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As we're entering a new academic quarter, July is the perfect time to join (or rejoin) the Academy:
– In the Great Books of the West seminar we're about to engage with the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. More on that below.– The language learning Summer Challenge is on its way, and we invite you to join us in the weekly Language Learning Support Group meetings.– We are also reading and discussing various fascinating works in a number of languages, including: French, Spanish, and German literature circles.– Finally, we offer an exciting opportunity to begin your journey in Old Norse, Sanskrit, Latin, Old French, and Middle High German
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Musings From The Professor's Desk
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Dear Readers,
This month I would like to give a progress report and a projected plan for one of the core elements of the Academy, namely the Great Books reading and discussion project. On July 12th, we will finish Tacitus and therewith the ancient historians in the University of Chicago / Encyclopedia Britannica collection of the Great Books of the Western World. The fifty-four volumes in this set were organized in a purely chronological fashion by Mortimer Adler, thus providing a mix of history, literature, philosophy, and science for those who go straight through it from volume 1 to volume 54.
Judging that the authors in a given field and a given time period had the greatest influence upon each other, I elected to rearrange the order in which we read the volumes to stick with a particular genre during a particular era. Thus, staying in Greco-Roman antiquity, I thought that reading through all the historical volumes first would give the participants some background understanding of the culture and society that could help them better appreciate and contextualize the literature and philosophy of these times. We therefore began with Herodotus and Thucydides (volume 6 has their respective investigations of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars), then moved on to Plutarch’s Lives of Eminent Greeks and Romans (volume 14), and are now about to finish The Annals and The Histories of Tacitus (volume 15).
Now, as of mid-July, it will be on from history to literature, which, in the volumes for the ancient period, consists of plays and epic poetry. The individual plays are short (an average of fifteen pages each), so we will begin with them in volume 5, which contains the complete extant works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Our experience reading the historians was that it took some time to grow accustomed to the overall style of writing, as well as to the individual style of each writer, and the same will probably be true with literature. I anticipate that we will not need to “unpack” as much of the narrative as we did with the historians, and that we may relish reading portions of the roles aloud in a dramatic fashion, as we do in the foreign language reading and discussion circles, so as to bring them to life.
After we finish the Greek dramas, we will then move on to the epic poems of Homer (The Iliad and The Odyssey are in volume 4) and of Virgil (volume 13 consists of his Aeneid). Although they lived their fictional lives 2,500 or even 3,000 years ago, the characters in this literature – from Oedipus in Freud through Ulysses in James Joyce through cinematic and artistic portrayals of various heroes – continue to live on in contemporary culture. Reading through these three volumes and discussing them in detail will provide a critical and solid basis for understanding European art and literature throughout the ages.
It took us fourteen months (May 2022 – July 2023) to read through the total of about 1800 pages in the three historical volumes. For the three literary volumes, the total is only about 1300 pages, so we should be able to work our way systematically through these by mid-winter, whereupon we will move on to the volumes containing philosophy.
If you have been considering joining Great Books of the West but were waiting for an opportune time to do so, then, from the point of view of course content, that time is now. It would be great to welcome you into our group come mid-July!
With best regards,
Alexander Arguelles
P.S. Please share the following link with anyone who may be interested in subscribing to our newsletter: alexanderarguelles.com/newsletter/
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Steve James
Meditator, musician, and host of the Guru Viking Podcast. Steve currently attends Academy classes in Latin, Sanskrit, History of Comparative Religions, Great Books of the West, and Path of the Polyglot. |
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“When Professor Arguelles began his Academy in 2022, he created something very special indeed. From Pāṇini to Tacitus, the Academy offers a wide range of unique classes to its international cohort of students. Professor Arguelles’ teaching style is rigorous, joyful, and sympathetic. Here is not only a true scholar who has lived a life of passionate intellectual curiosity and achieved much by it, but also a natural teacher who is devoted to sharing his methods and insights with skill and enthusiasm. I highly recommend the Academy to anyone who seeks a challenging, invigorating, and profoundly enriching opportunity for adult education.”
Listen to Steve’s podcast interviews with Professor Arguelles: PART 1 / PART 2
Additional student accounts can be found on the Academy website under Testimonials. |
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This month I would like to direct the attention of anyone who has not yet heard of it to Coulter H. George’s How Dead Languages Work (Oxford University Press, 2020); if you have heard of it but not yet read it, then I encourage you to do right away. The purpose of this book is to give you a feel of what it is like to read literature in a handful of languages of antiquity – Greek and Latin, Old English and Sanskrit, Old Irish and Hebrew are listed, but it also goes into Welsh and Arabic. There is a chapter for each language that gives an overview of its grammatical features, then a reading of a literary text in it with word-by-word translation and analysis as well as a discussion of its cultural context and significance. Given the nature of this work, I will go further and recommend that you listen to it as an audiobook. The narrator is a professional reader, not a linguist, so his pronunciation of any individual language is probably off, but his valiantly consistent fashion of reading not only brings the ancient texts alive but makes comparing them all the easier. |
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July Video RecommendationGuru Viking Interview Series - Dr. Alexander Arguelles
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