O Muse, not you who upon Helicon garland your brow with long-since faded bays, but you who among heavenly choirs don your golden crown of deathless stars always, breathe in my breast celestial fire, shed on my song your light. Torquato Tasso, The Liberation of Jerusalem The canon of […]
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Performance and Discussion Hamlet is undoubtedly one of Shakespeare’s most important and beloved plays. It is full of intrigue, mystery, the supernatural, and features a variety of memorable characters. Besides all of this, it is Shakespeare’s most theological play, though it is not often read as such. It has often […]
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Set Course for Adventure! Rigor is a sign of a well-trained mind. — Wonder is the most fertile soil for rigor to grow in. A literature course has got to make students good readers, but before that, it has to make them avid readers. One of the best ways to […]
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Rethinking the Middle Ages “Sadly, however, it is not serious historians who, for the most part, form the historical consciousness of their times; it is bad popular historians, generally speaking, and the historical hearsay they repeat or invent, and the myths they perpetuate and simplifications they promote, that tend to […]
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Correcting Our Understanding of Grammar Grammar, as the foundation of language, is an essential element in all good writing. And yet very few opportunities exist for us as adults to think about grammar in a focused way, to explore and question those rules that we so often teach more by […]
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This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells, And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells– Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash, Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash. […]
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Fantastical Short Stories A dragon of deepest winter cold; a golden key in search of a lock; a sea adventure of the highest sort in the most unlikely of places: these are our business. In this course we set out to prove that a tale need not be long to […]
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“Once upon a time there was a great wizard who lived in a far country. Once upon a time, in a deep forest, there was a poor woodchopper and his wife. Once upon a time a deep sleep fell upon all the inhabitants of the palace […] Once upon a […]
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“They were falling out of heaven, into a world. Nothing in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom’s mind as this. He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a […]
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