journal article
LitStream Collection
Home
Fargue, Léon-Paul;Larbaud, Valery
2018 Common Knowledge
After the early death of the little-known but extraordinarily promising French poet Henry J.-M. Levet, Valery Larbaud and Léon-Paul Fargue visited with Levet’s parents in the city of Montbrison. In a recorded conversation, they describe their visit, and in a subsequent drive of about thirty miles’ length they describe their own youth in Paris, what Levet and his poetry meant to them, and their plans to publish what they could assemble of his work. Their account is notable in that subsequently both of these poets would become significant figures in French literary culture, and their memory of Levet is one of very few on record. Levet’s poetry appeared in a book, Cartes Postales, that Larbaud and Fargue assembled; first appearing in 1921, the book was republished by Gallimard in 1942 and has never since been out of print. This translation is the first into English of a potentially important literary document revealing the characters and biographical backgrounds of three exceptional talents during the watershed of early French modernism.
Bynum, Caroline Walker;Hamburger, Jeffrey F.;Caferro, William P.;Safran, Linda;Cohen, Adam S.;Kremnitzer, Kathryn;Shah, Siddhartha V.;Zhao, Wenrui;Hunt, Lynn;Heineman, Elizabeth;Simpson, William J.;Rotman, Youval
2018 Common Knowledge
Caroline Bynum describes the rationale behind a second set of case studies or “ethnographies” of the humanities classroom, which complements a first set that appeared in Common Knowledge in the spring of 2017. The first set aroused interest because it took the innovative approach of describing particular pedagogical experiences rather than simply making general arguments about the value of the humanities, as a number of recent publications have done. The second set continues the approach of describing in detail the excitement and discovery that can occur in a particular humanities class but also expands upon the first to include the voices of graduate students and an undergraduate and to delineate the process by which one teacher put together an online course. Several essays articulate the doubts that professors sometimes feel about their task—doubts that may lead to moving connections with students, who also feel doubt. The introduction suggests that descriptions of specific classroom experiences and of the careful planning and passionate commitment of teachers may help us all to cling to the moral values both professors and their students seem to need and want in these troubled times.
2018 Common Knowledge
In this contribution to the second installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “In the Humanities Classroom,” a Harvard University graduate seminar on diagrams in the Middle Ages is described in detail. The course brought together a group of students as diverse as the various fields in which diagrams and diagrammatic modes of thought currently play a critical role: not only art history, visual studies, and design, but also computer science, “Bildwissenschaft,” and the history of literature and science, as well as music history and composition. Each participant, including the instructor, was required to cope with a considerable amount of unfamiliar material, but everyone was amply rewarded by the interdisciplinary dialogue that ensued. For the instructor in particular, the seminar proved to be an island of sanity—a means of engaging with the world, in a manner both passionate and dispassionate, during a crisis in his own personal life.
2018 Common Knowledge
This contribution to the second installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Inside the Humanities Classroom” describes the experience of teaching a single class meeting of the year-long Western Civilization survey course at Vanderbilt University. The essay examines both the professional and pedagogical challenges involved in organizing the class and the strategies employed to encourage critical reflection and historical thinking among the students. In addition, the author explores his own insecurities as a teacher and explains the means that, over many years of teaching this course, he has found of handling them. The changes demanded when teaching a Western Civilization class composed in large part of students from mainland China is treated as well.
2018 Common Knowledge
This article describes two different sessions taught at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts by Linda Safran and Adam S. Cohen as part of a three-year J. Paul Getty Foundation “Connecting Art Histories” initiative titled “Global and Postglobal Perspectives on Medieval Art and Art History.” While the essay engages with the particular challenges and satisfactions of teaching about medieval Sicily under Muslim rule (focusing on a tenth-century text about Palermo by Ibn Hawqal) and early medieval manuscript illumination (especially the Echternach Gospels of ca. 700), respectively, many of the lessons from one Chinese classroom are applicable to any context in which students are asked to grapple with unfamiliar textual and visual material. This teaching experience proved to be not only about communicating material, skills, and ideas to the students but also also an important reminder to the instructors about the need to be aware of, and to be willing to readjust, their own pedagogical and cultural assumptions.
Kremnitzer, Kathryn;Shah, Siddhartha V.;Zhao, Wenrui
2018 Common Knowledge
Three PhD students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University recount their experiences of a collaborative hands-on approach to the humanities, at the intersection of craft and science. As participants in the “Laboratory Seminar” component of the “Making and Knowing Project,” under the direction of Professor Pamela Smith, each was responsible for reconstructing, annotating, and contextualizing historical recipes from a sixteenth-century French manuscript. Working both in and beyond their chemistry lab, the authors reflect on the unique challenges and unexpected rewards of learning by doing, stepping outside of academic comfort zones, and finding success in failure. The compiling of these collective encounters depended on cooperation and coordination, as the authors worked across continents—via email, phone, text, and video chat—in keeping with the project’s international, interdisciplinary, and innovative working methods. This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Inside the Humanities Classroom” represents individual perspectives on a dynamic and demanding group project that the participants feel, in retrospect, had much in common with a Renaissance workshop.
