Whether or not willed, involuntary, or a mixture of each, the declining literacy of faculty college students is by now so usually lamented that stories of it ought to not come as a shock. And but, on some stage, they nonetheless do: English majors in regional Kansas universities discover the opening to Bleak Home just about unintelligible; even college students at “extremely selective, elite schools” wrestle to learn, not to mention comprehend, books of their entirety. Issues had been totally different in 1941, and really totally different certainly for those who occurred to be taking English 135 on the College of Michigan, a category titled “Destiny and the Particular person in European Literature.” The trainer: a sure W. H. Auden.
In his capability as an educator, the poet threw down the gauntlet of an “infamously troublesome” syllabus, as literary tutorial and YouTuber Adam Walker explains in his new video above, that “requested undergraduates to examine 6,000 pages of traditional literature.”
Not that the course was out of contact with present occasions: in its historic second, “Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and expanded into Jap Europe. Systematic extermination begins with mass shootings, and the equipment of genocide is accelerating. It’s no accident that Auden takes an curiosity in destiny and the person in European literature” — a theme that, as he frames it, begins with Dante. After the whole lot of The Divine Comedy, Auden’s college students had their free selection between Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Sophocles’ Antigone.
From there, the required studying plunged into Horace’s Odes and Augustine’s Confessions, 4 Shakespeare performs, Pascal’s Pensées, Goethe’s Faust (however solely Half I), and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to call only a few texts. Not everybody would contemplate Dostoevsky European, in fact, however then, no one would contemplate Herman Melville European, which for Auden was hardly a motive to depart Moby-Dick off the syllabus. Walker describes that novel as related to the course’s themes of “obsession and cosmic wrestle,” evident in all these works and their therapies of “ardour and historic forces, and the way people navigate these forces”: concepts that transcend nationwide and cultural boundaries by definition. Whether or not they would come throughout to the form of twenty-first-century college students who’d balk at being assigned even a full-length Auden poem is one other query fully.
View the syllabus in a bigger format right here.
Associated content material:
W. H. Auden Recites His 1937 Poem “As I Walked Out One Night”
Uncover Hannah Arendt’s Syllabus for Her 1974 Course on “Considering”
David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus: How you can Train Severe Literature with Light-weight Books
Donald Barthelme’s Syllabus Highlights 81 Books Important for a Literary Training
Carl Sagan’s Syllabus & Ultimate Examination for His Course on Crucial Considering (Cornell, 1986)
Marshall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buckminster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Fashionable Know-how & Media (1971)
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His initiatives embody the Substack publication Books on Cities and the ebook The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Observe him on the social community previously often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
