In an era when many college students shy away from reading long-form fiction—and some departments openly discourage the study of Western literature—author and scholar Joseph Bottum is pushing back with an old-fashioned experiment: teaching students to read serious novels again.
Bottum, a visiting chair in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado Boulder, joined Chicago’s Morning Answer with Dan Proft and John Kass to discuss his upcoming course, which will challenge students to engage with the great novels of Western civilization. The class is part of the university’s Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, and it is already drawing national attention—not only for what it includes, but for what it represents in the larger academic landscape.
Resurrecting a Lost Tradition
“What we’re trying to do,” Bottum explained, “is revive a once-standard course in the Western canon. The idea that students should grapple with one novel a week—starting with Defoe or Fielding and reading through to Faulkner or Joyce—used to be considered essential to a serious education.”
According to Bottum, the modern novel arose as a defining art form in Western culture, helping individuals explore their relationship to society, morality, and God in a rapidly changing world. “The novel is where we explained ourselves to ourselves,” he said.
But that tradition has collapsed, he argued, due to a toxic combination of factors: humanities professors losing confidence in the value of their work, bureaucrats enforcing student satisfaction over academic rigor, and a populist suspicion of “highbrow” literature.
“English was once one of the most popular majors,” Bottum noted. “Now it barely exists in many colleges. We’ve stopped teaching the very art form that most shaped our understanding of the modern self.”
A Syllabus Without Politics
Asked for specifics on the reading list, Bottum described a course rooted in the foundational works of the English-language novel: Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Ulysses, and others. The course will cover key literary genres—sentimental novels, realist fiction, modernist experimentation—while tracing the novel’s role in making sense of the modern world.
What it will not include: popular fiction, overt political messaging, or contemporary ideological filters.
“Professors used to assume you’d read your beach books on your own,” Bottum said. “They saw their job as introducing students to the difficult, the important, and the lasting.”
Ironically, he noted, this neutral approach to literature now marks him as “conservative” in the eyes of the university, simply because he refuses to politicize the material. The English Department at Boulder even declined to cross-list his course.
“That tells you everything about where we are,” Proft responded. “Neutrality is now a right-wing position.”
A Movement—or a One-Off?
The Benson Center’s support for Bottum’s course mirrors efforts elsewhere to revive serious study of the Western tradition. The University of Austin has launched similar programs, as has the University of North Carolina with its new School of Civic Life and Leadership. But Bottum is cautious about calling it a movement.
“Sweet Lord, I hope it is,” he said. “But in truth, I think these may still be isolated efforts in a sea of decline.”
He contrasted today’s academic climate with the past, when students were expected to build intellectual frameworks—“cubbyholes”—into which they could later store new knowledge. Now, he said, they’re given disconnected fragments and asked to build a worldview without context.
“When you have no sense of history, of literature, of the great questions that shaped modernity, how can you understand the present?” he asked.
Rediscovering a “Thick” World
Bottum also explored how literature historically helped address the spiritual and cultural challenges of modernity—what he called the loss of a “thick” world filled with meaning. The disenchantment brought on by science, exploration, and the decline of religious belief left individuals seeking new ways to locate themselves in the cosmos. The novel became the vessel for that search.
Even flawed movements like Rousseau’s sentimentalism were part of that effort. “At least he understood the problem,” Bottum said. “We’re cut off from meaning. The modern world is thin, and the novel was our way of navigating it.”
Can They Read?
In the end, Bottum’s course is not just an academic exercise—it’s a test.
“We know they don’t read,” he admitted. “The question is, can they still learn to?”
If they can, it might suggest there’s hope not just for the modern novel, but for the very project of Western education.
Joseph Bottum’s substack, Poems Ancient & Modern, can be found at poemsancientmodern.substack.com.
His course on the rise and meaning of the modern novel will debut at the University of Colorado in the coming academic year.