It was the students at Duke who convinced me to bring the The Sopranos into the classroom. It was a student (Joo-Young Chang in fact, a sophomore, from Seoul Korea!) whose essay on The Sopranos was judged the single best essay of the year in English. And it was the students and I, together, in the classroom, who found ourselves not only analyzing the artistry of serial television but discovering how great works return the favor, analyzing us. If Shakespeare were alive today, I swear it, he would be the writer-in-chief for West Wing (Aaron Sorkin), Deadwood (David Milch), or The Wire (whose David Simon just won a MacArthur genius grant).

It is not just lasting exemplars of pop media that interest our students however. As my long-time colleague Victor Strandberg will attest, there is also an appetite for returning to the major works of the American canon, those novels you read in high school, those too difficult for high school, and those you never got around to. So the students come to us in droves–committed majors, non-majors, and those still wondering. They want to encounter American literature at its best because, like Emerson, they want to be surprised out of their complacency, to read deeply and fully not just access & sample, Google-style. The Mystery of the Text, the Virtuosity of Reading, Literature as Equipment for Everyday Life: that’s what they come looking for, and we find they are willing to receive it, to make it, to get smart with it, to pass it forward.