Antiquitopia

As someone who, on the one hand, has and highly enjoys teaching broad core curricular courses (e.g., Columbia University's Literature of the Humanities) that stretch you as both instructor and student, allowing a broader view of things than is typical in teaching and especially research, and, on the other hand, always attempts to familiarize students with texts outside of "canon" (whether strictly understood in terms of the biblical canon or more loosely in terms of a "literary canon"), I find the following statement by Edward Said quite striking: We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented...in such works.  Culture and Imperialism , 66. He is understanding "canonical" in the broader sense--the "great books" point of...

Today in my Literature Humanities class, we were a bit reflective, reflecting over the year and critiquing our syllabus from the year. There was much catharsis, I think, in this discussion. There were several issues raised, but the root of much frustration with the syllabus is that there are simply too many works on it (other issues are that it is too western-focused, too androcentric, too historicist--the last refers to the structure or sequencing). And so this evening, I have begun to reflect what my ideal introductory literature course would be like. What if we started from scratch? I decided that my ideal course would be one in which we would read a single work for the entire semester in great detail intertwining our close readings with the various approaches that have been taken in studying literature (formal, Marxist, feminist, Freudian/Lacanian, historicist, new historicist, etc.), skills, theoretical approaches, and methods of reading and writing that would then be transfe...

There is an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the Great Books movement and "middlebrow" culture in the U.S. As someone who teaches a quintessential "great books" course, Literature of the Humanities, at Columbia University--not quite a "middlebrow" culture--I found the article interesting. I found the following few paragraphs interesting and strangely ironic: In my early 20s, when I was starting out as a graduate student in the humanities, I hosted a small gathering at my apartment. It didn't take long for my guests to begin scrutinizing my bookshelves. (I do the same thing now, of course, whenever I am at a party.) I remember that there were numerous battered anthologies, at least a hundred paperback classics, the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (acquired as a Book-of-the-Month Club premium), probably six copies of PMLA, and several shelves of books that I had retained from childhood, including the Time-Li...

I was just perusing the NYTimes (online) and glimpsed a familiar face on the front page tonight: a fellow preceptor in Literature Humanities, by all accounts a fantastic instructor, who came in at the same time I did, Zayd Dohrn. I was somewhat surprised seeing his face in the NYTimes. We chat occasionally about class and the literature we're teaching (I just saw him Tuesday with his copy of the Iliad in hand), but I don't think I realized he was a playwright (although I knew he was in theater), didn't really know he was much interested in politics, and didn't know much about his personal life (other than the fact that he has a young child). It turns out he has been busy turning out plays resonant with timely political themes. From the New York Times of the political plays of Zayd Dohrn: September 3, 2009 A Playwright’s Glimmers of a Fugitive Childhood By PATRICK HEALY When Zayd Dohrn began writing "Sick," a play about a Manhattan family going to extremes...

Death mingles and confuses itself with our life throughout. Decay anticipates its time, and even insinuates itself into the course of our growth. (Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience," Essays 3.13; trans. J.M. Cohen) There are perhaps two major themes I have seen arise in most of the works of literature that we have studied this year in my Literature Humanities class. The first is the power, duplicity, and ambiguities of language; the other, death. From the Epic of Gilgamesh , the Iliad , etc., to Montaigne's Essays , Death interweaves itself, or, in Montaigne's terms, insinuates itself throughout my entire fall and spring syllabus, whether in the attempt to overcome it through undying glory ( Iliad ), establishing great works ( Epic of Gilgamesh ; Aeneid ), gaining or failing to gain immortality ( Gilgamesh ; Genesis), or seeking a beatific afterlife ( Divine Comedy ) or, here, through the complacent acceptance of its inevitability. In this more mature vision of ...

April DeConick at Forbidden Gospels may like the title of this website: Forbidden Library . This site lists books that have been banned or forbidden at different places and times for various reasons. You can search it alphabetically by book or by author. In addition, it briefly quotes the censors' reasons for banning these books, along with the site's author's own pithy comments on the censorship of such books. For example, on the banning of 1984 : "Big Brother doesn't want people reading such things." Or see this on Don Quixote : "Placed on the Index in Madrid for the sentence, 'Works of charity negligently performed are of no worth.'" Banned for a single sentence (in a work about 1000 pages long)! Even Buddhist books have been censored. See this entry: Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings. D.T. Suzuki. Doubleday. Challenged at the Plymouth-Canton school system in Canton, Mich. (1987) because "this book details the teachings of th...

