There was also one translation of the Odyssey, by Fagles again. It was ever thus: for all its well-remembered adventures and faster pace, the Odyssey has always been outsold – out of 590 Homer papyrus fragments recovered in Egypt at the last count, 454 preserve bits of the Iliad. The ready explanation – that ancient schoolmasters preferred the Iliad because the other Homer is just too much fun – is no doubt true but doesn’t explain why the Iliad has been preferred outside the schoolroom as well, from antiquity and the Byzantine millennium to the Terminal 2 bookshop. Continue reading.

The Anastaplo Lecture
Plutarch’s Lives: On the Decline, Fall, and Attempted Restoration of Republics
Leo Paul S. de Alvarez, Professor, Politics Department, the University of Dallas
Sunday, November 13, 2011

Gleacher Center (PDF)
450 N. Cityfront Plaza Drive
Graham School downtown courses are held at this convenient location.

Pushed into a corner by these dismaying developments, defenders of the humanities — both traditionalists and revisionists — have lately been pushing back. Traditionalists argue that emphasizing professional skills would betray the humanities’ responsibility to honor the great monuments of culture for their own sake. Revisionists, on the other hand, argue that emphasizing the practical skills of analysis and communication that the humanities develop would represent a sellout, making the humanities complicit with dominant social values and ideologies. But though these rival factions agree on little else, both end up concluding that the humanities should resist our culture’s increasing fixation on a practical, utilitarian education. Both complain that the purpose of higher education has been reduced to credentialing students for the marketplace.

Martha Nussbaum, for example, while stressing that the humanities foster critical thinking and the ability to sympathetically imagine the predicament of others, insists such skills are, as the title of her 2010 book puts it, “not for profit.” In doing so she draws a stark line between the worlds of the humanities and the 21st-century workplace. Likewise, Geoffrey Galt Harpham in The Humanities and the Dream of America, laments the increasing focus on professional skills in the humanities at the expense of reading great books. Stanley Fish takes an even more extreme position, insisting that the humanities “don’t do anything, if by ‘do’ is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them. To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’, the only honest answer is none whatsoever.” Worse still, Frank Donoghue, in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, argues that the humanities will simply disappear in the new corporate, vocation-centered university. Continue reading.

The exhibition, “Picturing the Past,” explores how architecture, sites and artifacts of the ancient Middle East have been visually documented, and evaluates the accuracy and function of the different types of images.

The exhibition demonstrates how artists, for example, have given Egyptian queen Nefrititi a beauty makeover. It also explains how scholars were led to believe there was a mother goddess cult in ancient Mesopotamia, based on the reconstruction of a woman’s statue that includes a small figure of a child that was probably never there.

The exhibit includes 40 examples of facsimiles, photos, architectural reconstructions, casts, models, impressionistic paintings and computer-aided reconstructions as a basis for examining the influence that these images have had on our perception of the ancient world.

Jack Green, museum chief curator and exhibit co-curator said, “People often accept reconstructed images of ancient buildings and scenes of daily life as being completely accurate, but seeing is not necessarily believing. The commonly held expectation is that such renderings are based on hard scientific facts. But much of what makes up the final image may be informed guesswork. The objects in the exhibit allow us explore the relationship between real and imaginary elements of images that can mislead as well as inform.” Continue reading.

The exhibit runs between February 7 and September 2, 2012. For more information, visit OI.uchicago.edu/museum.

Click here for informational video preview of the exhibit.

At the end of his life, the philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) inserted a question into an essay written many years before: “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?” The question summed up Montaigne’s long-held conviction that we can never really plumb the inner life of others, be they cats or human beings. Montaigne’s cat can serve as an emblem for co-operation. My premise about co-operation is that we frequently don’t understand what’s passing in the hearts and minds of people with whom we have to work. Yet just as Montaigne kept playing with his enigmatic cat, so too a lack of mutual understanding shouldn’t keep us from engaging with others; we want to get something done together.

