2016 Actc Proceedings

TRADITION & RENEWAL TRADITION AND RENEWAL: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN CORE AND LIBERAL ARTS PROGRAMS Selected Papers from the Twenty-Second Annual Conference of the Association of Core Texts and Courses, Atlanta, April 14–17, 2016 Edited by Tuan Hoang Association for Core Texts and Courses ACTC Liberal Arts Institute 2021 Acknowledgments (Park) CREDIT LINE: Excerpt(s) from THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY AND THE CASE OF WAGNER by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann, translation copyright © 1967 by Walter Kaufmann. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. (McGrath) Excerpt(s) from THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS by Montesquieu, translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone, translation copyright © 1989 by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Used by permission of Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. (Galaty) Excerpt(s) from DISCOVERIES AND OPINIONS OF GALILEO by Galileo, translated by Stillman Drake, translation copyright © 1957 by Stillman Drake. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Contents Introduction: Core Texts and Tradition in Atlanta Tuan Hoang ix Tradition Juxtaposed and Complicated The Oral Voice in Ancient and Contemporary Texts Jay Lutz 3 On the Unity of the Great French Triumvirate John Ray 7 Burke, MacIntyre, and Two Concepts of Tradition Wade Roberts 13 Happiness as a Moral End: On Prudence in Kant’s Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and Austen’s Persuasion Jane Kelley Rodehoffer 19 “The Stranger God” and the “Artistic Socrates”: On Nietzsche and Plato in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice Julie Park 27 The Human Person in Core Texts Unheroic Heroes: Ambiguous Categories in Three Core Texts Michael D. Nichols 37 iv Contents The Passions of the Soul in Aristotle’s Rhetoric April Dawn Olsen 41 Montesquieu and the Mystery of the Missing Good Molly Brigid McGrath 45 Looking at the Individual’s Role in History through Joseph Roth’s The Emperor’s Tomb Caleb Karges 51 Race, Gender, and the Environment in Core Texts Cultivating Cato: Race, Resistance, and Sociability in Joseph Addison’s Cato, A Tragedy Douglas Casson 57 Between the World and Us: Richard Wright’s Poem “Between the World and Me” as Core Text Revenant Page Laws 63 Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Perfectly Teachable Narrative in an Imperfect Canon Reshmi Hebbar 71 Women and the Core: A Pitch for Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul Anneke Stasson 77 Encountering the Biosphere through Core Texts: Thoreau’s Faith in a Seed William Cromartie 81 Teaching in America and Asia How Humanists Can Use Their Expertise to Teach Core Science Texts David Galaty 85 Aspirational Ladders: Core Texts in the Era of Professional Education Andrew Mossin 93 Contents v The Ring of Gyges in Touchstones Discussions Dorothy Guyot 101 Attending to the Immanence of Hope in the Core Texts Classroom Yang Yeung 107 Closing Reflections Tocqueville and Higher Education as an American Counterculture Peter Augustine Lawler 115 Confessions of an ACTC President Richard Kamber 123 Introduction: Core Texts and Tradition in Atlanta Textual analysis has always been at the heart of annual conferences of the Associa- tion of Core Texts and Courses (ACTC). The 2016 edition in Atlanta was no excep- tion. From the opening plenary address (on Montaigne) to the last panel on the sched- ule (on Homer, Plato, Dostoevsky, and Morrison), conference participants proposed theses about the texts under discussion, located supporting evidence, and analyzed them toward particular arguments. Some of the presentations focused on the larger landscape of the humanities, the liberal arts, and the roles of tradition. Others named particular institutional programs and the students that they served. This volume of selected and peer-reviewed papers provides a representation of the vigorous engagement about core texts and core and liberal arts programs among the participants of this conference. Reflecting the twin themes of “tradition” and “renewal,” the first quartet of essays seeks to renew tradition, directly or indirectly, by juxtaposing, comparing, or complicating two or more works. This section begins with Jay Lutz’s discussion of the oral tradition in the Odyssey and, to a lesser extent, the African epic Sundiata and the novels Beloved and La Rue Cases-Nègres. “Once you start unearthing the oral,” observes Lutz, “and finding ways to bring it alive again, orality starts show- ing up everywhere.” The section ends with an exposition of the aesthetic ideal in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. It is no simple exposition, however, because Park contrasts Mann’s view with the Nietzschean view of Dionysian wisdom in The Birth of Tragedy. She further argues that it is not with Nietzsche but with Plato’s Phaedrus to which the novelist’s vision is