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Historical Portals in the City of Lights
When I was first learning French in high school, I was enthralled by Paris. Not only did I love the language, but the cuisine, the culture, the history, and of course the art seemed as though they were all part of this mystical world I wanted to get to know—and that Paris embodied. But it wasn’t until I went on a study abroad to the City of Lights last spring that I was truly able to see and experience the history that’s embedded in every part of the city. As I walked through the cathedrals, streets, hotels, and doors, I was able to see almost the whole history of Paris. Roman antiquity left its gladiator arena in the 5th arrondissement, while the Middle Age dotted the city with churches and gothic cathedrals. Then, amid the industrial revolution, the city’s architecture exploded with the Haussmann architectural style. While there are many examples of this transition, my attention was immediately drawn to the doors on the buildings. I came into Paris with adequate knowledge of how much history was there, but I was slightly intimidated about how to learn from it all. I was surrounded with an abundance of architectural history and had absolutely no idea how to dissect it. So I chose the first thing I encountered, which were the entrances to the buildings I visited. Doors are often symbolic of a transition from one place to another, thus signifying a transformation that can be physical, intellectual, or spiritual. For me, the focus on doors brought a unique intellectual transformation in that they were my entry into the history that I was standing in. With their intricate molding and varied...
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Chasing the Literary Sublime
I’ve just finished reading Ulysses in one of my classes. As a group, we struggled and wrestled and plodded through the dense text in a month, coming to class only to realize that a mere three hours a week was barely enough to scratch the surface of the segment we had read. Ulysses—and Joyce’s writing in general—has a well-earned reputation for being, well, inscrutable. Virginia Woolf, Joyce’s contemporary, wrote of the novel: “I finished ‘Ulysses’ and think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.”[1] And perhaps she has a point here—though Woolf is not entirely innocent of being startling or doing stunts in her own work. My process of reading Ulysses consisted of far more than merely following words on a page. Rather, I unashamedly used nearly every tool available to me: online chapter guides, various Google and Wikipedia searches, a Librivox audio recording on 1.5 speed, a set of academic lectures on Audible, and my fellow classmates. When I finished the novel, pushing through the last two chapters in one six-hour stint, I felt like I needed a week-long hibernation. Reading Ulysses was difficult and frustrating and funny and tragic and grotesque and beautiful and incredibly rewarding—I understand why it is so widely considered a masterpiece. To me, reading Ulysses was a worthy endeavor, but I’m well aware that not everyone agrees. I remember one particular class that I taught last semester,...
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Dispatches from 21st-Century Europe
As a specialist in the literature of Britain’s Romantic period, I had little occasion during graduate school or the first twelve years of my professorial career to venture outside the Anglophone world in my teaching and research. This suddenly changed, though, in 2012, when I began a five-year stint running BYU’s European Studies program. Besides providing regular opportunities to learn more about the history and politics of individual nations and the continent as a whole, this position brought new course assignments requiring me to expand my literary horizons in a hurry. Eight years later, I am now teaching my fifth iteration of a European Studies course that uses contemporary fiction as a lens for examining major social, political, and aesthetic trends in modern Europe. Although I still have much to learn on the subject, I thought I would use this crack at writing the Humanities Center blog to recommend five newish titles that my European Studies students have especially appreciated. Here they are, then, in descending chronological order: Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009 in Polish; English transl. 2018). Few contemporary writers better illustrate the hit-and-miss nature of what gets translated and when than Tokarczuk, whose works were only just beginning to appear in English when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. Along with her memoir-fiction hybrid Flights (also published in English in 2018), Drive Your Plow has been one of the breakout books of European “literary” fiction in recent years. A thoroughly engaging “eco-thriller” – and an all-too-rare example of a tale narrated by an elderly woman – this is a must-read for fans of William Blake (the protagonist...
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Unorthodox Academia
Here’s a question: could the mediated essay be an underutilized opportunity to expand the scope of academia? >> Intro music and graphics Hey guys, welcome back to the channel! Huge shout out to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode, and of course, thank you to all the patrons who support the channel. Without all of you, this kind of content would literally be impossible. If you enjoy what you see here today be sure to like and subscribe, or you can check out the links for our Patreon in the description below. Today we’re collaborating with the Eliza R. Snow Undergraduate Fellowship at BYU to give some final thoughts before we wrap up this series on the Humanities. Now, if you’ve hung around the show for very long you’ve probably noticed that we’re really interested in the formation of questions, themes, and innovations that materialize in the overlap between art and the realities of student life. But those discussions have always had an inherent assumption—that the functioning voice of the episode was that of a student within an academic institution. What happens if we removed that assumption? What if the individual speaking about interdisciplinarity, tradition, or pedestrian readings was neither matriculated student nor tenured professor? Could an agent external to and independent of the academic orthodoxy be allowed room to express similar thoughts and feelings? To answer this, let’s turn to the growing enclave of content online and in new media (which for our uses here will narrowly refer to alternatives to traditional broadcast media) consisting primarily of video essays and podcast audio. Though the quality and breadth of these formats differs broadly in their numerous iterations, usually found...
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Events
Women's Voices of the Middle Ages and Renaissance: A Symposium
When: Friday, Mar 13, 2020
Where: B192 JFSB
more event details ->
MARS Keynote Speaker: Jane Newman
When: Tuesday, Mar 17, 2020
Where: B192 JFSB
more event details ->
Colloquium: Caroline Weber
When: Thursday, Mar 19, 2020
Where: 4010 JFSB
more event details ->
Humanities Center Blog
Historical Portals in the City of Lights
When I was first learning French in high school, I was enthralled by Paris. Not only did I love the language, but the cuisine, the culture, the history, and of course the art seemed as ...
continue reading ->
Chasing the Literary Sublime
I’ve just finished reading Ulysses in one of my classes. As a group, we struggled and wrestled and plodded through the dense text in a month, coming to class only to realize that a mere ...
continue reading ->
Dispatches from 21st-Century Europe
As a specialist in the literature of Britain’s Romantic period, I had little occasion during graduate school or the first twelve years of my professorial career to venture outside the Anglophone world in my teaching ...
continue reading ->
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