2018 Common Knowledge
This essay—a contribution to “Inside the Humanities Classroom,” a seriatim symposium in Common Knowledge—is a first-person account of the development and teaching of an online version of a UCLA course on the history of Western civilization (1715 to the present). The author finds that such courses involve both gains and losses. Learning to lecture in front of a blank screen in an airless studio is not easy but has its own rewards if a professional media staff amasses and edits images and sounds. Teaching assistants also have to develop new techniques for involving students in discussion online rather than in person. Students have less interaction with each other, cannot ask questions during the lecture, and, at least in this version of online teaching, are never in the same room with their instructors. On the other hand, students can absorb the lectures, which are captioned, at their own pace; contact their teaching assistants and the professor when it suits them; and enjoy the advantage of a relatively seamless multimedia presentation. The quality of the students’ work, the author finds, is the same as in a bricks-and-mortar course, and the students themselves express enthusiasm for the lectures and, surprisingly, for the attention shown them (via fast-response email) by their instructors.
Heineman, Elizabeth;Simpson, William J.
2018 Common Knowledge
During the 2016 US presidential campaign, historians and other scholars of fascism explored the question of whether the Trump phenomenon was fascist in nature. Following the election, Elizabeth Heineman developed a course to investigate these writings in tandem with a close inspection of historical fascism in the German case. The course coincided with the first months of the Trump presidency, inviting discussion not only of ideology and popular appeal, but also of specific developments in the young administration. Students were challenged to think critically about the uses of historical analogy in a politically charged setting. Presenting the voice of a student, William Simpson, “When History Meets Politics” highlights the importance of discussions that happen beyond the instructor’s hearing. Simpson’s account underscores the potentially transformative experience of well-structured debate among students with opposing viewpoints, each committed to deep reading and careful thought about both history and present-day politics.
2018 Common Knowledge
As a contribution to the second installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “In the Humanities Classroom,” this essay describes a four-hour meeting of an undergraduate seminar on historiography at Tel Aviv University. The students and instructor alike are enabled, by analyzing together the work of ancient and medieval historians, to examine their own positions vis-à-vis the discipline of history and to reflect on its political and rhetorical aspects. The seminar, titled “Jews, Pagans, and Christians Write History in Antiquity,” was meant to question, through self-reflexive discussion, common assumptions about how a discourse of study emerges. At the class meeting described, the students argue that all teaching is and should be an exposure to the instructor’s own political viewpoint and methodology. To the instructor’s dismay, the conversation turns to and cannot be diverted from discussion of current Israeli politics and the power relations between teachers and students.
2018 Common Knowledge
By way of introducing new English translations of critical works by two French post-Symbolist poets and a Russian Formalist theoretician, the editor of Common Knowledge reflects, as the journal’s twenty-fifth anniversary approaches, on the overlapping political and academic contexts in which he founded it. A campaign in American literature departments to downgrade the status of high modernism (in reaction against its elitism and obsession with axiology) was ongoing at the same time the Cold War was ending. He reconsiders the fate of modernism in the intervening years and speculates that, while in fiction an accommodation with modernism has been reached, an equivalent achievement still awaits in poetry. Among writers of fiction, a type that Susan Sontag called the “good-humored, sweet Beckett” has arisen to combine the axiology of modernism with the democratic ethics of antimodernism. This essay proposes it is time for a similar type to emerge in poetry so that the counterproductive hostility of contemporary poets to the Symbolist tradition may subside at last.
2018 Common Knowledge
Yuri Tynianov’s seminal 1924 review of contemporary poetry discusses the work of many bright lights of the early Soviet avant-garde, as well as the prerevolutionary modernist poets who were still a presence in literature of the 1920s: his subjects include Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Esenin, Velimir Khlebnikov, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Boris Pasternak. This article has long been a favorite among scholars of early twentieth-century Russian letters. “Interlude” offers a historical snapshot, wherein subsequently acknowledged “classics” like Akhmatova or Mayakovsky are examined alongside poets like Nikolai Aseev or Ilya Selvinsky (now known only to specialists) and, moreover, are subjected to unsparing criticism by a contemporary. Tynianov describes the given period as an “interlude,” characterized by seeming inertia: a time when apparently nothing is happening in poetry. But, as Tynianov, a consummate theorist of literary evolution, assures his readers: “There are no dead ends in history. There are only interludes.”