Reading Big Books

June 18, 2008

One unacknowledged result of the current centrality of colleges and universities in intellectual pursuits is the disappearance of the big book. Every society creates niches within which creative works are consumed. These niches range from the rigors of court life to the leisure of the country house. Creative works do not fill a random number of pages, but arrive in the world at a size related to their imagined social niches.

Higher education should not be viewed as somehow a force set apart from the market.. but as a social niche that actively shapes the way works are consumed. It does this through the establishment of narrow time limits within which works must be read. Each term here at Lawrence University lasts ten weeks.. and so myself and others cast about for books that will fit in well with this time frame. Each class must stand alone, so there is no possibility in working through a text over multiple terms. A class should cover four or five main texts, and those texts should be readable in about two weeks. Every instructor knows there are great books that are just too long or too involved to work as a textbook.

This is an issue not only in undergraduate settings, but graduate ones as well. The graduate seminar pushes for books that can be read in the course of a week (oftentimes "read" should be in quotation marks). I recall getting through the first section of Grammatology in a week.. and works by creative writers were often chosen to fit snugly within a week's worth of reading. I seem to remember Walter Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian getting switched out for a shorter novel in one class. This is no complaint, but it is a fact that many books which deserve time and attention get lost or mentally abridged because of the pressure related to the semester/term schedule.

I see a danger in this system. In the pursuit of knowledge it cannot be healthy if the system itself dictates the manner of approaching a subject. Our goal is to see through the eyes of a another culture and another era.. and yet here we are stuck asking which books will read well in the course of a term. Necessity wars against the deeper goal. This is particularly true of the study of the Middle East, I might add. There are a whole host of books that are too long to fit comfortably into our term system.. and so they get ignored. This applies both to classic works of Arabic literature and major Orientalist studies.

This year (as Emily will attest) I have been mulling over how to introduce big books to students. That is, the pleasure of carefully reading a demanding work that was written for a very different audience. These are the works that I personally most love to settle into. My current work on a translation of sections from al-Maqrizi's crazy-long historical work is one example of this.. but I have the notion that I could begin something of a big book reading group. The goal would be to every year choose a work that will engage us for the entire year.

I have two nominations:

1) Shahnameh, the medieval Persian book of kings, relating a history of Persia that reaches deep into the pre-Islamic past. Ferdowsi's book comes in at 900 pages, so it is not a work that can fit easily into a class.. but at the same time it is a work that should be read.

2) Prolegomena to the History of Israel by Julius Wellhausen. This is a example of the kind of ground-breaking older scholarship that few people actually read. It sets out the multi-source theory of the composition of the Torah. Granted, this is a book whose conclusions are dated and may make some uncomfortable assumptions about race.. but that is part of the point: to historicize the traditions of academic scholarship and to look closely at how convincing these arguments are (as opposed to the vague second and third hand repetitions of these ideas).