English department seeking input from faculty on 10 books every student should read

A scholar torn between including Homer’s “Iliad” or “Odyssey” on a mandatory reading list concluded the “Odyssey” was a better choice since the “Iliad” was just a bunch of people running around killing each another.

The same scholar, further contemplating that list and similarly undecided about the relative merits of the including the Old Testament or the New Testament — simply wrote, “The New Testament. See above under Homer.”

Ken Dauber, a professor in the Department of English, shared the story as part of a conversation about the list of great books he’s assembling with the help of other faculty members across the university for a course to be offered in the fall semester.

Dauber’s effort is reprisal of a similar venture he led 15 years ago.

He’s asking faculty members across the university to email him a list of 10 books they feel every college student should read. The selections receiving the most mentions will form the basis of the class, “Top 10,” a collaborative effort led by Dauber with other faculty members introducing the texts specific to their discipline.

“The last time I taught this class it was tremendous fun,” Dauber says. “And students were taking the class who just wanted to ‘know.’ For them, it was purely educational, or maybe the chance to discover what education actually means.”

If current enrollment is any indication, Dauber’s assessment of student enthusiasm is spot on. The course already has reached nearly half of its 45-seat limit — and no one yet knows what they’ll be reading.

For the list, he is loosely defining “book,” since the selections could include short stories, essays or historical documents.

“If someone thinks it’s an important and determinative text, then it will be considered,” he says. “The only qualification is that the selections not be so technical that a general reader cannot read them.”

Dauber initially visited the idea of a top 10 class around 2000 during the so-called canon wars. At the time, questions swirled about the literary canon’s lack of diversity, whether it favored specific values and if there should be a different canon.

“The idea then was to determine the state of the faculty on such a thing, and that’s still part of it now when we ask if anyone actually won the canon wars or if there was a compromise,” says Dauber. “But the larger, more significant part today is our long discussion among the faculty on what general education should be.”

There has been an incremental shift — but enough that amounts to a real difference — in the nature of the various disciplines in the past 20 years, according to Dauber.

“The humanities have come to look more like the social sciences and the social sciences have come to look more like the sciences,” he says.

“In literature classes, for example, we used to read historical, political and cultural materials as background to understand the language of the assigned text. But today, that background material has become nearly synonymous with the text itself, in some ways fading into the social material that was once the province of the social sciences.”

If the old gen-ed lacked coherence, the new gen-ed’s changes are reflected in the idea of clusters, Dauber says. A biology student looking for a humanities elective, for example, today will look for a course on literature and the environment, rather than a literature course that broadly examines the novel.

“The notion that books are at the center of a university education is now greatly attenuated,” he says. “I’m very curious to see if that has an effect on the kinds of books people choose.”

Dauber also looks forward to student participation.

“It’s not just talking about the books, but about why the books have been selected,” he says. “Students will discuss the importance of the books, but also the mistakes if they think some of the books are not important.”

Selections are welcomed from all faculty members. July 6 is the deadline for submissions. Email lists to dauber@buffalo.edu.