What’s So Great About the Great Books?

What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia; Princeton University Press

It would be tempting to put Naomi Kanakia’s new book on the crowded shelf of recent works that have sought to defend the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly the humanities. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (2021) is the most logical precursor to set it beside. But in championing Great Books, Kanakia is not staking out ground in campus curriculum debates. Instead, she addresses the lay reader, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” the nonacademic reader who, like Kanakia, may have spent formative years reading science fiction or fantasy more than literary fiction or philosophy. A convert to the Great Books in her 20s, Kanakia wants the Gone Girl reader (her example) to at least consider moving on to Proust and Middlemarch. Todd Shy, The American Scholar

A new global gender divide is emerging

One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others? 

The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one. In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye. In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up. John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times

l'articolo risale a circa due anni fa, è datato 26 gennaio 2024, ma l'ho scoperto ora e lo trovo molto interessante e ancora rilevante, anche guardando alla situazione italiana 

Using AI in the classroom

This July, Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University, started a new role on campus as the University’s first associate provost for artificial intelligence. Littman’s charge includes supporting AI-related research, expanding opportunities for students to engage with AI across a diverse array of disciplines and advising operational units on AI use and working with external entities to maximize the impact of Brown's AI research.

Q: What about AI in research? What kinds of things are you thinking about there?

There are two broad categories here. There's research on AI specifically — how to make it work better, how to use it responsibly, etc. Then there's research that’s not on AI per se, but that AI can help to support. Brown University

e molto altro, un articolo interessante! 

Lumps of Cram

[...] the contingent character of the subject we call English. The very name of the discipline, as Stefan Collini argues, is slippery with ambiguity, ‘an adjective masquerading as a noun’. What is the missing noun to which English refers: literature, language or both? If both, does English belong with the study of other modern languages and literatures? Is its primary concern with literature in English or with the culture of Englishness? Colin Kidd, London Review of Books

recensione a:  Stefan Collini, Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford UP)

Is Careerism Ruining College?

The fundamental questions: Have the scales of academia—weighed down by soaring tuition and the expensive real world that awaits Gen Z college grads—tipped too far toward pre-professionalism, a term for careerism on steroids? And are students too focused on getting into the right campus clubs and nabbing the perfect internships to reap the advantages of a diverse, liberal-arts education? 

For Sangeeta Bhatia ’90, liberal arts and high-level career success are not contradictory concepts—they’re directly related. While Bhatia says her parents told her she could choose from three careers, doctor, engineer, or entrepreneur (she became all three, with a PhD to boot), she feels her coursework in humanities was key to her ultimate success as a biomedical entrepreneur.  [...]

“I describe the process of invention as a bit like writing a song,” Bhatia says. “You start in one direction and make it up as you go. You form collabs with others. You riff. Creating something out of nothing and imagining the future requires inspiration—and to be inspired, students need to be exposed to as much outside of their field as in it.” Will Bunch, Brown Alumni Magazine

leggi anche The Gender Q, sempre sul Brown Alumni Magazine, 

 

Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168

Executive Order 14168, issued on 20 January, is titled ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. In the book I published last year, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I noted that the campaign against ‘gender ideology’ was very late to gain ground in the US. The term itself was coined by the Vatican back in the 1990s. It was circulated in Latin America by both Catholic and evangelical churches (thus helping to mend a rift between them), and taken up by the World Congress of Families, especially in 2017, when Trump representatives were in attendance. It was an incendiary topic in presidential campaigns in Costa Rica, Uganda, South Korea, Taiwan, France, Italy, Argentina and Brazil, to name a few, though the US press hardly noticed. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán effectively allied with the Russian Orthodox Church in condemning ‘gender ideology’; in turn, Putin declared his fidelity to J.K. Rowling’s critique of trans rights, asserting that the ‘gender freedoms’ associated with ‘the West’ were a threat to Russia’s spiritual essence and national security. The last two popes have both taken a position against gender ideology; Pope Francis, despite his occasional progressivism, has accelerated the discourse, insisting that gender is a threat to men and women, to civilisation, the family and the natural order of human relations. Judith Butler, lrb

Judith Butler è una filosofa americana, insegna a Berkeley.

Q&A with Dr. Michael Silverstein: How social media can impact child health

 

Q: Can you help put the social media phenomenon in context? How does it compare to previous phenomena that were assumed to have negative effects on children’s mental health, such as violent television programs or video games? 

