Classics students need long projects

I've been working on a couple of academic writing projects today, and I'm struck by how much tedium is involved. Notice I didn't say 'how tedious they are'; I find both project intellectually engaging and worthwhile.

So my idle thought is this: Perhaps the format of undergrad and grad work encourages a short attention span, which becomes a handicap later on. I can only speak to classics work, since that's my experience. No matter how gifted and diligent my students are, it is a rare college student indeed who has any notion of the kind of sustained attention a dissertation or article takes. Even we junior scholars are not immune. With the current article I'm working on, I still occasionally fall back into those grad student thought patterns: "You mean I defended my argument and put in a few footnotes on each page? And I'm still not done?"

Offering students, at the very least, projects that span multiple terms might help them decide if academe is for them and help them figure out good work habits before the stakes get too high.

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"Something you cannot purchase or wear - knowledge"

The Miami Herald makes these classical tours sound more serious than many college classes:

Close to marking 40 years afloat, and celebrating the second year of its newest makeover and re-naming, the Aegean Odyssey is not for the tattooed masses nor the jewels-by-Harry-Winston crowd. Its passengers love something you cannot purchase or wear — knowledge....The passengers can’t always count on laughing during their pre-tour lectures, but the people booking cruises on Voyages to Antiquity are assured of authoritative presentations followed by educational, even fascinating, visits to places where Western civilizations began and prospered, struggled, and sometimes were extinguished by ruthless competitors. [emphasis mine]

I love that first quote - not a definition of knowledge exactly, but a detaching of it from things it's sometimes conflated with (major in the right 'practical' subject, and you'll rake in the money, etc.) And I like that the article acknowledges that most audiences expect humor in lectures, even when it's incongruous with the subject matter.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/29/2608086/voyages-to-antiquity.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/29/2608086/voyages-to-antiquity.html#storylink=cpy

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"Plague bad, light good"

Mary Beard discusses  the complications that can arise when filming on the ancient Acropolis:

The script vetting [by the Greek authorities] comes right down to the interpretation of classical history and culture. Try saying that the god Apollo was a god of plague as well as of light and purity and, I'm told, you'll have a struggle on your hands. You'll need to go armed to the vetting meeting with a copy of the Iliad (which says just that) under your arm, and be prepared for a fight. (The fact is that Greek authorities dont like nasty aspersions being cast on their ancient gods. Plague bad, light good.)

I'm reminded of our Greek tour guide who defended Heinrich Schliemann on a daily basis. But, as I came to find out, so does Michael Wood (In Search of the Trojan War). Pin It

Elizabeth I by Margaret George

Since I found George's recent Helen of Troy slow, I thought I should report that her Elizabeth I is wonderful. The novel begins with the build-up to the first Armada and ends with Elizabeth's death. It is written in Elizabeth's own voice. I imagine it took courage to write in the first-person voice of one of the most inscrutable figures of early modern history.

I found the humility and weariness that shone through in Elizabeth's narration completely authentic and believable. It seems to me (the husband and I had a discussion of this after watching The Tudors), that Elizabeth's strength lay in her realistic assessment of her own power. In this she seems to have been the opposite of her megalomaniac father.

Which brings me to another thing I appreciated about this book -- that Elizabeth thought about her mother and father from time to time without making a huge deal out of it. At one point she thanks her mother for having the courage to seek a high-profile position in the world, and she often wishes she could discuss state affairs with her father. She doesn't agonize excessively over her parents' tortured history. That's believable to me. It's a remarkable story to us, but Elizabeth had lived with it all her life.

If you love historical fiction, give this book a shot. I got it as a Kindle ebook from my local library.

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"In the depths of digital libraries lie dead Iliads."

The "Siege of the Iliad" over at the Chronicle is a fun, fast read. I appreciate its tight focus on the issue of translation style -- it's very easy (very easy) to become pedantic or get bogged down in scholarly minutiae when talking about Homer.

But the Iliad appealing mainly to fighters or manly men? Nah. It's actually striking how many prominent English language Homerists are women. And Simone Weil's "The Iliad or the Poem of Force" makes a cogent (and passionate) argument for viewing Homer's poem as anti-war.

I do wonder why more women haven't translated Homer. It may be a perception issue, where there's a concern that such a translation would be taken less seriously. It seems odd, when nearly every other Greek genre has been translated by both men and women, but gender stereotypes can be odd like that.

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Read what you need

I find I'm writing and researching a bit more effectively these days. Part of it is that it's now so important to be published, and so catastrophic not to be published, that I care less about potential weaknesses in my writing or argument. But I've also become more disciplined about what I read. I've come to trust my own sense of what is or is not relevant to a paper I'm writing, and I'm not afraid to stop reading something if it won't help me.

I think sometimes we bring to our research a doggedness about reading scholarship that's left over from our graduate seminar days. We start reading an article for our diss., get the sense that it's not going to be too helpful, but we feel like we should finish because we're used to making ourselves finish articles for seminar discussions.

And it's not that we can never return to that mode of 'just seeing what's out there.' But I have come to see that taking that attitude during a work in progress is a recipe for not finishing.

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious. I've always known there were flaws in my reading and writing process, and I'm pleased to have figured one of them out.

