Benefits of grad school

via Wikimedia Commons

This recent NYT article (on lawyers’ need for training post-law school) fits in with something I’ve been thinking about: what enduring benefits does grad school confer on humanities profs, beyond a credential required for employment?

Grad school made my Latin and Greek much better, of course; writing a dissertation helped my research skills. But I have to wonder if grad schools go about this in the most useful way, since I've only once taught an author from one of my grad school seminars. I've also found writing a publishable article an absolutely foreign experience, despite having written and defended a dissertation.

Maybe going 'back to the basics' is a common reaction to adversity, but it's been odd how often in the five years since I started my career that I've returned to authors, teaching methods or writing tips I encountered in my undergrad classes. I know grad school must have been more than 8+ years of waiting to mature and practicing translation skills, but I'm finding it hard to identify specifics right now.

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Robin Hood, Canterbury Tales and ... human sacrifice?

I love that Baldrick from Blackadder has had a successful career working with such seemingly dry material as medieval history, but come on, human sacrifice as one of the top five medieval (rather than ancient) superstitions? Really? Pin It

'Oh dear, is that supposed to be the Round Table?'

Pop Classics' review of the King Arthur movie from 2004 made me laugh so hard I cried, especially the references to "Titus f***ing Pullo" and the deficiencies of Keira Knightley's wardrobe. Enjoy! Pin It

Classics and 'Specialness'

via Wikimedia Commons

I read with pleasure Mary Beard's post yesterday on her upcoming lecture "Does Classics Have a Future?" She is considering incorporating The Browning Version into the talk, focusing on the scene where the beleaguered classics teacher, Andrew Crocker-Harris, is given Robert Browning's translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon as a gift.

This caught my attention for a couple of reasons. One is that my SO showed me the 1994 Albert Finney film just after we had started dating, so it seems to be important to his idea of what the classics are. (I showed him Branagh's Henry V, a movie I can't watch at the moment because of its gratingly idealistic tone. [Look at us! We conquered France because our king is more closely related to the previous king that yours! Hooray!])

Beard's post, and the Browning Version scene, also mesh well with some thoughts I've been pondering about Classics and specialness. As a Gen Xer, I lived through the whole parental/pedagogical experiment with raising self-esteem as an end in itself. So part of why I value Classics is that it shows me both that I'm not special and that it doesn't matter that I'm not. For thousands of years, people have had their hopes dashed, let themselves down and made stupid decisions. (Like killing your brother's kids and serving them at a feast. Or sacrificing your daughter for the sake of a military expedition.)

Am I wild about living in a rather isolated town with less-than-pleasant winters? Of course not. But I understand that economic forces cannot always be overcome by "believing in yourself." And most importantly, studying classics has helped me develop an imaginative and creative life that should be able to transcend temporarily unpleasant circumstances. Pin It

'Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy'

via Wikimedia Commons

I've been reading In Search of the Trojan War by Michael Wood (full review coming soon). Wood has a detailed discussion of the the Troy myth's on medieval literature, noting that most medieval works about are based on something called The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy. The Iliad and Odyssey were virtually unknown; The Recuyell was the 'Homer' of this period. (It was also the first book printed in English, in 1475.)

I liked the sound of this work; as a dead languages nerd I was especially pleased that its very archaic English has not been updated. I did a little digging on it today (in between trying to get undergraduates interested in Latin personal pronouns -- ugh!). Here is a sample, from the reign of Saturn:

By the moyen of these thynges the renomee of kyng Saturn grewe. And the worlde was that tyme of gold, that is for to saye hyt was moche better and more haboundant in the dayes of mannes lyf and in plente of frutes of the erthe than in ony other tyme after. (Recuyell pp. 16-17)

How sweet would it be to offer an English class on the postclassical reception of the Trojan war? A girl can dream...

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"Io, Saturnalia!" T-Shirt and Mug

New in the Classics Daily shop: a t-shirt celebrating Saturnalia, the Roman holiday that likely influenced the date of Christmas.  It was celebrated from December 17-23 and featured revelry, funny hats and the giving of small gifts. Also available as a mug.

Previous offerings:

Cano ("I sing") iPhone and iPod case

Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo ("Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.")

Quod me non destruit, me nutruit ("What does not kill me makes me stronger.")

Epistula enim non erubescit ("A letter does not blush.")

Meles mellis non curat. ("Honey badger don't care")*
Id quod mater tua dixit non est. ("That's not what your mother said")
Quis pater tuus? ("Who's your daddy?")
O tempora! O mores! ("Shame on the age and its principles!")

      Venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum ("I'm the brightest witch of my age")


*available in several versions

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What's the matter with Athenaze?

My SO is teaching first year Greek from a text called Athenaze. We have both taught from it before with decent results. This semester it's a nightmare. Students don't learn vocabulary, are clueless about endings, and never do the readings.

I would have said before this semester that Athenaze is a 'good but not great' book. The problem is that there is a fairly small number of Classical Greek textbooks out there (discounting the self-study and reprint-from-the-nineteenth-century options). Hansen and Quinn's chapters are too long, and Mastronarde doesn't have long enough reading passages. 

Athenaze's major problem, I believe, is one that affects all reading-based Latin and Greek textbooks: it has too much faith in its own method. If you believe that students can learn the grammar and vocabulary through reading, you shouldn't be afraid to make the grammar explanations hard to find. Athenaze seems to take the approach that if you make it hard enough to locate an actual explanation of the grammar, the students will say to themselves, "gosh, I guess I should try to figure it out from this nice little story here." 

I kid, of course. I realize the grammar is probably not deliberately hard to find. But the readings getting completely out of control in terms of length does seem to be purposeful. Okay, it is likely that a reading-based approach helps students read Greek more naturally and therefore more quickly. But students are also conditioned (by evaluations, by RateMyProfessors and similar sites) to be constantly on the lookout for 'unfairness.' Readings that are suddenly twice as long as they were a few weeks ago certainly fall under that category.

So, what to do? Someone should revise Chase and Philips (a barebones 1960s textbook that makes up in clarity for what it lacks in reading practice). Or make a separate grammar handbook for Athenaze.

Or students could learn to memorize better. Right.

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'Speed and Quantity of Production'

From "In Praise of Fallow Fields," in the most recent Utne Reader:

"An economy that measures success primarily in terms of speed and quantity of production will eventually become toxic."

Yes. Pin It

'The World of Odysseus'

via Wikimedia Commons

Published in 1965 (rev. ed.), before the footnote revolution, The World of Odysseus is wonderfully clear and straightforward. Of course, some of what it says is (according to modern scholarship) exaggerated or irrelevant. For example, Finley is at pains to argue that the Greeks were not "primitive," and the scholar in me wants to know 1) what does he mean by primitive and 2) what does it matter?

Denial that the Greeks were 'primitive' is often an attempt to place Homeric epic apart and above the then-emergent field of comparative oral traditions. (Basically, the idea that you can learn about archaic Greek epic -- or any traditional epic -- by comparing it with epic traditions from other cultures.) Finley is fair-minded about this, according to his lights. In his appendix "The World of Odysseus Revisited," he argues that the Homeric-length poem recorded by the Slavic bard Avdo Medjedovic is inferior in quality to the Odyssey but that the methodology of oral tradition is still valid (143).

It is a great pleasure to read a book about the Odyssey and about those whose experiences shaped it (rather than a book about the other books about the Odyssey, which is how I would describe many more recent works in this field). The chapters on "Wealth and Labour," and "Household, Kin and Community" deal in a measured way with topics that are frequently underrepresented in classical scholarship. More recent works that covers these topics are often hijacked by trendy subfields, but Finley manages to cover them thoroughly and unemotionally, as far as I can tell. In "Wealth and Labor," his argument that the worst-off person was not a slave but a thes, an unattached person, was particularly cogent and striking (57ff). In "Household, Kin and Community" he vividly describes a world where almost none of a household's business had public relevance unless the head of household chose to make it so. His point is well taken since, with Homer as the foundation of Greek literature, classicists are sometimes tempted to fit 'the world of Odysseus' into the mold of a classical polis.

The World of Odysseus would be an excellent introduction to the background of the Iliad and Odyssey. It is also (as is pretty well apparent in my review) a great refresher for anyone already acquainted with the poems who is worn out by the tendentiousness of much current scholarship.

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"Cano" iPhone Case

New in the Classics Daily shop, an iPhone case that says cano, "I sing." (Also available for the iPod Touch.)

Previous offerings:

Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo ("Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.")

Quod me non destruit, me nutruit ("What does not kill me makes me stronger.")

Epistula enim non erubescit ("A letter does not blush.")

Meles mellis non curat. ("Honey badger don't care")*
Id quod mater tua dixit non est. ("That's not what your mother said")
Quis pater tuus? ("Who's your daddy?")
O tempora! O mores! ("Shame on the age and its principles!")

       Venefica aetatis meae illustratissima sum ("I'm the brightest witch of my age") Pin It