New degree in Great Texts comes to TWU

Posted by admin on Feb 17, 2010 in News | 1 comment

Starting in the fall semester of 2011, Trinity Western
University hopes to offer a new B.A. Honours major in the humanities.

Communications professor Dr. Ned Vankevich has been working with English professor Dr. Jens Zimmerman and Elsie Froment, Dean of Academic Research, to create a new interdisciplinary program in “Great Texts.”

The goal of the new major is to explore many of the foundational literary, philosophical and historical texts that, according to Vankevich, have “deeply influenced and impacted the values, ideals and cultural practices of Western culture and society.”

Vankevich sees a strong need for such a program. “Given that we are, at core, a liberal arts-centered institution we owe it to our students to explore what this concept actually means. Unfortunately much of current day academe suffers from secondary-itis, that is, an emphasis on commentaries on the great texts and authors and not enough encounters with the primary texts themselves,” he said.

Great texts programs are nothing new to other universities. The origin is embedded within the liberal arts education tradition and its current emphasis dates back to the 1940s and ’50s, when Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago founded the Great Books Foundation. The idea behind such programs is to read and discuss the great works of Western civilization in order to better appreciate our intellectual and cultural heritage.

Such works in the program would include Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, the dialogues of Plato, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Joyce’s Ulysses.

Vankevich defines a great text as any work that is superior to the reader in terms of its insight, cross-cultural and temporal perspectives, and accomplishment in challenging us to think beyond the myopia that continually entraps our psyche and soul.

Given that the potential new major is driven by a member of the Faculty of Professional Studies and Performing Arts and one from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the notion of Great Texts will also include art, music and film, as well as literary, philosophic, social science and historical works.

Vankevich sees two primary objectives of the course: “to provide a historical context and present a wider consideration of how an author’s text and ideas have had an impacting influence on Western thoughts and values and to do this within the perspective of the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions which have become inextricably interwoven in Western culture and civilization. Unless we do this we are committing the worst form of civilizational amnesia and thus will be condemned to repeat the social sins of the past that have so thwarted human flourishing.”

Overall, this new major will provide context and an outlook that is ideal in revisiting Western society in a balanced and holistic manner while avoiding chauvinism or pangs of guilt.