Vincent Vega
Rock n' Roll Doggie ALL ACCESS
If I wanted to stay focused on that, I wouldn't have written the two sentences before.
AEON said:His justification was that he wanted us to think beyond the influence these two books had on Western art and literature (Joyce for instance), and start thinking about the influence Homer had on other cultures.
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This isn't about race - it is about 'forced' multi-culturalism.
The experience I am sharing is similar, with the exception the professor really did seem to care about the African writings.
You probably would have enjoyed one of these 'Great Books' majors, unfortunately there aren't too many colleges which have them as they tend to be seen as not preparing you to do much of anything careerwise. The thing is, a certain amount of those heavily condensed, survey/major-core type courses really is necessary to ensure all your majors graduate with a basic grasp of the full sweep of topical, theoretical and methodological domains that make up the field, even though they'll ultimately wind up in some concentration or another. And if you're teaching a course like that, your choices more or less are A) cover a large number of excerpts from various key texts, with probably only a couple read in full, and rely heavily on intensive lectures to supply historical context etc. or B) choose a small handful of texts, maybe one from each key period/country/etc., then read those closely and in depth (and where applicable, expect to have a few majors planning on academic careers pissed off at you because they were basically expecting rote GRE prep). Although I personally find B) more rewarding, and it definitely offers better opportunities to develop writing and discussion skills, in practice I'm often not comfortable doing that because, for example, if I'm teaching Political Theory it means they're going to wind up with huge gaps in their awareness of the historical sweep of the subject. So I usually do a compromise thing where one session a week takes the form of small-group discussions, taught in different classrooms with me running one and my TAs running the others (these are large courses, 100+ students usually). Then those are also where the writing assignments are given, and we usually devote a couple of those sessions to going over papers once they've been handed back.AEON said:It seems in the humanities, there is simply so much ground to cover that it is almost impossible to fit 'everything' in one class. I always preferred the classes the focused on one author, or even one book.
anitram said:
It seems like he had a reasonable and logical rationale for introducing the African poetry. It seems like he genuinely had an interest in it.
AEON said:
He did. And perhaps he should have included that in his class description so I could have decided to avoid the class or not. He could have perhaps taught another class on Homer's influence on African Literature.
The main point I am making is not that the poetry was crap, it was that I signed up to study two, and only two, books by one author.
AEON said:The main point I am making is not that the poetry was crap, it was that I signed up to study two, and only two, books by one author.
AEON said:
He did. And perhaps he should have included that in his class description so I could have decided to avoid the class or not. He could have perhaps taught another class on Homer's influence on African Literature.
Diemen said:
This seems to be either another rather unfortunate choice of words or another bigotted comment, take your pick. Quite frankly it seems to reinforce the notion that you had decided the poetry was terrible well before even reading it.
Are you saying that if it was indicated in the description that the professor would also include African poetry, then you would more than likely not take the class?
MrsSpringsteen said:There's no Caucasian American crap poetry?
Irvine511 said:
this seems quite anti-intellectual to me. you just wanna read one book and that's it? might it not enhance your understanding of said book to understand how it might have influenced other cultures? isn't that one of the hallmarks of great literature -- that it can be translated and transformed, but it retains it's brilliance? you can have a stellar performance of "Romeo and Juliet" in Elizabethan costumes or you can have an MTV-influeced "Romeo and Juliet" with Leonardo DiCaprio and find power and brilliance in each.
you're free to like or dislike the poetry, but i'm not seeing some pernicious PC-ness that's tantamount to liberal propaganda.
AEON said:
Imagine taking a class Major World Religions (emphasis on the word major). The class description said that first half of the class would be Buddhism, the second half would be Christianity. However, the instructor decides that the Chruch of Monday Night Football is important and decides to teach it as an equal world religion. Now, 1/3 of the class of Buddhism, 1/3 of the class Christianity, and 1/3 of the class is Church of Monday Night football.
Would you feel cheated? Perhaps not. But I did, and that's my point.
AEON said:
^ And this seems to be either another rather unfortunate choice of words or another racism witch-hunt, take your pick.
yolland said:I think that's enough on the African poetry tangent.
yolland said:Uh, how am I stopping anyone from questioning anything? More than half the thread has been on this colonialism-good-or-bad/is-African-poetry-OK-in-Homer-class spiel, I've made several posts on those topics myself as have you. It was worth questioning to the extent that most posters didn't see the connections AEON was making between those things and African-Americans in a Disney movie, but I think that vein has pretty much been bled dry at this point. I don't really see the connections either but it's pretty clear AEON does and that's just the way it is, which no is not the same thing as trolling.