Twenty-First Century
The newest additions to the lists, still arguing with everything before them.
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Three books, all assigned by one program, and all still arguing with the present. The programs on this site are cautious about the recent: a great book, on their view, is one that has been read for long enough to be sure, and most of the lists stop somewhere in the 1960s. Yale’s Directed Studies is the exception, adding a few works each year whose arguments are live now and which the older books can be read against.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is the literature: a lyric essay on race in America, assembled from encounters, artworks and the second person, so that the reader stands where the speaker stands. It is read at Yale alongside Douglass and Du Bois, as the latest entry in the argument they began.
The other two are a pair chosen to disagree. The Ecomodernist Manifesto, signed by eighteen scientists and writers in 2015, argues that the way to protect nature is to decouple from it: more intensive farming, more nuclear power, denser cities, and wilderness left alone. Burton and Somerville’s Degrowth: A Defence argues that no amount of efficiency can make endless growth safe and that the rich world must shrink. Read together after Rousseau and Smith, they are the eighteenth-century argument about progress, still unresolved, with the planet as the stake.
