Literature

“I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare, or James or Twain or Hawthorne, or Melville, and so on,” Toni Morrison wrote in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” an essay on literary canons and African American literary tradition. “There must be some way to enhance canon readings without enshrining them.” 

According to Literature Humanities Chair Joanna Stalnaker, this remains a key purpose of the Core Curriculum. In her introductory letter to this year’s first-year class, Stalnaker explained the stakes: “To remain vital, Lit Hum must be open to change, contestation and debate, in the spirit of Morrison’s critique and of literature itself. Lit Hum must also meet the most urgent challenges of today’s world.”  

"To remain vital, Lit Hum must be open to change, contestation and debate."

This is, of course, an aim as old as the Core itself. What Stalnaker called “the most urgent challenges of today’s world” was characterized as “the insistent problems of the present” in the original Contemporary Civilization syllabus in 1919. As the Core enters the first year of its second century, it demonstrates its continued flexibility: all incoming College students have begun reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) over the summer, to shape conversation about the insistent problem of violence against Black Americans.

“We are framing Lit Hum around a summer reading assignment that engages directly with [these] issues,” Stalnaker explained in her letter. “This work takes the millennia-old lyric tradition (exemplified by the Archaic Greek poet Sappho on the Lit Hum syllabus) in a fundamentally new direction by inventing a collective lyric ‘you’ to address, on a scale both intimate and historical, myriad forms of anti-Black violence. It is a vital work for our time, and a vital work for Lit Hum, as it explores through the medium of lyric poetry questions of citizenship and community in a polarized world.” 

As we conclude the year-long celebration of the Core’s Centennial, we look to the future with a renewed appreciation for the vitality and relevance of the works on Core syllabi, and a similar determination to continue exploring the ever-evolving Core.