{"id":8637,"date":"2016-03-19T10:06:37","date_gmt":"2016-03-19T15:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=8637"},"modified":"2016-03-24T14:50:42","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T19:50:42","slug":"what-we-ask-students-to-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/03\/19\/what-we-ask-students-to-read\/","title":{"rendered":"What we ask students to read…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Both\u00a0Open Culture<\/a>\u00a0and The New York Times<\/a> have reported on the Open Syllabus Project<\/a>, which has tallied over\u00a0a million college course syllabi to determine the 10,000 or so most commonly assigned texts.<\/p>\n

The project also provides a\u00a0cluster map<\/a>\u00a0of these texts, which is probably less interesting (and more confusing) in its large form than when one pokes into it from a given text — to find, for instance, that The Communist Manifesto<\/em>\u00a0(at #3) is assigned most commonly<\/a> with Capital<\/em>, The Social Contract<\/em>, and Leviathan<\/em>; Thoreau’s Walden<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(#31) with texts by Emerson; and Barbara Bush’s The White House<\/em> (at #69?!) with William Rehnquist’s\u00a0The Supreme Court<\/em>, Time, Inc.’s World War Two, <\/em>and\u00a0<\/em>Hitler’s Mein Kampf\u00a0<\/em>(interesting…).<\/p>\n

(Meanwhile, The Guardian<\/em>\u00a0recently polled<\/a> booksellers, librarians, publishers, and the public to create a list of the 20 most influential<\/em> academic books of all time.\u00a0The overlap between the two lists is interesting, even if the Guardian<\/em>‘s methodology leaves\u00a0a great deal of room for improvement. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species<\/em> topped that list<\/a>, followed by The Communist Manifesto<\/em>, The Complete Works of Shakespeare<\/em>, Plato\u2019s Republic<\/em>, and Kant\u2019s Critique of Pure Reason<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Here are a few quick\u00a0observations about the Open Syllabus Project mega-list.<\/p>\n

1. Only three\u00a0books that appear on my own list of “33\u2153 Environmental Studies Greats<\/a>” appear in the top 250 or so most commonly required college readings. They are Charles\u00a0Darwin’s Origin of Species<\/em> (at #27, but its multiple editions would raise the book up the list if they were included in the same count), Rachel\u00a0Carson’s Silent Spring<\/em> (#96), and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation<\/em> (#232, also with multiple listings).<\/p>\n

2. Others that could reasonably\u00a0be included in an “environmental” list include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein <\/em>(#5), the already mentioned Walden\u00a0<\/em>(#31),\u00a0Garrett Hardin’s article “The Tragedy of the Commons” (#54), Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass<\/em> (#131), Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature\u00a0<\/em>(#147), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s\u00a0Ceremony\u00a0<\/em>(#175).\u00a0But including literary works like Shelley’s, Whitman’s, Silko’s, and even Emerson’s here gives you some indication of\u00a0how debatable\u00a0the criteria might be\u00a0for what\u00a0constitutes “environmental.” (Should\u00a0we include Heart of Darkness<\/em>, Plato’s Republic<\/em>, Marx’s\u00a0Capital<\/em>, or for that matter\u00a0Neil Campbell’s Biology<\/em>, which somehow strikingly made it into fourth place?)<\/p>\n

3. Among the top humanists of the last century<\/a>, Michel Foucault again wins handily by any measure, with three of his books attaining a “score” of 83% or higher, and two of 95% or higher. Few others from that list of 30 authors<\/a> come close to Foucault, and only Edward Said’s Orientalism<\/em> scores higher (98.6) than Foucault’s top publication, Power<\/em> (96.9). If we draw the boundaries back another century, Marx’s\u00a0Communist Manifesto<\/em>\u00a0would triumph with a 99.7 score (third place, as mentioned), and The Origin of Species<\/em>\u00a0would come into the very high 90s (96.8 plus about 1000 other citations in multiple editions).<\/p>\n

4. Filtering the mega-list by fields, countries, and U.S. states leads to some\u00a0interesting observations as well. (Filtering by Vermont, for instance, we find Ellen Langer’s 1947 book Mindfulness<\/em> in fourth place of all assigned readings. Meanwhile, Thomas Frank’s troubled<\/a> Kansas surprises with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart<\/em> in top spot.\u00a0I suspect we’re getting into some very limited\u00a0statistical samples there…) There is no “environment” field, alas.<\/p>\n

If you play with the list and find anything of interest, feel free to share in the comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Both\u00a0Open Culture\u00a0and The New York Times have reported on the Open Syllabus Project, which has tallied over\u00a0a million college course syllabi to determine the 10,000 or so most commonly assigned texts. The project also provides a\u00a0cluster map\u00a0of these texts, which is probably less interesting (and more confusing) in its large form than when one pokes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[203],"tags":[350224,5700,16146,123617,100542,257,16147,109062,5961,49864],"class_list":["post-8637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","tag-authors","tag-books","tag-canon","tag-canonism-anti-canonism","tag-citations","tag-curriculum","tag-environmental-studies","tag-humanities","tag-readings","tag-syllabi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2fj","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7208,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/01\/20\/anthropocene-readings\/","url_meta":{"origin":8637,"position":0},"title":"Anthropocene readings","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 20, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 I'm thinking of making my Spring semester graduate class, \"Environment, Science, and Society in the Anthropocene,\" into a semi-public seminar series, with a blog where we will share links to readings and videos as well as discussions. (Actual meetings will not be online, but will be open to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Clark","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2014\/01\/Clark-183x275.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10577,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/04\/29\/image-ecologies-spiritual-polytropy-and-the-anthropocene\/","url_meta":{"origin":8637,"position":1},"title":"Image ecologies, spiritual polytropy, and the Anthropocene","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 29, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"An article of mine by that title has appeared in a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture on \"Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene.\" The article contains the theoretical core of the book I'm currently writing on image regimes. It builds on my\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Spirit matter"","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1026,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/06\/on-ground-and-groundlessness-jamesonian-marxism-v-derridean-deconstruction-v-buddhist-onto-phenomenalism-w-guest-appearances-by-lacan-and-freud-spiked-all-the-way-through-with-ecology\/","url_meta":{"origin":8637,"position":2},"title":"On ground and groundlessness: Jamesonian Marxism v. Derridean deconstruction v. Buddhist onto-phenomenalism (w\/ guest appearances by Lacan and Freud, spiked all the way through with ecology)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 6, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Or, Toward an eco-Buddhist-processualist cultural criticism Note: This is work in progress and probably won\u2019t be published for a while, and not in this form in any case. 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What's missing?\u00a0 Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Practice: Comparative Perspectives This course introduces\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12965,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2022\/09\/27\/cinema-will-henceforth-be-godardian\/","url_meta":{"origin":8637,"position":4},"title":"Cinema will henceforth be Godardian","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 27, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"The work of Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away a couple of weeks ago through euthanasia at the age of 91, has always seemed to me to be about the possibilities of cinema as a form of thinking. 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