From Dr. Thurow:
I’d like to muse a little about how we approach the Great Books at Chesterton Academy of the Incarnation. As I have been lamentably sick for the end of this week and the weekend, however, I hope you will pardon me for starting slowly. I also get a little academic-y when on cold medicine, so please forgive any of that as well!
Let us begin by saying what our approach is not. So what is going on now outside of our academy? I will begin with my own area of greatest specialization, literature studies, and work outwards. Literature departments across the nation are now almost always dominated by one of four related approaches, each defined by what they think literature is primarily good for: Deconstructionism, New Historicism, topical theories, and what they will often call “rhetoric”. Oh, there are a million “theories” out there, but the dominant ones today always boil down to one of these four.
Deconstructionism denies the existence of any stable “meaning” in language and thus in any text, save what the reader imposes upon it. As such, would-be serious students of literature end up examining form in isolation from truth. What is useful about this outside of knowledge of knowledge’s sake, however, Deconstructionism has always been notoriously bad at arguing.
New Historicism, looking for a “scientific” and demonstrable way to reject the inherent nihilism of Deconstructionism, declares that the meaning of the text must be found by examining the biography of the author and his times so as to determine what his words meant to him. Due to the almost inevitably limited sources of information about most of the great authors outside of their works, however, New Historicism effectively encourages a focus on very recent writers, on bits and bobs of personal trivia blown out of proportion, or on the supposed spirit of an author’s age, thus denying the possibility that Great Books transcend the time and circumstances in which they are written. This contradicts the traditional understanding of the Great Books and, indeed, the primary justification for reading them: that they address timeless and universal truths.
Topical theories (Marxist, feminist, queer, etc), in turn, combine Deconstructionism’s assertion of fluid meaning with New Historicism’s focus upon the perceived spirit of past ages as the limitation upon the thoughts of authors of that era. The various topical theories opt to impose a contemporary, usually highly political, worldview on the text, using an examination of the work to demonstrate, most often, the inferiority of prior epochs with regard to their particular contemporary preconceptions.
The more practical-minded business world, as it has come more and more to dominate college campuses, has rightly found all three of these approaches rather useless. If texts have no meaning, why read them, especially when it takes any real effort to learn how to do so? But if all that the meaning of a text does is demonstrate what we already believe about an era or a topic, they are either useless or, at best, merely propaganda. Many colleges have rather jadedly agreed that the end of propagandizing students is worthwhile, in itself, but at some other colleges this has given rise to more and more English departments being relegated to teaching primarily “rhetoric”, which in most cases lacks much of any traditional focus on “rhetoric”, as such, and is actually just essay-writing. Professors are allowed to teach any topic or historical era they please, gratifying their own preoccupations, as long as the students are given essay assignments and improve in their writing skills. This is at least genuinely useful because people do need to know how to write! But what about the deeply Christian and philosophical end of education: to know and love the truth? Can’t we learn to write and become wise and joyful lovers of truth at the same time?
None of these approaches, of course, are what we seek to embrace at Chesterton Academy of the Incarnation. I will talk more about this, however, next week. By that time the cold medicine should have worn off!
November 8, 2025