Montaigne was born the year Holbein painted The Ambassadors. Like Holbein’s young emissaries to Britain, the young Montaigne had a political education as a member of the parlement of Bordeaux – a regional council of notables. Like the two emissaries, he came to know the religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants close up. The civil wars of religion in the mid-16th century convulsed the Bordeaux region and threatened the village in which his family’s domains lay. While Montaigne took the side of the Protestant leader Henri de Navarre, his heart was in neither religious dogma nor professional politics. In 1570, two years after the death of his father, he retired to his estate, and even further, to a tower within the south-east corner of the chateau, where he set up a room in which to think and to write. In this chamber, he began both to experiment with writing in a dialogical way – that is, emphasising dialogue – and to think through its application to everyday cooperation. Continue reading.

One form of wickedness Charles Dickens decried still haunts us, proud and unrepentant: the lawyer.

TUESDAY is the bicentenary of the birth, in Portsmouth, England, of Charles Dickens, literature’s greatest humanist. We can rejoice that so many of the evils he assailed with his beautiful, ferocious quill — dismal debtors’ prisons, barefoot urchin labor, an indifferent nobility — have happily been reformed into oblivion. But one form of wickedness he decried haunts us still, proud and unrepentant: the lawyer.

Lawyers appear in 11 of his 15 novels. Some of them even resemble humans. Uriah Heep (“David Copperfield”) is a red-eyed cadaver whose “lank forefinger,” while he reads, makes “clammy tracks along the page … like a snail.” Mr. Vholes (“Bleak House”), “so eager, so bloodless and gaunt,” is “always looking at the client, as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes.” Most lawyers infest dimly lighted, moldy offices “like maggots in nuts.” (No, counselor, writers dead since 1870 cannot be sued for libel.)

Dickens knew whereof he spoke. At 15, he was hired as an “attorney’s clerk,” serving subpoenas, registering wills, copying transcripts; later he became a court reporter. For three formative years he was surrounded by law students, law clerks, copying clerks, court clerks, magistrates, barristers and solicitors who (reborn in his fiction) uttered cheerful sentiments like “I hate my profession.” His portraits of nearly every London court — Chancery, Divorce, Probate, Admiralty, etc. — are so accurate that one scholar wrote a lively book called “Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian.” At 32 he filed his first suit against a pirate publisher. Dickens told a friend afterward that “it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law.” Continue reading.

They and others view their tendency toward solitary activity, quiet reflection and reserve as “a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology,” Cain writes. Too often denigrated and frequently overlooked in a society that’s held in thrall to an “Extrovert Ideal — the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight,” Cain’s introverts are overwhelmed by the social demands thrust upon them. They’re also underwhelmed by the example set by the voluble, socially successful go-getters in their midst who “speak without thinking,” in the words of a Chinese software engineer whom Cain encounters in Cupertino, Calif., the majority Asian-American enclave that she suggests is the introversion capital of the United States.

Many of the self-avowed introverts she meets in the course of this book, which combines on-the-scenes reporting with a wide range of social science research and a fair bit of “quiet power” cheerleading, ape extroversion. Though some fake it well enough to make it, going along to get along in a country that rewards the out­going, something precious, the author says, is lost in this masquerade. Unchecked extroversion — a personality trait Cain ties to ebullience, excitability, dominance, risk-taking, thick skin, boldness and a tendency toward quick thinking and thoughtless action — has actually, she argues, come to pose a real menace of late. The outsize reward-seeking tendencies of the hopelessly ­outer-directed helped bring us the bank meltdown of 2008 as well as disasters like Enron, she claims. With our economy now in ruins, Cain writes, it’s time to establish “a greater balance of power” between those who rush to speak and do and those who sit back and think. Introverts — who, according to Cain, can count among their many virtues the fact that “they’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame” — must learn to “embrace the power of quiet.” And extroverts should learn to sit down and shut up. Continue reading.

Such items appear to have been of little or no interest to researchers immediately after World War II. Then, historians naturally had larger questions on their minds, not the least of which was the need to establish the broad outlines of what had transpired in such a vast and complex conflict. They sought to understand how such a mass horror as the Holocaust had been organized and implemented, and how the Nazi movement that perpetrated this horror had begun and taken hold in Germany. Their focus was on the usual criteria of who, what, when, where, and why. Personal effects such as the photo albums of Nazi officials were considered curiosities at best, trivial objects in the grander scheme of things.

