Dear reader,
I am here to tell you what others will not: if you value the coherence of a limited worldview, stay away from the great books. If you, like Victor Frankenstein, presume that the happier man is he who “believes his native town to be the world” while shunning he who “aspires to be greater than his nature will allow,” well, then, stay away. If the rather top-heavy construction that is (perhaps) your own ego rests upon unstable grounds, do not laden it with Proust, Dostoevsky, Chaucer, Shelley, Browne, Yeats, Woolf, Homer, or anyone else whose language carries the weight and impact of human history; in other words, for your own safety, stay away from the great books.
Literature, if it is truly literature, should challenge us—not just intellectually, but existentially. It should seize our minds and make us taste, feel, hear, smell, but most of all, see. A great book should inhabit us like some hallucinatory parasite. Yet, our affinity for the written word is a parasite we grow to cherish—giving it a pet name, feeding it at night before bed, and tending to it in our thoughts with the vehement, nurturing protectiveness of maternity. It must live through us, and, if only for a brief time, we must give ourselves over to its sovereignty. Will you, reader, find your way back to yourself once the cover is clapped shut and the parasite rests?
No, I am not being facetious, clever, or histrionic. Perhaps your editor is coming across a little more pretentiously than he intends. It is only, dear reader, that I failed to heed my own warnings. I could not stay away from the great books, and thus, as Franz Kafka wrote in his diary in 1923, I feel—upon the publication of the eleventh volume of Symposium—that I am “nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.”
The question must be addressed: what do we intend when we invoke the “Great Books”? Between the covers of the journal you now hold, you will find a list of authors whose works have earned that distinction. From Chinua Achebe to Samuel Beckett, you will discover an array of fine writers. Yet, I detest prescriptions. As did the great Italo Calvino, I endorse no canon beyond personal necessity. Each reader, even you, dear reader, has the capacity to determine their own canon, to map their own constellation.
A word of guidance for those readers attempting to establish their own: you will know a great book by the grit it leaves behind in your teeth.
Twenty-six years in, the Great Books Symposium Journal owes the privilege of its continued existence to the support of students and staff in equal measure. First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Michael Petersen, without whom the publication of this journal would not be possible. The level of historical, literary, philosophical, linguistic, and grammatical proficiency displayed in the student essays of Symposium is the direct result of Dr. Petersen’s influence and tutelage. While many instructors have made a program out of reining in the creativity and curiosity of their students, Dr. Petersen allows the intellectual ambition of his students to be their guide. The result, one will find, is work that far surpasses the standard expectations for community college literary analysis.
In addition, I would like to express special gratitude for my assistant editors: Muhammad Saeed, Tristan Bruns, and Douglas McSheridan—each of whom is well-suited to direct the publication of this journal. Ultimately, our appointment of an editor-in-chief was a decision made not on the basis of competition but camaraderie and mutual respect.
Sincerely,
Sean Ogilvy
Spring 2026 editor-in-chief, Great Books Symposium Journal