The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [30]
In this connection, it’s of some interest to note that the Chicago Great Books course, devised by university president Robert Hutchins and philosopher Mortimer Adler, was initially aimed at businessmen, and was intended to fill in gaps left in their education. This was not, that is to say, initially a freshman “core” course but a program intended to allow “successful business and professional men” to remedy the omission of literary reading in their earlier years of study by meeting “in a relatively painless fashion in congenial surroundings.” The year was 1943.
The concept met with immediate approval, and within a month the Great Books seminar, nicknamed by participants the “Fat Man’s Great Books Course,” began to meet once a month at the University Club.1 It was one of these businessmen, William Benton, the CEO of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (and later a U.S. senator from Connecticut), who had the idea of marketing a set of Great Books in conjunction with the encyclopedia. It was only when the Great Books of the Western World were sold like encyclopedias—by door-to-door salesmen explicitly recommending them as an instant educational upgrade for middle-class American households—that the set turned the corner from steep deficit to (modest) profit. To save money, the editors had chosen inferior translations in the public domain. Some nineteenth-century translations of the Greek classics were imbued with ejaculations and false archaism—“Ay me!” “Why weepest thou!”—at the same time these plays by Sophocles and Euripides were being translated by a brilliant new generation of scholars and published as The Complete Greek Tragedies by the University of Chicago Press.2
For decades the Great Books movement—which Dwight Macdonald, in a scathing review of the Adler-Hutchins venture, called “the fetish for Great Writers”3—had been tied to a notion of general education that promoted these texts as essential building blocks for college freshmen and sophomores. Today, however, many freshmen and sophomores rush straight ahead to professional training, skipping literature altogether, or taking only one or two literature courses over the four years of their undergraduate education. Some later come to regret the lost opportunity to learn about the humanities and the arts. As a result, the interest in brushing up the classics that animated executives in the 1940s and 1950s is again alive and well: an idea that began as a pick-me-up for businessmen has found a new audience among modern-day professionals. Very often readers who read these authors with pleasure in high school will return to an interest in literary culture only after establishing themselves in positions of professional—and financial—security through college and post-college training. Book clubs, leadership institutes, post-performance audience talk-backs in regional theaters, cruise-ship lectures, and alumni colleges are among the ways adult readers now encounter the literary classics. Business schools teach the plays of Shakespeare to exemplify good (and bad) business practices, management skills, and group motivation, and programs in medical humanities likewise use Shakespeare to illustrate key themes about life, death, and humanity. It is in extension courses and lifelong learning, though, that