Click play to listen. Recorded on November 9, 2008.
Chicago has been identified with the Great Books movement ever since Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler shook up the University of Chicago’s core curriculum, along with the reading habits and book clubs of that school’s board members, in the 1930s. Cultural critic Alex Beam, St. John’s College’s longest-serving tutor Eva Brann, and Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Earl Shorris assess the movement’s growth. They ponder the determinants of the canon, traditional and otherwise, and examine the institutions carrying the torch of the Great Books and the Socratic method associated with the study of them. Daniel Born, editor of the Great Books Foundation’s quarterly magazine, The Common Review, moderates.
Presented in partnership with the Great Books Foundation