better aligned. Mann’s novella is not an easy text to teach, but Park has proposed a fruitful way to dissect its central ideas in conjunction with two other texts. Between these papers on literature are two essays about tradition in political theory. On the “Great French Triumvirate,” writes John Ray, “let us acknowledge viii Tradition and Renewal that Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville differ greatly on many of the most prominent themes in modern political philosophy.” Yet as indicated by the title of his paper, Ray argues that it is unity among the triumvirate that most deserves our intel- lectual engagement. He names their opposition to Hobbes as a negative unity; and he focuses on their positive aspects, particularly their views on human “malleability, including human passions.” On the other hand, Wade Roberts’s essay emphasizes differences rather than similarities regarding two other thinkers: Burke and Alasdair MacIntyre. This essay is essentially a MacIntyrean critique of the more extreme aspects of the Burkean view of tradition, and it argues for a more expansive concept— again, MacIntyrean—in which tradition engages reason and does not define itself in opposition to reason. The next group of papers also seeks to complicate several aspects about the human person in the Western tradition. Similar to the first section, two of these essays focus on literary characters. In his discussion of “unheroic heroes,” Michael Nichols recounts his experience of teaching Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and the Bhagavad Gita to sophomores and juniors in the core program at his institution. Why unheroic? Be- cause these figures are paradoxical in some respects and ambiguous in others. Why studying them this way? Because the direction of ambiguity—Nichols references William Perry’s scheme of cognitive and moral development—helps students to move past the dualistic view of the human experience and prepares them for autono- mous commitment in the future. Caleb Karges also relates the subject of his paper to teaching one of the core courses at his university. While this particular class is history rather than literature, Karges employs a twentieth-century German novel to ex- plore several “enduring questions” about the individual in the course of history: How should I be governed? What is the nature of a just society? What are the characteris- tics of a virtuous citizen? “What does one do,” Karges would ask his students, “and where does one go, if one’s society has rejected one’s answers [to these questions]?” Between these papers, April Dawn Olsen and Molly McGrath address very different topics from very different philosophers, yet both find their texts to be prob- lematic. Olsen gives a lucid exposition of the twelve passions according to Rhetoric, but she also finds Aristotle’s treatment to be limited in the end. Nonetheless, she suggests that beyond public rhetoric, the main focus of this text, Aristotle “leaves open the possibility of a private rhetoric communicated through well-crafted writ- ings that successfully inspire different passions in different people.” It is a point worth pondering about the nature of public social media of our times, which favors not-so-well-crafted tweets and memes over well-constructed writing. McGrath, too, concludes that the philosopher of her paper—in this case, Montesquieu in Spirit of the Law—falls short of reaching a position on the ultimate human good. It is a cu- rious situation because Montesquieu actually has a lot to say about good and bad laws, but not so much on the summum bonum. In McGrath’s final analysis, it was the Frenchman’s fear of despotism that led him to sidestep the problem of the ultimate human good. In comparison to the time-honored themes among these four essays, the next batch of papers centers on three of the biggest concerns in the humanities today: race, gender, and the environment. It begins with Douglas Casson’s consideration Introduction: Core Texts and Tradition in Atlanta ix of Addison’s play Cato, best remembered today for its popularity among American colonists around the time of the American Revolution. However, Casson focuses not on the principal character but on the Numidian prince Juba. Notwithstanding some stereotypes in his representation of Numidians, Casson argues, it is Juba that actually “carries the hope of a free and honorable republican future.” In the next essay, Page Laws performs one of the closest of close readings that this editor has read in all past ACTC collections. In this case, she discusses a poem by Richard Wright on the premise that “experiencing tradition and continuity can sometimes be excruciat- ing, when dead tongues rattle on interminably and corpses keep rising—Banquo- like—in all-too-recognizable forms.” Wright renders the experience of lynching in a horrifying fashion and dissects violence in three types: disciplinary, retributive, and intimate.

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