29 Comments
One of many casualties
According to anonymous sources, the committee in charge of next year’s Lit Hum syllabus has arrived a series of changes to the curriculum. While not final, these changes are not expected to undergo much revision.
Shakespeare’s King Lear, one of the most resilient texts in the history of Lit Hum, will be absent from next year’s syllabus. The play had been taught from 1937 until 2006 and then again from 2009 to present. It is to be replaced by the Bard’s The Tempest, which has been taught in brief bursts since 1941.
Euripides’s Medea, and The Book of Job are also set to be removed entirely. Medea has been on the syllabus since 2003 and has been taught sporadically since 1937, while Job has been taught continuously since 1990 and for most years before that. The final fatality, Goethe’s Faust, has enjoyed long stretches of obscurity on the syllabus, most recently from 2001 through 2012. It returned to the syllabus in 2013, but its journey seems once again at an end.
Readings from Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Montaigne’s Essays are to be reduced, but those—both mainstays of the syllabus—will remain on the official syllabus.
Returning to the curriculum in addition to The Tempest are Boccacio’s Decameron (last taught from 1986 through 2011) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (taught exclusively between 1937 and 1973).
All of this will come with some restructuring, as well. Genesis, in an effort to bring it closer to its proper chronological place, will be read directly after the Odyssey. Vergil’s Aeneid will also move up a bit so that it’s read in the first semester, nearer to its friend the Iliad.
Syllabus history from the Lit Hum website.
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29 Comments
@Anonymous may as well go to yale
@Lucille I don’t really *care* for Job.
@Anonymous i have a feeling this is not based on the survey they asked everyone to take at the end of the year. because i’m pretty sure at least everyone in my class liked Medea.
@when will they add hunger games?
@NO Removing Medea *and* Lear?
@alum Really bad idea to teach genesis after odyssey..
There is a reason that you go odyssey, iliad, greek stuff, aeneid…..
@Truer words were never spoken than those from Animal House... Professor Jennings (Donald Sutherland): Now…what can we say of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”? Well, it’s a very long poem, it was written a long time ago, and I’m sure a lot of you have difficulty understanding exactly what Milton was trying to say. Certainly we know that he was trying to describe the struggle between good and evil, right?
(picks up an apple from his desk) Okay. The most intriguing character, as we all know from our reading, was (writing “SATAN” on the blackboard) Satan. Now, was Milton trying to tell us that being bad was more fun than being good?
(He takes a bite out of the apple; a long pause as he chews and realizes that the class remains unmoved)
Okay…don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring, too. He, uh, he’s a little bit long-winded, he doesn’t translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.
(the bell rings, and the students begin to leave) But that does not relieve you from your responsibility for this material! Now, I’m waiting for reports from some of you! (students pay no attention to him) Listen, I’m not joking! This is my job!
@Anonymous Moving up the Aeneid is fantastic. The rest… :/
@Anonymous This is ridiculous, bring back Faust
@Good choice I like this decision. The Tempest lends itself very well to introduce post-colonial, gender, race, and queer theory.
@Anonymous Tempest is incredible, and it’s a great followup for On Cannibals, but not at the expense of losing Lear. Also, definitely not queer or gender studies. Postcolonial and race, yes, but gender no more than Lear, and queer not at all. I think there are other texts that can and do (did, because they fucking cu Medea) fill that void without changing the overall arc and purpose of Lithum. At any rate, I think it’d be great to have them both, but if they only have time for one, it definitely should be Lear, or possibly Richard II. Tempest isn’t even representative of Shakespeare, let alone Renaissance thought.
@Anonymous How can they gut the course like this? What purpose does it serve to cut Medea, or Faust? Or to shrink down the already minimal Montaigne? And Tempest over Lear? Lear fits perfectly with the Core; Tempest doesn’t fit with anything at all, it hardly fits with the rest of Shakespeare. Adding Paradise Lost is even more absurd. There’s a reason why we have semester-long courses devoted to PL, it’s impossible to get through it in a matter of days. The only good news in this mess is moving Virgil up and the return of Boccacio.
What the actual fuck.
@Anonymous HOW COULD YOU REMOVE JOB
@someday they'll be like “i’ve made a huge mistake”
@I HEART WHITE GUYS
@anon Sorry that white guys have contributed the most to literature art and science throughout history . The only other group that has contributed non negligible amounts to these subjects are Arabs
@CC 16 I really hope you’re a troll. There’s an argument that can be made for Lit Hum’s syllabus’s exclusiveness, but it has nothing to do with putting down non-Western cultures.
@anon Please tell me about all the great non white/arab empires throughout history, oh wait you cant because they do not exist. Stupid dynasties in China and crap like Kahn don’t have shit on the western side in terms of great works and science. Math was created by Arabs and perfected by Europeans. Science has taken its greatest leaps in the last 600 years in European/American countries. Tell me all about the Newtons, Galileos, and Eisensteins of non European cultures. All about the great South African writers from 1000 A.D. please enlighten me on how much these great civilizations that still get diseases from fucking goats have done for the world and its advancement
@anon There are tons, but your ignorant ass doesn’t know them. Confucius, Lau tzu, Popul Vuh, Bhaghivad Gita. THE LIST GOES ON -not to mention the innumerable “idolatrous” books that white men burned when they began colonization. Many more that simply haven’t been translated. STUF, because you sound like a 16th century colonizer, plague spreading swine.
@child don’t troll so hard, you might hurt yourself.
@child in response to the ignoramus cc16 of course.
@Harmony Hunter Alphabetical language propagates chiefly from the activities of people with physical histories away from central, equatorial land. The logical puzzles of alphabetical language are sublime. However, alphabetical language goes hand in hand with social inequality; to learn languages like English and Latin requires many years of dedicated focus, when you cannot be dedicated to agriculture. So other people have to harvest food for you if you are learning alphabetical language.
@Anonymous ok but like who is the harmony hunter
@Anonymous ^^clearly a first-year
@A Travesty how can they remove Faust? Not only one of the best written, most entertaining entries on the LitHum syllabus, but also one of the most relevant and profound in relation to CC.
@CC '17 still no sappho :/
@umm only one of her complete poems has survived… please tell me how that and fragments of a few other poems are substantial enough to be put in the syllabus.
@anonymous I would wait and see re: Sappho.
@"While not final, these changes are not expected to undergo much revision." “Readings from Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Montaigne’s Essays are to be reduced, but those—both mainstays of the syllabus—will remain on the official syllabus.”