Unlike, say, the video games of yesteryear, social media follows you from school to soccer practice to your friend's house to your house; from the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom. This phenomenon can exist and persist in most physical spaces, as well as in a person’s mental space. Let’s say a classmate is being mean to a student at school. Well, the student can get away from that, at least temporarily, by coming home. But if a classmate is being mean to a student over text or social media, they can’t get away from it, even if they leave school. They will still be confronted or reminded by it whenever they turn on or even look at the computer, the phone or the watch they use to interact with others online. That makes it uniquely powerful in terms of potential mental health effects.  Corrie Pikul, Brown University

The End of the English Major

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. Nathan Heller, New Yorker

un articolo molto interessante, che collega il declino delle humanities ai costi stellari delle università americane e ai conseguenti debiti che gli studenti devono ripagare alla fine degli studi, ma anche a molti altri fattori, come al fatto che molti studenti hanno idee vaghe su che cosa siano le humanities. Colpa nostra, anche. Comunque da leggere.

sempre sul New Yorker, un bell'articolo sui mondi di Italo Calvino, Mavellous Things, Merve Emre.

ancora su Old Babes in the Wood (Chatto & Windus),  Lisa O'Kelly interevista Margaret Atwood, The Guardian

e anche:  

Growing numbers of women in UK are joining forces with friends to run independent bookshops, Nadia Khomami, The Guardian

e la longlist dell'International Booker Prize, sempre sul Guardian

 

Syllabus: Myth in the Hebrew Bible

Myth in the Hebrew Bible is a complex and controversial topic, depending on how one defines myth and sometimes on one’s religious orientation. In everyday usage today, myth carries a meaning of something untrue, a fable, a fiction, or an illusion. That usage has a long history, traceable back to certain Greek philosophers. Anthropologists and historians of religion, however, use the term “myth” with a quite different meaning. For them myth refers to a traditional story, usually associated with the time of origins (e.g., creation or some important institution) that has paradigmatic significance for the society in which the story is operative. In this latter meaning, myth is characteristic of every traditional society; some would argue that myth continues to be operative even in modern, scientific society, camouflaged under other terms, including science itself (e.g., the big bang theory). Persons who hold that the Bible has been infallibly revealed by God and those who consider myth as something untrue may well find it offensive to posit that myth is present in the Bible. By contrast, those who see myth as one of the ways that a traditional society expresses it most profound truths may find inspiration in seeing biblical narratives as myth. Oxford Bibliographies

The history of Nazism in Small Objects

‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that we had two cookbooks on our shelf at home with the same title’ – a 1938 edition by her grandmother Alice and one from the following year attributed to Rudolf Rösch. When she did notice, however, it provided a key to unlocking some fascinating family history and a little known strand of Nazi persecution. Matthew Reisz, Spectator

interessante recensione a due libri che attraverso oggetti comuni - un libro di cucina, un coltello - scrivono insolite storie del nazismo. I libri sono: Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook, di Karina Urbach (MacLehose/Quercus); e My Grandfather’s Knife and Other Stories of War and Belonging (Joseph Pearson). Nella foto Alice Urbach - l'autrice del libro di cucina di cui si parla.

E, dagli archivi del Guardian, un articolo sull'importanza della letteratura nell'insegnarci a capire meglio i sentimenti altrui:

New research shows works by writers such as Charles Dickens and Téa Obreht sharpen our ability to understand others' emotions – more than thrillers or romance novels. Liz Bury, The Guardian

Il triste declino delle discipline umanistiche

Indeed, Russian culture itself has become a target. Russian artists who lived long before the birth of Putin, or the creation of the Soviet secret police that trained him, have been cancelled. In Italy, writer Paolo Nori’s lectures on Dostoevsky were “postponed.” “This is to avoid any controversy,” explained the email he received, “especially internally, during a time of strong tensions.” Nori responded: “I realize what is happening in Ukraine is horrible, and I feel like crying just thinking about it. But what is happening in Italy is ridiculous. . . . Not only is being a living Russian wrong in Italy, but also being a dead Russian. That an Italian university would ban a course on an author like Dostoevsky is unbelievable.” After a backlash, the university reversed its decision.

But numerous cancellations have not been reversed. Gary Saul Morson, First Things

io credo che continuare a studiare la letteratura russa, così come tutte le letterature, sia un modo di combattere i dispotismi. E' questo che dico ai miei studenti. Dobbiamo rivendicare il ruolo fondamentale delle materie umanistiche nella formazione di cittadini pensanti e pacifici. Invece le cose stanno andando diversamente, purtroppo, come si vede da questo articolo:

Hiring in the humanities last peaked in 2007-2008, when the MLA’s jobs report recorded 3,506 openings across English and other languages. By 2019-2020, that number had fallen to 1,411. Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post Magazine

Books Do Furnish a Civilization

IN THEIR NEW BOOK, The Library: A Fragile History, a splendid study of the institution of the library from its origins until today, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen recount the initiation, the innovations, and the dissolution of library after library, personal as well as public, scholarly as well as lending, over the centuries. The word “fragile” in their subtitle touches on the unsettled conditions of libraries throughout history. For books have everywhere and at all times been lost, stolen, vandalized, spoiled by neglect, while entire libraries have been abandoned, systematically despoiled, set afire, even deliberately bombed. Joseph Epstein, Commentary

interessanti riflessioni sulle biblioteche, e anche sui classici, con qualche sorprendente scoperta, e altre considerazioni più à la page:

