Make sure you fill out the survey for the Catcher in Rye group assignment!
Due for Wednesday Complete grammar review packet Due for Thursday Complete Shakespeare review packet Due for Friday Complete vocab review packet Final Exam Information A BLOCK Monday June 18th Room 1302 8:15 – 10:00 am Proctor: Mr. Lee! B BLOCK Monday June 18th Room 1304 8:15 – 10:00 am Proctor: It is not your boy. It is Mr. Wilson.
0 Comments
Due for Wednesday (B Block) or Thursday (A Block)
1. Please pick one of the following articles to read: 2. Read and take notes on the following passage: what is the main idea of the passage? What are a couple of specific lines that support it? Excerpt from The New Republic The Value of the Canon Irving Howe February 18, 1991 Knowledge of the past, we felt, could humanize by promoting distance from ourselves and our narrow habits, and this could promote critical thought. Even partly to grasp a significant experience or literary work of the past would require historical imagination, a sense of other times, which entailed moral imagination, a sense of other ways. It would create a kinship with those who had come before us, hoping and suffering as we have, seeking through language, sound, and color to leave behind something of enduring value. … By invoking the “classical heritage of mankind” I don’t propose anything fixed and unalterable. Not at all. There are, say, seven or eight writers and a similar number of social thinkers who are of such preeminence that they must be placed at the very center of this heritage; but beyond that, plenty of room remains for disagreement. All traditions change, simply through survival. Some classics die. Who now reads Ariosto? A loss, but losses form part of tradition too. And new arrivals keep being added to the roster of classics—it is not handed down from Mt. Sinai or the University of Chicago. It is composed and fought over by cultivated men and women. In a course providing students a mere sample of literature, there should be included some black and women writers who, because of inherited bias, have been omitted in the past. Yet I think we must give a central position to what Professor John Searle in a recent New York Review of Books article specifies as “a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature…. It is essential to the liberal education of young men and women in the United States that they should receive some exposure to at least some of the great works of this intellectual tradition.” ... These [classic, canonical] writers don’t necessarily endorse our current opinions and pieties—why should they? We read them for what Robert Frost calls “counterspeech,” the power and brilliance of other minds, and if we can go “beyond” them, it is only because they are behind us. What is being invoked here is not a stuffy obeisance before dead texts from a dead past, but rather a critical engagement with living texts from powerful minds still very much “active” in the present. And we should want our students to read Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Jane Austen and Kafka, Emily Dickinson and Leopold Senghor, not because they “support” one or another view of social revolution, feminism, and black self-esteem. They don’t, in many instances; and we don’t read them for the sake of enlisting them in a cause of our own. We should want students to read such writers so that they may learn to enjoy the activity of mind, the pleasure of forms, the beauty of language—in short, the arts in their own right. By contrast, there is a recurrent clamor in the university for “relevance,” a notion hard to resist (who wishes to be known as irrelevant?) but proceeding from an impoverished view of political life, and too often ephemeral in its excitements and transient in its impact. I recall seeing in the late 1960s large stacks of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice in the Stanford University bookstore. Hailed as supremely “relevant” and widely described as a work of genius, this book has fallen into disuse in a mere two decades. Cleaver himself drifted off into some sort of spiritualism, ceasing thereby to be “relevant.” Where, then, is Soul on Ice today? What lasting value did it impart? American culture is notorious for its indifference to the past. It suffers from the provincialism of the contemporary, veering wildly from fashion to fashion, each touted by the media and then quickly dismissed. But the past is the substance out of which the present has been formed, and to let it slip away from us is to acquiesce in the thinness that characterizes so much of our culture. Serious education must assume, in part, an adversarial stance toward the very society that sustains it—a democratic society makes the wager that it’s worth supporting a culture of criticism. But if that criticism loses touch with the heritage of the past, it becomes weightless, a mere compendium of momentary complaints. 3. Bring in your Catcher book for return! Due for Monday Fill out this survey! |
Archives
May 2024
|