From Here to There: the Odyssey of the Liberal Arts

FROM HERE TO THERE: THE ODYSSEY OF THE LIBERAL ARTS Selected Proceedings from the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses Williamsburg, VA, March 29–April 1, 2007 Edited by Roger Barrus John Eastby J. Scott Lee Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Roger Barrus and John Eastby ix Odysseys in Poetry and Epic Petrarch’s Triumphs: An Introduction to Humanism and the Renaissance Ann Dunn 3 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73: Drama in Lyric Poetry Stephen Zelnick 11 The Mahabharata Patricia M. Greer 17 Hospitality Re-visioned: Odysseus’s Recognitions in Book 14 Kathleen Marks 23 The Homeric Question: Is the Odyssey a Great Book? Paul A. Cantor 27 iv Contents Odysseys in Modern Creative Prose “Good Surviving”: Heroes, Heroines, and Realism in Dickens’s Early Novels Sandra A. Grayson 41 Mentorship in Soseki’s Kokoro Richard Myers 45 Odyssey of Despair: Using Chiasmus to Examine the Domestic Sphere in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Arthur Rankin 49 The Odyssey of Reading Proust Erik Liddell 53 My Journey with James Joyce Nicholas Margaritis 61 Creative Writing and the Classics: Contrapuntal Music Steven Faulkner 67 Bronzeville Odyssey: The Literary Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks Joanne V. Gabbin 71 Odysseys in the Political World “Family Values” in Livy’s Rome Joseph Knippenberg 81 One Story: An Approach to Teaching the History of Political Philosophy in One Semester Joseph Lane 87 Ethics, Espionage, and War Daniel G. Lang 97 Using The Good Woman of Setzuan to Illuminate The Communist Manifesto Kathleen A. Kelly 103 Contents v Actualizing Memory Nafisi’s Way: Reading Homer in El Paso Ronald J. Weber 109 Odysseys in Theological and Philosophical Reflection The Socratic Journey: Liberal Education as Demythologizing James Woelfel 117 Church-Related Colleges and the Core Values of the Liberal Tradition Storm Bailey 121 The Nicomachean Ethics: Foundation for an Education John Russell 127 Gadamer, the Phaedrus, and the Arts of Healing, Teaching, and Rhetoric Kieran Bonner 131 Recovering from Amnesia in an Information Age Randall Bush 139 Here, There, Anywhere, Nowhere: The Question of Odyssey in Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man” Christopher Metress 143 Reading Darwin and Mendel: Paradoxes of Biology William J. Cromartie 149 Making the Examined Life Relevant: Great Books and “Great Books” John Kerr 155 A Textual Odyssey through the Liberal Arts Bruce A. Kimball 159 Acknowledgments We are grateful to the following for permission to reprint various extracts, listed by the chapter author: Bonner: Excerpts from The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age Hans Georg Gadamer, Translated by Jason Geiger and Nicholas Walker Copyright (c) 1996 Polity Press All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press, www. sup.org and Polity Press. Gabbin: Excerpts from Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Anniad”, “Infirm” and “The Second Sermon on the Warpland,” published by Third World Press Reprinted by Consent of Brooks Permissions. Knipperberg: Excerpts from Livy, The History of Rome, bks. 1–5, trans. Valerie M. Warrior (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006). Woelfel: Excerpt from “Little Gidding” from FOUR QUARTETS by T.S. Eliot. Copyright 1942; Copyright (c) renewed 1970 Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Introduction The thirteenth annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Course, spon- sored by Hampden-Sydney College and cosponsored by Averett University, James Madison University, Lynchburg College, and Norfolk State University, was held in Williamsburg, VA, near the original point of debarkation for those who launched the English exploration and settlement of North America. The journey of those who left their homes in England for a new continent was inherently a journey of discovery and physical danger. Their legacy, we have come to see, has nested the morally ambiguous alongside the grandeur of America’s hopes and achievements. This seemed to the conveners of the conference a material embodiment of the ancient tradition of the journey in literature and, more broadly, culture. No better presentation of that tradition can be found than that of the Odyssey, which has become synonymous with journeying itself. The Odyssey offers examples of grand hopes and great personal achievement with episodes of deeply ambiguous, if not to say outright immoral personal behavior. Is this not also metaphoric for the life of the mind itself? To explore, to understand, moral judgment needs temporary suspension. Questioning must be fearless. But, in the end, reconstitution is necessary. At some point the mind must come home to a hearth and a community. Something of this view lay behind the original call to papers for the conference, which we quote below. The journey of the liberal arts and their