Whether you want, involuntary or a mixture of both, the drop in student literacy is now so often deplored that reports are no longer a surprise. And yet, at a certain level, they always do it: English majors at the regional universities of Kansas Find the opening of Dark house practically unintelligible; Even students at “Highly selective elite colleges” Fight to read, and even less understand, the books in their entirety. Things were different in 1941, and very different indeed if you had taken English 135 at the University of Michigan, a class entitled “Fate and the individual in European literature”. The instructor: a certain Wh Auden.
In his capacity as an educator, the poet threw the glove from a “sadly difficult” program, as explained to the literary academic and youtuber Adam Walker His new video aboveThis “asked the undergraduate students to read around 6,000 pages of classical literature”.
Not that the course was disconnected from current events: in its historic moment, “Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and extended to Eastern Europe. Systematic extermination begins with mass shots, and the genocide machinery accelerates. After the entirety of Divine ComedyAuden students had their free choice between Aeschyle ‘ Agamemnon or sophocles' Antigone.
From there, the required reading plunged into Horace Odes And Augustin ConfessionsFour pieces of Shakespeare, Pascal Thoughts,, Goethe's Bewilder (but only part I), and Dostoevsky The Karamazov brothersTo name only a few texts. Not everyone would consider Dostoevsky Europe Moby-dick outside the program. Walker describes this novel as being relevant for the themes of the course “obsession and cosmic”, obvious in all these works and their treatments of “passion and historical forces, and how individuals sail by definition of these forces”: ideas that transcend national and cultural borders by definition. That they meet the kind of students of the 21st century who are reluctant to be assigned even a complete Auden poem is another question.
Display the program in A larger format here.
Related content:
Wh Auden recites his 1937 poem “while I went out one evening”
Discover the Hannah Arendt program for its 1974 course on “Thinking”
David Foster Wallace's 1994 syllabus: how to teach serious literature with light books
Donald Barthelme's program highlights 81 essential books for literary education
Syllabus and final exam by Carl Sagan for its course on critical thinking (Cornell, 1986)
Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.