I listen to quite a few podcasts, and happened across one that included an interview with Wilfred McClay, a Professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. His excitement at creating this course, (with the equal participation of two other professors,) and hearing the stories of students who were able to take the course, lead me to search for more information. Here is a representative article, in various quotes (original here.)
In the fall of 1941, as a visiting faculty member at the University of Michigan, the poet W.H. Auden offered an undergraduate course of staggering intellectual scope, entitled “Fate and the Individual in European Literature.” We know little about the origins or trajectory of this remarkable course: how it was conceived, how it was taught, how it was received.
The course was enormous. It was as if Auden had put together an idiosyncratic and mainly literary version of a Great Books curriculum and compressed it into a single semester.
Beginning with the ancient Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, the course covered the Roman poet Horace, then St. Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, a bouquet of Shakespeare plays, Pascal, Racine, Blake, Goethe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, Eliot, and other certifiable greats, tossed in some then-classic scholarship about culture (including Ruth Benedict and C.S. Lewis), then washed it all down with the bubbly delights of nine opera libretti.
Some thought its high demands were a commentary on the lower standards to which education has devolved in our time. Others shook their heads in disbelief, dismissing the idea that Auden could possibly have imagined that students were actually doing the readings. But both sides seemed to agree that no teacher in his right mind would attempt something similar today.
Well, here at the University of Oklahoma, people have a pioneering spirit. They get their backs up when they hear that something can’t be done. After joining the OU faculty in the fall of 2013, I caught that spirit. While working with some of the most interesting and dedicated scholar-teachers I’d ever met, I thought about the Auden course and wondered if one might teach it, or at least something patterned after it.
I wasn’t sure I had the chops to do it. Yes, I’d had a Great Books education as an undergrad at St. John’s College, but that was a long time ago. My professional field was American history. What business did I have teaching Dante? I discovered two brave colleagues, David Anderson of the English Department and Kyle Harper of the Classics Department (and provost of the university), who were just as partially prepared as I but excited at the idea of team-teaching the course together. We found that there was complementarity in our respective areas of ignorance and a spirit of adventure that redeemed it all.
The two-semester course that we developed tries to capture the same sweep, intellectual richness, and mingling of seriousness and delight that Auden’s syllabus embodied. To accomplish this, we added a few things to the master’s own list and removed others. For some reason, just to pick one example, Auden didn’t include any epics. We have presumed to improve on him by including the Odyssey, Aeneid, Beowulf, and Paradise Lost, texts that (with Dante) form the backbone of the course’s first semester.
Throughout, we wrestle with the big questions conjured up by Auden’s title: what is the role of fate or destiny or providence in human affairs? What is the role of God or the gods? What is the meaning and extent of human freedom? What is the value of an individual person and what constitutes a meaningful life? How should we relate to those around us and to those in authority?
We have broken every rule of the postmodern academy, creating a highly demanding sequence of classic works, setting high expectations, and eschewing the grayness of theory and the reductionism of identity politics in favor of an intense engagement with the texts themselves. We insist upon literature as a distinctive form of knowledge and upon tradition as a source of creativity and insight.
We offer these books to students as a part of their legacy, as something that by right belongs to them, no matter who they are or what they look like or where they come from. And they respond with enthusiasm. Those who are prepared to give up on the millennial generation should come to our class. Their hope will be renewed, their defeatism defeated.
What is the role of fate or destiny or providence in human affairs?
What is the role of God or the gods?
What is the meaning and extent of human freedom?
What is the value of an individual person and what constitutes a meaningful life?
How should we relate to those around us and to those in authority?
What an amazing concept, as expressed in 5 deceptively simple sentences.
It was simple. I'm in.
The course syllabus is available online, so I have downloaded the page, and reproduced it here. My plan is to roughly follow the course schedule, and to read the texts. Some of them I have read, although for any that I have read, it is a long time ago!!
I'll be starting the readings the week of Nov 4th. Most of the books can be downloaded on Kindle for $0.99. I have downloaded a number of them, and then I switched and decided to go with the annotated versions as much as possible. So many characters and situations represent people and circumstances in life at the times the works were written, and they would have been obvious to those who read them at the time, but I have zero connection to historical Greeks, etc (except as an inheritor of their legacy and writings.) So, with the annotated versions, I'll get the inside jokes, side stories, and as a bonus, have a LOT more to read.
This is always something that I have wanted to tackle. I just hope that I can swim through it.
I'll be posting (or I hope to post) regular updates and information on the books on the list, as I read them and move forward. If you are interested in joining me for this project, drop me a line and we'll coordinate.
So here is what we'll be reading-----
Week 1 Homer, The Odyssey (Books 1-8)
Week 2 The Odyssey (Books 9-16) The Odyssey (Books 17-24)
Week 3 Aeschylus, Agamemnon Virgil, Aeneid (Books 1-4)
Week 4 Aeneid, (Books 5-8) Aeneid, (Books 9-12)
Week 5 Petronius, “Dinner Party of Trimalchio” Augustine, Confessions (Books 1-5) Week 6 Confessions, (Books 6-9) Beowulf (Lines 1-1382)
Week 7 Beowulf, (Lines 1383-end) Dante, Inferno (cantos 1-10)
Week 8 Inferno, (cantos 11-22) Inferno, cont’d (cantos 23-34) Week 9 Dante, Purgatorio (cantos 1-14) Purgatorio, cont’d (cantos 15-33) Week 10 Gawain and the Green Knight (Fits 1-2) Gawain (Fits 3-4)
Week 11 The Sonnet (see handout) The Tempest (Acts 1-3)
Week 12 The Tempest (Acts 3-5) King Lear (Acts 1-3)
Week 13 King Lear (Acts 3-5) Donne, selected lyrics (see handout)
Week 14 Racine, Phèdre
Week 15 Phèdre, cont’d Milton, Paradise Lost (Books 1-4)
Week 16 Paradise Lost (Books 5-8) Paradise Lost (Book 9-12)