Wrath—one of the most famous first words in all of world literature. The word sets the pace, the tone, the content of the Iliad , shaping the plot of all there is to come. Wrath—Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and the birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles. (Iliad, 1.1-8; trans. Robert Fagles with some changes) The first word is menis . It is not just “anger” as the magisterial translation of Richmond Lattimore has rendered it. It is sustained anger, almost godlike in its intensity and singularity. Thus, Robert Fagles’ “rage” more clearly fits the bill. Yet I prefer the terminology of “wrath.” It reminds me of the wrath of God, which it ap...

I found the following in the Chronicle for Higher Education News Blogs --something I found scary. An intro to Western Civ instructor from an Iowa community college was fired for teaching that the story of Adam and Eve was a myth rather than something that was literally true. It seems this has been something followed for a while now, but this is the first I have heard about this incident. When you get down to it, how else can you really teach many of the predeluvian stories in Genesis? This is something we run up against all the time in religious studies and biblical studies. At my orientation meeting for Literature of the Humanities, in which we will be reading Genesis, some preceptors from other departments were a bit worried about how to approach biblical materials. It is always important to define your terms: myth, from the Greek, Mythos , means "story." In terms of religious studies, it does not mean what it has come to mean in modern society--something that is fal...

I have been reading through more literary criticism as of late for teaching my class next year, Literature of the Humanities, and, while in an independent bookstore in St. Louis, I found a book of posthumously published essays by Italo Calvino, who wrote one of my favorite books, Invisible Cities . This book of essays is called, Why Read the Classics?, after its opening essay. I thought such a book would be very relevant for a class that is loaded with classic authors from Homer to Virginia Woolf. In this opening essay, he speaks of both "classics" and "your own classics," noting that classics are works that will shift over time, both in which works will be included as classics and in terms that our understanding of them will shift, not just as centuries pass, but even from our youth to our old-age. Classics are those works that we may read when young, forming us in some ways, and then revisit when older, never exhausting what it has to say to us. Each rereadi...

Today I picked up my desk copies for Literature of the Humanities fall term. Only TWELVE books for just the fall term! They really weigh you down! Although carrying them home made for a good workout. So...my students will be reading: Epic of Gilgamesh The Bible (RSV) Iliad Odyssey Homeric Hymn to Demeter Aeschylus, Oresteia Sophocles, Oedipus trilogy Euripides, Medea Aristophanes, Clouds Plato, Symposium Herodotus Thucydides So the year-long course that ends with Virginia Woolf is very antiquity-heavy, but being an antiquarian, I'm not complaining! So, we have three epic poems (four if you include the "epic" of the Bible), an epic hymn, four playwrights, two historians, a philosopher, and a partridge in a pear tree.

In the Chronicle today there is an article about a Law professor who has banned laptops from his classroom. The article notes that in this day and age, doing so is a very bold move by a professor. Some students claim that they can't receive a good education without their laptops. While some students need to take notes on a computer due to some learning difficulty, most students in my experience just surf the net, play games, do some online shopping, and IM their friends (who also may be in the class). When I TA, I often now sit up front so that I don't have to see the sea of computers with everything on their screen except their note sheet. Is banning them the solution? One could argue that, with laptops or not, students will be distracted. They will just stare listlessly out the window, or, uh, do what I did when I was bored in class--doodle. But doodling is NOT as much a temptation as whatever games you have on your computer, checking your email, and IMing your friends...

In the previous post, I pasted my closing comments to the "Instituting Religion" conference from April 10, and my friend Jodi raised some issues in the relationship between funding (and academic advancement) and teaching, noting that as long as research is the primary means of advancement within academe that teaching will get the short end of the stick. She also raises several important issues of the relationship between pedagogy and theory (bringing theoretical savvy to teaching and practical teaching experience to theory), between research and teaching (bringing research into teaching and teaching issues into research), and speaking in general about the contingency of context for these issues (concerning the type of school, its funding structures, and so on). Given all of these interrelationships, I thought it would be appropriate to announce to my blog-reading public my situation next year: I will be teaching Literature of the Humanities next year at Columbia, which, acc...