Now summer can proceed.? After brief delays on account of VBS and travel, I’ve finished this summer’s reading of Dante.? Once again, although Mark Musa is a professor and John Ciardi a poet, the latter still offers far better reading notes throughout, and I noticed things this time through that I hadn’t before.
Those bits aside, [...]
I’m gladder than I was before that I picked up the John Ciardi translation of the Comedy. ?For the first time I have some idea why Cato of Utica, who was a pre-Christian pagan (so he should at least have been in Limbo), a suicide (so he should have been in Hell with the other [...]
I took the plunge this summer and decided to leave Mark Musa’s translation of Dante on the shelf. I looked at five different candidates, and I decided to use a 40% off coupon at Borders to get John Ciardi’s translation.? The footnotes are better than Mark Musa’s and the best I could find at [...]
Endpaper – Fiction reaches a new level
I’m not sure whether to laugh or to cry.
Better yet, I’ll just wait until I can get it cheap on eBay.
Why Protestants Should Read Thomas Aquinas part 1
Why Protestants Should Read Thomas Aquinas part 2
Why Protestants Should Read Thomas Aquinas part 3
Why Protestants Should Read Thomas Aquinas part 4
These posts come from a speech that Fred Sanders delivered, and all of them capture my own love for things medieval.? As Sanders duly notes, there was [...]
Beowulf is over, and so my semester of experimental literature survey wraps up with it. ?I was dog-tired when I taught today, impending events having robbed me of some sleep, and I felt like the lesson suffered somewhat, but Beowulf?is a strong enough poem in its own right that, despite my own fatigue, the material [...]
Day two of Beowulf is in the can.? Once again I had too much in my notes to squeeze into a seventy-minute class, but that’s an alright embarrassment of riches, as far as I’m concerned.
We started out where today’s section of the poem did, reviewing the Grendel family’s genealogy, which runs back to Cain.? This [...]
Strangely enough, even though I had just as much amateur linguistics lore, Tolkien tidbits, and other distractions in my notes today, our class on Beowulf turned out more focused than did our class on Anglo-Saxon elegies just before spring break.? We covered more of the poetry, got in some discussions of big cultural questions, and [...]
I’ve also got video clips that I might upload at some point, but I figured people might like to see the basic stills of our outing, so here they are!
Medieval Times
There’s not a whole lot to talk about from yesterday’s English Lit class. I gave my students a break, assigning a relatively brief text [...]
Yesterday’s class was a blast, though once again I proved that I’m not quite educated enough to teach Middle English texts.
Our opening exercise, my favorite part of today’s class, had my students split up into groups of three or four (which, predictably, swelled to groups of five to seven as stragglers straggled in).? Each group [...]
I really do enjoy Chaucer, I’ve found.? We did the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale today in class, and I discovered that the Wyf (a holdover from the Old English neuter noun for woman–a lesson in the difference between grammatical gender and conceptual gender that I didn’t let pass) is, almost as much as [...]
I gave my students a big old Middle English assignment over the weekend, all 2200 lines or so of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale.”? I was surprised, frankly, at how little objection I got when I came to class this morning.? Some students found the ending depressing, and others felt like they were living in the marginal [...]
Once again, I don’t feel like I taught an extraordinary lesson today, partially because of my selection of texts.? Malory’s Morte d’Arthur is a fun text, heavy on the storytelling and light on the allegory.? Although the moral philosophy is relatively complex even in its sometimes-cynical treatment of knights and chivalry, it doesn’t require a [...]
I think I had too much fun in class today, and that fun came forth in a lesson that, in seventy-five minutes, covered about ten lines of poetry but diverged into textual histories, translation theory, multiple commercial breaks to pitch Dr. Evans’s Old English class, and at least half a dozen digressions on Tolkien.? In [...]
First of all, my sophomore lit survey class proved again today just how bright they are–taking on a text that could not but be alien to them, they imagined their ways inside of it, and they made me look really good for Dr. Medine, who was observing my class for the sake of writing a [...]
I’m always glad when my students bring up what I’m afraid to.? After comparing A Country Wife to Wedding Crashers and the comic relief scenes in Doctor Faustus to Beavis and Butthead, I was somewhat apprehensive about comparing the Second Shepherds’ Play to Seinfeld, but one of my students brought up the parallel early in [...]
Revision meetings are this week, so there won’t be any news from the Enlightenment until next week.
In lit survey we finished up Doctor Faustus (though the discussion spilled into the hallway after class) and started our discussion of Everyman, and our discussion in both cases ranged quickly into the theological and didn’t stray back out [...]
I wrapped it up yesterday afternoon, reading the last cantos of Paradiso and closing the book until 2009.? The realities of fallen mortals and our attention spans struck me as ironic this time: although the Pilgrim continued to rise into realms of increased energy and joy, my own eyes and concentration waned as canto after [...]
It was set to be a hit from the time letters hit paper. (No movable type yet, so it wouldn’t hit the presses for a couple centuries.) It had glimpses into Hell and Heaven, the doom of the Pope, and a cast of modern-day (every era thinks itself modern) characters present and active as God’s [...]
I’ve got just a few days left, but I think I’m going to make it through Dante before I go back to campus next week.? This morning I finished Purgatory.
I’ve not started Paradise yet, but unless that section just blows me away this year, Purgatory will likely remain my favorite as it has been the [...]
The Christian Humanist Podcast