Whether it’s will, involuntary or a mixture of both, the decline in literacy among college students is now lamenting that reporting it should no longer be a surprise. Still, on some level, they still do: English major at the University of Kansas Region Find the opening Dark house I can’t understand it virtually. Even students “A very selective elite university” I have a hard time reading, and I understand the entire book. Things were different in 1941, and in reality, when I was filming English 135 in a class entitled “Fate and the Individual” at the University of Michigan, it was actually very different. Instructor: Specified WH Oden.
In his abilities as an educator, the poet threw away the “notoriously difficult” gauntlet of the syllabus, as explained by literary academic and YouTuber Adam Walker. His new video abovewhich “he asked undergraduates to read about 6,000 pages of classical literature.”
It is not that the course has not been in contact with current events. At a historic moment, “Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and expanded into Eastern Europe. Systematic extinction began with mass shootings, and genocide machines are accelerating. After the whole God’s ComedyAuden students chose freely among the Esquilius. Agamemnon Or Sophocles Antigone.
From there, the necessary readings plunged into Horace. odes And Augustine ConfessionFour Shakespeare Theatres, Pascal Pensch, Goethe Faust (However, only part I), Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothersname some text. Of course, not everyone would consider Dostoevsky Europe, but then no one thought of Herman Melville Europe. Moby Dick From the syllabus. Walker explains that the novel is revealed in all these works and “The Treatment of Passions and Historical Forces, and how individuals navigate those powers,” as it relates to the themes of the course of “Obdullah and Space Struggle.” Whether they come across a 21st century student who acknowledged that even full-length Auden poetry was assigned is a completely different question.
View the syllabus Here is a big format.
Related content:
Auden recites his 1937 poem “When I Walked One Night”
Discover Hannah Arendt’s syllabus for a 1974 course on “Thinking”
David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How to Teach Serious Literature in a Lightweight Book
Donald Barthelm’s syllabus highlights 81 books that are essential for literary education
Carl Sagan’s syllabus and final exams for his course on critical thinking (Cornell, 1986)
Marshall Mcluhan, WH Auden & Buckminster Fuller Debate The Virtues of Modern Technology & Media (1971)
Based in Seoul Colin marshall Write and broadcasting stationTS about cities, languages, and culture. His projects include the Substack Newsletter Books about cities And the book The Stateless City: Walking through 21st century Los Angeles. Follow him on social networks previously known as Twitter @colinmarshall.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