core texts takes us from our homes to the world and back to our homes. Perhaps the Odyssey is both a quintessential core text and an icon for liberal arts education. In a liberal arts journey, each text is a station and we must have diverse arts to navigate the entire course. Each program, each text, represents a movement away from our home into the world and, then, a return. Moreover, at each of our institutions, though many of the stations may be common to others, the journey for professors and students is, still, uniquely institutional and pro- grammatic. ACTC invites papers that can speak to the uniqueness of these journeys, to the discovery of liberal arts needed to undertake them, and to the core texts which mark the landings of each journey. Ultimately, ACTC seeks to learn what our faculty and students learn from their particular Odysseys through the liberal arts. viii Introduction The conference, then, was conceived as a meditation on the perils and possibilities of an ultimately humanizing intellectual odyssey. The Odyssey begins in a community of warriors and ends in the community of home, but in between it is Odysseus’s journey. This sequence mirrors our own embarkations (and the hopes we have for future pilgrims—our students) into the world of thought. We begin with our shared opinions (as disciplinary warriors or more generally), start our own investigations from those common views, and ultimately bring our newly discovered or newly reinforced conclusions back to the community to share. The ACTC Annual Conference offers such a home for sharing. The routes of discovery are diverse. They are individualized. But they find at the conference a suitable reception or welcome home. We have grouped the papers in this volume to highlight four basic types of intellectual journey. These ways include “Odysseys in Poetry and Epic,” “Odysseys in Modern Creative Prose”—similar to but not perhaps the same journey as the study of poetry, “Odysseys in the Political World,” and “Odysseys in Theological/ Philosophical Reflection.” The study of each category requires a different way of seeing and encountering the world. The journeys of the authors within each way may have been substantially different. They may have used different texts and techniques. But they began along a common way or path with the view that poetry and epic, or creative prose, or political life, or philosophy, science, and reflection on the divine constitute a special voyage of discovery. These types are not the only ways we think about or encounter the world. And they are not mutually exclusive. In our case, the papers themselves showed the commonality in the journeys taken by the authors. We thank the authors for sharing journeys with the conference. In particular we would like to thank those who shared their techniques for training a new generation of adventurers—whose papers are scattered through the proceedings. They show us how the highly personal Odyssey of the humanizing thinker perpetuates itself. They show us not only the ways we know but also the ways we share our journeys, our Odysseys with others—particularly those who are just beginning their own voyages of discovery. The call for papers asked what do we learn about our own programs by thinking about our students? What can we discover about ourselves as teachers and our programs when we think about our students and their futures? Who, then, are the new “crew” of students that are undertaking these journeys? Ought our programs to persuade students of the efficacy of the liberal arts journey or is that efficacy just “obvious”?Are there moments of “discovery” and “reversal” in our students’ journeys which we ought to attend to because they shape our curricula or our selection of texts? We believe the papers of this proceeding show the challenges of our individual Odysseys and the exciting possibilities open to us in sharing our journey with students. Roger Barrus John Eastby Hampden-Sydney College Odysseys in Poetry and Epic Petrarch’s Triumphs: An Introduction to Humanism and the Renaissance Ann Dunn University of North Carolina at Asheville But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop. —Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, 5: 4.80–82 If we were to follow Dr. Kimball’s advice in his plenary address, and take influence and exemplarity in a text’s own time as criteria for inclusion in a core curriculum, we would read Petrarch’s Triumphs, rather than his sonnets (chosen because of their influence on sixteenth-century English court sonneteers) or Dante, who became in- fluential and exemplary for a later era, for that era’s purposes. In Petrarch’s own time and for centuries afterward, his Italian Triumphs were far more popular, more widely translated, and more often drawn upon in art, literature, music, philosophical dis- course, and political practice than either his other poetry or Dante’s Divine Comedy.

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