Historically, in America, the true strength of the Classics and of a Classical education has not been among the elite but among the rising middle class. Naomi Kanakia, LA Review of Books

 

Highly Irregular

Il titolo si riferisce a un divertente libro sulle stranezze della lingua inglese, Highly Irregular, di Arika Okrent (Oxford University Press). "Ms. Okrent investigates more or less familiar questions: Is the letter “y” a vowel or a consonant? What does it mean to say that the exception “proves” the rule? Why does English have so many synonyms? She also ponders whether “I am woe” would be better than “woe is me”; what egging someone on has to do with eggs; and why we don’t tell a restaurant server, “I’m a large spender. Make it a big pizza.” Henry Hitchings, WSJ

 

Project Cassandra: Three years ago, a small group of academics at a German university launched an unprecedented collaboration with the military – using novels to try to pinpoint the world’s next conflicts. [...]

The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defence ministry predict the future.

The academics weren’t AI specialists, or scientists, or political analysts. Instead, the people the colonels had sought out in a stuffy top-floor room were a small team of literary scholars led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature with wild curls and a penchant for black roll-necks. Philip Oltermann, The Guardian

Una preghiera di Isaac Singer

The prayer below was composed by Polish-born Jewish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer (ca. 1903-1991), whose published work includes numerous volumes of fiction, essays, memoir, and stories for children. It was handwritten on the back of a rent receipt made out to Singer by Riesner & Gottlieb, which shows he lived on 410 Central Park West, Apartment 12F, and that he paid $73.50 for March 1952. Tablet

Oh yes! The best books about sex. Kate Lister, The Guardian

The fall of the intellectual. Ross Douthat scans the landscape for novelists, filmmakers, intellectuals, and everywhere sees torpor and repetition, NS

L'importanza degli studi umanistici

 As a participant in the Graduate School’s first Summer Proctorship Program, religious studies Ph.D. student Tara Dhaliwal used her research and writing skills to introduce the work of Brown scientists to industry partners. Brown

Reading Elena Ferrante in English

Millions of readers in thrall to Elena Ferrante, the secretive and wildly popular Italian novelist, must accept certain conditions.

[...]

And if they are reading Ferrante’s books in English, they are absorbing, whether they realize it or not, the nimble translation work of Ann Goldstein. Joumana Khatib, NYT.

The Slow Death of the University

Un articolo molto interessante sul lento declino delle università, asservite ai bisogni della società e non più liberi centri di pensiero e sperimentazione. "Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism. Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism". Terry Eagleton, chronicle.

The Killing of the Creative Class

Scott Timberg, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press). Ecco qualche dato sconcertante, e triste: "Over the past two decades, the number of English majors graduating from Yale University has plummeted by 60 percent; at Stanford University in 2013, only 15 percent of students majored in the humanities. In American universities, more than 50 percent of faculty is adjuncts, pittance-paid laborers with no medical insurance and barely a prayer to bolster them. In the publishing and journalism trades, 260,000 jobs were nixed between 2007 and 2009. Since the turn of the century, around 80 percent of cultural critics writing for newspapers have lost their jobs. There are only two remaining full-time dance critics in the entire United States of America. A not untypical yearly salary in 2008 for a professional dancer was $15,000". William Giraldi, newrepublic.

La fine dei prof.

Insegnare è una carriera che nessuno vuol più fare. "My undergraduates’ career plans are a peculiar mix of naked ambition and hair-shirt altruism. If they pursue investment banking, they do so not merely to make money. Rather, they wish to use their eventual wealth to distribute solar light bulbs to every resident of a developing nation. They’ll apply to the finest law schools in hopes of some day judging war criminals at The Hague. Countless want to code. They dream of engineering an app that will make tequila flow out of thin air into your outstretched shot glass. My students, I suspect, are receiving their professional advice from a council of emojis. There is one occupation, however, that rarely figures in their reveries. Few of these kids hanker to become professors". A scrivere è Jacques Berlinerblau, professore di Jewish civilization a Georgetown University. chronicleof highereducation.

Trigger Warning

Un altro attacco della political correctness ... alla letteratura, naturalmente. "Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans. ... At Oberlin College [nella foto] in Ohio, a draft guide was circulated that would have asked professors to put trigger warnings in their syllabuses. The guide said they should flag anything that might “disrupt a student’s learning” and “cause trauma,” including anything that would suggest the inferiority of anyone who is transgender (a form of discrimination known as cissexism) or who uses a wheelchair (or ableism). nyt.