Six Pretty Good X is a new initiative within the First Year Seminar Program offered every fall semester. Intentionally irreverent in name, the program deconstructs canonicity and reconceives the “great books” rubric as open, dialogic, and vital.

Examine the Capitol, the Library, the Ship, the Factory, the Museum, and the House. Covering a range of epochs, geographies, genres and media these six building “types” provide a foundation for questions about how societies and individuals organize value systems.

Explore the ways we think about ourselves and the “other,” home, the unfamiliar and wondrous through accounts of trans-continental journeys to six regions.

This year, we begin with a hypothesis: that poetry offers a useful space for exploring the problem of how to relate universals to particulars. Explore this possibly universal problem through six pretty good poems.

A course anchored around six trans-historical models of thinking about selfhood: the ideal self, the lover, the revolutionary, the convert, the solipsist, and the social climber.