, racial anxiety is shown to have no firm grounding in human qualities as such. With subtle narrative strategies of plotting and dialogue, according to Robbins, Chesnutt’s novel goes beyond simply taking a position on segregation, and instead shows its inherent instability. 

(Robbins was lecturing in place of Stuart Culver, who is teaching Chesnutt’s novel in Great Books in the Humanities.) 

Scott Black, Director of the Tanner Humanities Center and Professor of English:
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925. 

Mrs. Dalloway tells the story of a single day in the life of its titular character, as she prepares for a party she’s hosting that evening. From within this deceptively simple plot, Woolf’s narration depicts the vicissitudes of thought, memory, allusion, and sensation which make up what is known as stream of consciousness. While the events of the day bring people together in the novel’s plot, they also bring people’s streams of consciousness together for the reader. 

But importantly, characters do not share this intimate access to each other’s minds, just as the complete thoughts of real people remain unknown to us in the real world. Woolf reveals how much we remain unknown to each other, moment to moment and throughout our lives. By depicting the deep unknowability of other people’s minds, according to Black, Woolf’s novels are “empathy machines,” compelling us to pay careful attention to what is said and unsaid—be it memory, opinion, desire, or trauma. In Black’s view, Mrs. Dalloway invites us to cultivate an empathetic “awareness that beyond what’s said is something that can’t be fully articulated. In that mystery is our privacy and our dignity.” 

Erin Beeghly, Associate Professor of Philosophy:
Jennifer Morton, Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility, 2019. 

Beeghly presents Morton’s book as an example of a recent development in the discipline of philosophy, often called the “social turn.” Traditionally, philosophical concepts have been developed and debated in terms of abstract thought experiments, such as 17th-century philosopher Rene Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am,” which is the result of a radical refusal to trust sensory perceptions. Another example is the famous “trolley problem” of philosophers Phillipa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson in the late 1960s, in which major ethical decisions are analogized to the ability to divert a runaway trolley to hit just one person, instead of five. 

Instead, Morton’s book considers real, grounded ethical problems that are not reducible to thought experiments or singular decisions, but instead occur over many smaller dilemmas and longer-term situations.Moving Up without Losing Your Way explores the ethical challenges of first-generation and low-income college students, who face inevitable conflicts between academic striving and connections to their families and communities. Beeghly shared the book’s profound resonance with students in the course from a variety of backgrounds, as they considered their own daily lives in light of the applied philosophical framework of Morton’s book. 

Aniko Csirmaz, Associate Professor of Linguistics:
Raymond Hickey, Life and Language Beyond Earth, 2023. 

If an alien species had a human-like faculty of language, what would it be like? Hickey’s book illustrates how this question, seemingly speculative and open-ended, entails more precise reflection if pursued seriously. Speculation, it turns out, requires revisiting basic assumptions and facts taken for granted. For example, what distinguishes human language from other species’ communication? What defines a being as living or non-living? If language could operate through other senses—say, olfaction—what does this tell us about the supposed uniqueness of human language? What about senses other than those which humans now possess? 

In teaching Hickey’s book, Csirmaz invites students into this intellectual dynamic of open speculation and analytical precision. She demonstrates how discipline of linguistics synthesizes humanistic questions about what it means to be human with forms of critical thinking and reasoning which pertain to all academic inquiry. 

Avery Holton, Professor and Chair of Communication:
Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, 2022. 

In both the Great Books class and in the event at the Commander’s House, Holton uses an experiment to demonstrate the relevance of his chosen book. People are invited to swap their phones with a neighbor—first without unlocking them, and then again after they are unlocked; finally, people are invited to whisper their password to their neighbor. Both the differing results between each task, and the generational differences in people’s responses to each task, tell us something about important changes in people’s senses of privacy and security over the last generation—and over the last four years. 

Holton situated Fisher’s book in the context of the life experiences of current first- and second-year students at the University of Utah. Like students everywhere, they experienced the COVID pandemic during formative years in high school, most of them immersed in an entirely screen-based social and educational ecosystem. Out of the pandemic, lockdown, misinformation, and discordant policies, the current generation of undergraduate students have profoundly different expectations and priorities around issues of privacy, trust, and personal authenticity. The Chaos Machine provides an analytical framework for understanding how social media, both before and during COVID, has contributed to these changes. In teaching Fisher’s book, Holton has uncovered a major generational shift towards valuing authenticity in the face of eroded expectations of privacy. 

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In Spring 2025, Great Books in the Sciences will enter its second year, featuring works like Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.