What has Civics to Do with Literature?

By Michael Clune
November 10, 2025

Earlier this year, I joined the Chase Center at The Ohio State University after spending two decades as a professor of English. People ask me: Why would a literary scholar and novelist want to join a civics center? And why would a civics center want the study of literature?

The civic thought movement that is currently making great headway in higher education is most often identified with the fields of law, history, political science, and philosophy. People can easily understand why these centers attract scholars of constitutional law or historians of the Civil War. But, partly due to the ways literary study has developed in the academy in recent decades, literature’s place in this project seems less obvious. I decided to come to Chase because I believe that we have a generational opportunity both to enhance education for citizenship with the riches of our literary tradition, and to revitalize the academic study of literature.

The central figures of American political history would hardly be surprised by the idea that literature constitutes a central dimension of civic education. From the founders’ immersion in the classics, to Frederick Douglass’ reading of Dickens and Wordsworth, to Lincoln’s lifelong devotion to Shakespeare, the minds that shaped our political order were themselves shaped by careful literary study. From these works, the founders and their successors learned the art of oratory—of moving and lucid political speech—an art surely in need of resuscitation in our era. They also appreciated literature’s profound framing of the problems of tyranny and slavery, liberty and social cohesion, order and revolt. Today, citizens whose minds are cultivated by the study of what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said,” can witness similar fruits in their own lives.

Yet such cultivation doesn’t exhaust the resources the study of literature holds for civic thought and life. In a manner unique in history, the pathbreaking American writers of the nineteenth century set out consciously to create a democratic art—a kind of writing that would realize the promise, and illuminate the tensions, of the American constitutional experiment. In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman offered perhaps our most visionary meditation on the founding ideal of e pluribus unum, seeking to create a representational space in which diversity enriched rather than fractured unity. Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne created daring new literary forms to scrutinize the conflicts and resonances between America’s religious heritage and its democratic ideals. Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Beecher Stowe turned the form of the sentimental novel into a vessel for expressing the terrible human cost of slavery. And Melville’s Billy Budd staged the conflict between the ideal of justice and the reality of law with unequalled power.

To study the American political imagination expressed by these writers—and such twentieth-century successors as Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, and Marilynne Robinson—illuminates the past, clothing the bones of historical and political structures with flesh and life. American literature’s civic resources are best unlocked in an intellectual context in which the insights of political science, history, philosophy, law, and other fields draw out meanings that often slumber in the silos of literature departments.

For example, the tradition of civic thought provides a framework for understanding one of our literature’s ongoing and generative paradoxes. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville asked whether a democratic culture is a contradiction in terms. Is it possible that a nation without the aristocratic spirit could create masterworks rivalling the national traditions of England, France, China, or Japan? Or would the egalitarian ethos have a leveling effect—grinding all culture down to the lowest common denominator?

A modern observer of our culture of TikTok videos and superhero movies might incline to a pessimistic answer. Yet the popular neglect of ambitious art would hardly surprise Nathaniel Hawthorne, who found his community utterly indifferent to his early great tales, or Emily Dickinson, whose poems had to wait a century until they could even be printed in a form remotely corresponding to what she wrote. The tension between equality and high cultural ambition is not a problem to be solved once and for all, but the very condition of democratic art. This tension has given birth to new forms and genres. It has fostered works that speak the common tongue, as well as writing that withdraws from mass culture to obtain a new vantage on the nation. And despite the fears—and sometimes the reality—of cultural malaise and commercial flattening, American writers have for a quarter millennium continued to produce books that stand among the acknowledged masterpieces of all time.

Yet, as Tocqueville foresaw, the hostility to literature, and the suspicion of greatness, challenges each generation anew. And this brings me to what the study of literature has most to gain from the emergence of civic thought. In many English departments, professors have grown uncomfortable with the idea of great literature, and have in many cases given up on making literary judgments. I believe the study of literature is ultimately justified by saying forthrightly to students: these great works of enduring value have the capacity to change your mind and your life, to reveal truths and perceptions you never suspected, to challenge you to develop a love for a kind of writing you don’t yet understand.

