There was a film review of the new Wes Anderson flick The Darjeeling Limited last week in The New Yorker in which the reviewer asks: Can you have a thriving movie culture in a country without enough trains? It’s a great question– for those of us interested in all genres of American art. I, too,…
Read MoreI went to a roundtable the other night on “The Aesthetic” hosted by our English department. As you might expect, much of the discussion was guided by Kant’s Critique of Judgment, supplemented with the requisite considerations of Baumgarten and Burke. At one point, the discussion turned to the “sublime” and, of course, to the ready-to-hand…
Read MoreI was very pleased to see all of the interest in the To Student, or not to student post! The discussion, much of which was sparked by an initial distinction between a student-who-learns and a student-who-students (a la Sartre’s garçon de café) seemed to concentrate on the “inauthenticity” of the latter. I thought it might…
Read MoreA colleague of mine recently alerted me to an interesting passage in Garry D. Fenstermacher’s essay, “Rediscovering the Student in Democracy and Education,” in John Dewey and Our Educational Prospects: A Critical Engagement with Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Fenstermacher suggests imagining that the word “student” might function as a verb or a noun. He writes,…
Read More[Chet has forced me to place a temporary moratorium on Memphis-themed posts to this blog. But it’s only temporary.] I was tied up with Merleau-Pontyans shortly after the Columbia University speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but I did actually watch his speech in its entirety on CSPAN and wanted to offer my $0.02 on…
Read MoreMy cable was out over the weekend and I had to have a repairman come by yesterday morning to check it out. Because the cable company gave me a window of 10-noon to expect him, I was at home still scrambling to prep for my 1pm class when he arrived. My cable repair guy was…
Read MoreWe’ve moved on to the story of Cain and Abel, which is actually one of my favorites in the Bible. There are so many unexplained details in that story. Why didn’t God like Cain’s offering? (I mean, Cain and Abel were only the 2nd and 3rd human beings ever… it’s not like there was an…
Read More[Note to readers: Please keep reading. I promise there is a payoff at the end of this entry!] Now that I’ve finished up the Iliad, we’re moving on to a three-week study of the Bible. Although I actually began college as a theology student (and I am a preacher’s kid), I’ve never actually taught the…
Read MoreI am, again, inadvertantly competing with a couple of (bad) film versions of texts that I am teaching in my classes this semester. First, there’s the mega-blockbuster Troy, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles. Now, I haven’t seen Troy (though I have recently resolved to do so ASAP), but my understanding of it was that the…
Read MoreI always appreciate it when colleagues of mine share from their bags of pedagogical tricks, so I thought I might pass on a recent experiment that generated an eminently “teachable moment” for me. I’ve just begin teaching the Iliad in my course, which is a small seminar-tpye class. Yesterday, I decided to utilize an exercise…
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