Beginning with the ancient Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, the course covered the Roman poet Horace, then St. Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, a bouquet of Shakespeare plays, Pascal, Racine, Blake, Goethe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, Eliot, and other certifiable greats, tossed in some then-classic scholarship about culture (including Ruth Benedict and C.S. Lewis), then washed it all down with the bubbly delights of nine opera libretti.
All in a single semester. Who could digest such a feast? …………………………….
After creating the syllabus, we marched out to recruit students to take our daunting course.
Colleagues were skeptical that such students could be found, but as soon as the course opened for registration, it filled up. The same thing happened in the second semester, and again in the first semester of the current academic year. Each semester we have raised the ceiling for course enrollment; every semester we’ve had to turn away students. Kyle Harper’s bold promise to the students turned out to be an irresistible recruiting slogan: “This is the hardest course you’ll ever take.”
We have broken every rule of the postmodern academy, creating a highly demanding sequence of classic works, setting high expectations, and eschewing the grayness of theory and the reductionism of identity politics in favor of an intense engagement with the texts themselves. We insist upon literature as a distinctive form of knowledge and upon tradition as a source of creativity and insight.
We offer these books to students as a part of their legacy, as something that by right belongs to them, no matter who they are or what they look like or where they come from. And they respond with enthusiasm. Those who are prepared to give up on the millennial generation should come to our class. Their hope will be renewed, their defeatism defeated.
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