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Kermit the Frog as a college instructor

Watch as Cookie Monster tries to 'flirt his way to an A' at 2:09...

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Uhtred of Bebbanburg returns!

I'm going to write (scholarly writing) for a couple of hours, and then reward myself with the new Uhtred of Bebbanburg novel, Death of Kings. The series (6 books so far) follows the adventures of a ninth-century Thor-worshipping Saxon warrior who loves to poke fun at the pieties and 'middle class values' of Anglo-Saxon life.

From The Burning Land (the previous book):

Next morning it was raining like the world was ending and so I waited until the wind and weather had done their worst. I roamed the monastery and eventually found myself in a dank corridor where three miserable-looking monks were copying manuscripts. An older monk, white-haired, sour-faced and resentful, supervised them. He wore a fur stole over his habit, and had a leather quirt with which he doubtless encouraged the industry of the three copyists. "They should not be disturbed, lord," he dared to chide me. He sat on a stool beside a brazier, the warmth of which did not reach the three scribblers. 

"The latrines haven't been licked clean," I told him, "and you look idle." 

So the older monk went quiet and I looked over the shoulders of the ink-stained copyists. One, a slack-faced youth with fat lips and a fatter goiter on his neck, was transcribing a life of Saint Ciaran, which told how a wolf, a badger, and a fox had helped build a church in Ireland, and if the young monk believed that nonsense then he was as big a fool as he looked. The second was doing something useful by copying a land grant, though in all probability it was a forgery. 

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"Hour-long lectures on the color of Dido's hair"

Lauren Davis's piece on the survival of our pop culture is lovely and imaginative. But there's a more important reason I liked it: it explains why my classical studies students prefer Homer to Vergil:

Today... the Aeneid is relegated to upper-level Latin classes, while middle schoolers and high schoolers get the Greeks' mythical side of the story with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. So why do Hector and Achilles get a starring role in English class (and, consequently, big box office movies) while Aeneas and Dido don't? A Latin teacher once explained to me that when she tried to teach Vergil's poem in English, she had very little to say. The Aeneid is one of the great works of Western literature, but appreciating it depends heavily on understanding the language in which it was written: Vergil's word choices, his syntax, even the number of times he uses certain words to describe Dido's hair. (I had a Latin teacher who could deliver hour-long lectures on the color of Dido's hair.)

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Comments

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Update: After looking at the Known Issues for Blogger page, I have changed my comments settings and hopefully fixed the problem.

Please let me know if you are having trouble leaving comments. One reader has already let me know of a problem with this via the contact form (as well as leaving a thoughtful comment on my previous post). If you have encountered this problem before and know how to solve it, suggestions are appreciated. Many thanks! Pin It

Is Mythology a made-up subject?

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So, another semester of Mythology. It's an important class for my department, a great way to get students interested in the ancient world, etc. But ... what is it supposed to be about?

I just wonder every time I teach it, what is it other than a low-level survey of ancient literature? I throw in some mythological theory just to try to be somewhat true to the subject matter. But I feel like that's more relevant to the later works that use Greek mythology than it is to the original works themselves. Especially if that's all you're going to read.

Take Oedipus Rex, for example (Please :)). It's clearly compelling to interpret it from a psychological standpoint. So we read it and talk about the characters' psychology. I feel like I should then go and try to interpret it using one of the other theories of myth we've studied. The ideological approach, perhaps.

But most undergrads (especially those with a very firm idea of what a lower-level class should be like) won't go there with you, frankly. The idea that you explain a work one way and then turn around and explain it the other way is something they're not willing to entertain.

So you end up reading OR and then talking about psychology. Exactly like you would do in a lit. survey course.

Myth might be a more meaningful course if you could span time periods a bit more. Read Greek tragedy and then some of the neoclassical works by Racine, the Odyssey and then a bit of Joyce, maybe. But again, students are overwhelmingly likely (in my opinion) to see that as exceeding one's brief. And maybe they're right. Pin It

Reining in undergraduate paper topics

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Sorry I haven't been around lately, I've been working on a conference abstract and trying not to have it come straight from my dissertation. A surprisingly hard task.

Anyway, one of my colleagues received a paper this semester entitled something like "A Guide to .... [something an undergraduate can't possibly be an expert in.]" It made me wonder, what the heck is it with undergraduate paper topics?

At one of the schools where I used to work, every senior had to do an undergraduate thesis, a serious, rigorous research project, etc., etc. And the topics were just awful. Nearly every one had to do with material culture or nebulous cultural topics. (We did not have anything like the kind of library you need to research such subjects.) Nearly every one had problems with its thesis statement. I later found out that the students spent nearly half the semester developing a thesis statement. Good heavens, by that time you've invested so much time in the subject you're going to squeeze a thesis out of it however you can.

It was around this time I developed a theory about undergraduate research papers, which is that almost all their problems can be solved by 1) encouraging them to think small and 2) making sure their thesis statement asks a single question. By following these guidelines I have been able to get entire classes to hand in thesis statements that didn't have to be rewritten.

I continue to wonder why so many undergraduate research projects are hampered by vast topics and vague, 7-part thesis statements. As someone still fairly new to the profession, I'm willing to believe there's a good reason. I'd just like to know what it is before I sit down to read another senior thesis that claims to be the definitive work on ancient women or Greek science. Pin It