Yet in recent decades, English departments have preferred to see literature as mere examples of good or bad social attitudes, the excrescence of class or racial formations. Analysis and appreciation have been pulled apart, and a skeptical, critical spirit often forecloses the capacity to be surprised by a work’s power and beauty. “Greatness” is seen as elitist. Who are we, professors ask, to tell a student that Emily Dickinson is greater than Taylor Swift?

But I discovered in the emerging culture of the civic center a blending of appreciation and analysis especially congenial to literary study. The perspective that seeks to acknowledge and understand our nation’s failings without ceasing to admire its ideals and achievements can also serve its literature. I have developed a course at Chase called, unapologetically, The Great American Novel. Each of the terms of the title is subject to analysis. Through a selection of transcendent masterpieces we ask: What is greatness? How is it achieved? What are its objective signs and subjective effects? How do these novels represent America? Is the America of Moby Dick the same America of Invisible Man? Does the writing develop specifically American qualities? What does the novel show us about America that we didn’t already know? And what is a novel anyway? How do we discern the difference between Melville the author and Ishmael the narrator? Which conventions of literary realism did Edith Wharton borrow from European models, and which did she renew for American purposes? How does the novel’s representation of politics differ from the genre of the speech, or the philosophy monograph, or the history book?

Why would a civics center want literature? Because literature is a fundamental source for civic thought. A literary education cultivates modes of attention, thought, and expression essential for engaged citizenship—and because the practice of a democratic literature is both our inheritance from the past and our duty to the future.

Why would literary scholars and writers want to join a civics center? Because the intellectual constellation of perspectives from multiple fields brings out the radiance of our great works. The fusion of appreciation and analysis afforded by the civics center’s mission enables us to recover the love and reverence that inspired many of us to study literature in the first place. And, in the face of the real and perceived failures of the humanities, a new institutional form brings with it the opportunity to revise an ossified curriculum and to try something new.

I will close by briefly elaborating on this last point. One way to see the civic thought movement is as a fruitful, mutually beneficial alliance between educators primarily interested in restoring civics, and educators who want to revive the great books tradition. At Chase we are developing a major focused on the close reading of important works characteristic of great books programs. Yet in my research on existing great books programs, I have come to feel that we have an opportunity to build on their strengths while adding something new.

In stopping at the great books of the early and mid-twentieth century, some graduates of great books programs feel a sense of loss, as the towering achievements of earlier eras run aground on the sands of modern nihilism and confusion. And some programs have found it difficult to motivate undergraduates to undertake a demanding course of study that can seem to them focused on the past, with an uncertain relation to the present.

As a creative writer, I feel a symmetrical dissatisfaction with the way the enormously popular creative writing programs have approached their subject. At many MFA programs, students rarely read anything from before 1990, and almost never anything from before 1945. Undergraduate students drawn to creative writing find themselves stranded in the shallows of the present, without a robust sense of literary traditions stretching back to antiquity. The writers, editors, and screenwriters I know constantly bemoan the paucity of the contemporary imagination. The past is the mine that the great writers have always returned to in order to revitalize the present. A mark of a writer’s radical ambition is how far back they look for their predecessors. In pioneering a completely new kind of modern literature, the early twentieth-century poet Ezra Pound returned to the French troubadours and to Homer.

Would it be possible, I wonder, to fashion a program that brings the riches of the deep past to bear on the problem of cultural renewal in the present? Where students would learn to write by first learning how to read—studying the effects and dynamics of Virgil, Milton, and Dickinson before embarking on workshops in which their knowledge illuminates their craft? At a moment when the challenge of AI pushes the human to transcend easy formulas and predictable moves, perhaps we can help a new generation rise to answer Tocqueville’s perennial question: What is democratic art?