|
|
THREE PILLARS
This course entails "a literary quest around the world in 180 days" which includes critical approaches of study to literary traditions from around the world, across diverse cultures and through times ancient to postmodern. Students are invited to bear in mind the wisdom of writers given here:
"Everything is the same; everything is different."
--Gertrude Stein
"We are more alike than we are unalike."
--Maya Angelou
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
--Aristotle
As students examining literatures from diverse eras, geographies, and peoples foreign to our own we will be struck by the particular differences of how people know, believe, understand life, discern values, create art, and tell stories.
We will seek to recognize the themes universal to the human condition, irrespective of time, place, and culture.
And we will consider things from others' perspectives while forming our own.
SCHOLARLY STANCE
You go to a great school not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thought, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness. Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.
-- William Cory, 19th Century English schoolmaster
MOTIVATION
"Study as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow."
--Edmund of Abingdon
APPROACH
"Stories we are told, stories we tell, stories that tell us."
|
