If Guido Taught Humanities 4

I just got an email from one of the helpful people at IVC's EOPS office (they buy books for students who can't afford them). She noted that the bookstore listed some thirteen books for my Humanities 4/Culture Since 1700 course. Certainly, she said, this must be a mistake. Did you mean to have students select four of those books?

I don't know how she came up with the number "four," but I assured her that all thirteen books would be required. Granted, some of the books are relatively short (The Communist Manifesto, The Social Contract, Candide, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and some of them are collections of essays from which I'm only assigning selections (The Basic Writings of Immanuel Kant, Heidegger: Basic Writings, Simulacra and Simulations; and I'm only assigned some sections of Walden). But that still leaves some long books for them to read (On Photography, Mrs. Dalloway, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Gay Science, and The Myth of Sisyphus).

Listing them like that, especially when I remember that this is summer course, only lasting six weeks, does make me feel pretty evil.

I comfort myself by remembering a conversation I had with my predecessor/colleague here at IVC, Peter Morrison. We were discussing the ideal reading load for Humanities 3--Western Culture from 1100-1700--and without missing a beat he said, "about a book a week." I also comfort myself by remembering that summer school students need to do the same amount of work as students enrolled in a sixteen-week semester.

I also remind myself that covering three hundred years worth of literature, history, philosophy, and art is a pretty impossible task even if you are reading 500 books.

But there is more to it than that.

In Fellini's 8 1/2 Guido faces the same problem I face every time I send my book orders, for any class, to the bookstore. I can't decide which books to read, which films to watch, which artists to highlight. There are too many good choices. There are too many necessary choices. This is the same problem Guido faces in 8 1/2. Which film will he make? Which plot-line will he leave out? Which women will he keep in his life, his bed, his heart? In the end he keeps them all.

Trust me, I haven't come anywhere close to keeping "all" of the books, films, ideas I wanted to keep for this Hum 4 class. Still, I, like Guido, like every modern person, find myself oppressed by my options. I have too many choices most of the time. I can imagine that in past generations humanists could immediately point to this or that philosopher, author, artist as "essential" for a particular course. But aren't we too savvy for this kind of thing? Don't we all know, at some level, how ultimately contingent all (such?) choices are? Isn't this what Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sontag, and Baudrillard have shown us? Isn't responding to this what Camus, Woolf, and Kundera were trying to do? Of course, to understand that project, that project of engaging in/with "normal nihilism," we have to know something about the murderers of God Nietzsche describes in The Gay Science, so don't we at least have to read Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, and Kant (et al)?

So, no, the students can't choose four out of the thirteen books I've assigned for the class. As it is, I've narrowed my choice to thirteen from five hundred.

I know, it's a lot, but I think it's going to be a really fun six weeks, and hopefully not just for me.