These albums now no longer appear to be only minor trophies of war. The complexity of World War II and the Holocaust, and the enduring interest in the study of totalitarian societies, means historians and others continue to write on these subjects and may well do so indefinitely. There are always new facets, new pieces of the puzzle. Documents that reveal details about certain Nazi leaders also provide clues to the mental landscapes of such individuals, persons whose idiosyncrasies are now deemed worthy of study. The photo albums of Hitler’s associates—the extended Nazi family, as it were—now seem compelling rather than superfluous, illustrating more than the immediate scene or persons they depict. Continue reading.

With a life as long, important, and public as Tolstoy’s — a life rightly described by Rosamund Bartlett, in Tolstoy: A Russian Life, as “gargantuan” — the Boswellian approach would appear the natural one. And prior biographers have indeed followed this path. Tolstoy’s former secretary Nikolay Gusev embarked on the definitive Russian-language life in the 1950s but died after a mere four volumes. The work was taken up by Lidiya Gromova Opulskaya, who produced a further two before dying in her turn, so that to date the last eighteen years of Tolstoy’s life remain uncovered. Ernest J. Simmons’s Leo Tolstoy (1946), now out of print, is probably still the most inclusive and definitive English-language life. Henri Troyat’s 1967 Tolstoy totals 900 pages; A. N. Wilson’s 1988 biography of the same title is shorter but still sizable at 625.

So what about all those readers who are interested in Tolstoy’s life but might not want to commit the time demanded by such comprehensive accounts? Great figures require the Boswellian treatment, there’s no doubt about it, but biographies that deliver lives in more digestible portions are clearly necessary, as the recent success of Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life indicates. Bartlett has skillfully compressed the eighty-two years of Leo Tolstoy’s intensely active life into a smoothly written and very readable 450-page narrative. Continue reading Tolstoy: A Russian Life – The Barnes & Noble Review.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Spring Weekend Study Retreat)
The weekend will include a talk by William Nickell of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, author of The Death of Tolstoy.

Visit William Nickell’s website about his book here: The Death of Tolstoy.

William Nickell, the author of The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910, is quoted in this January 3, 2011, New York Times article For Tolstoy and Russia, Still No Happy Ending.

The death begins with flight: “In the middle of the night of October 28, 1910, Lev Tolstoy closed the door to the room where his wife of 48 years was sleeping, packed his things and left his home, never to return. At the age of 82, the most famous living Russian embarked on a final journey that would become one of the great legends of the twentieth century.” How different from Chekhov’s quiet death a few years earlier, and his return to Russia in a refrigerated car labelled “Oysters”.

William Nickell reads the death of Tolstoy as a modern media event, showing along the way how the media are heirs to oral tradition. The tragedy of the disintegration of a marriage and the journey of an old man for unknown reasons to an unknown place combines with the grapho-maniacal comedy enacted by all the key players (Tolstoy, his wife Sonya, his many children, his doctor, his typist, his followers), all busily writing diaries – some secret – and letters. Continue reading Death of Tolstoy review.

By some miracle, you set aside a day to tackle that project you can’t seem to finish in the office. You close the door, boot up your laptop, open the right file and . . . five minutes later catch yourself thinking about dinner. By 10 a.m., you’re staring at the wall, even squinting at it between your fingertips. Is this day 50 hours long? Soon, you fall into a light, unsatisfying sleep and awake dizzy or with a pounding headache; all your limbs feel weighed down. At which point, most likely around noon, you commit a fatal error: leaving the room. I’ll just garden for a bit, you tell yourself, or do a little charity work. Hmmm, I wonder if my friend Gregory is around?

This probably strikes you as an extremely, even a uniquely, modern problem. Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis. Acedia, also known as the “noonday demon,” appears again and again in the writings of the Desert Fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries. Wherever monks and nuns retreated into cells to labor and to meditate on matters spiritual, the illness struck. Continue reading.

The event comes 55 years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of his first Chicago speeches from the Rockefeller Chapel pulpit in 1956, before he became the well-known civil rights leader whose legacy Americans now celebrate each January.

The MLK Celebration in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel is a free event, and tickets will be issued to people who wish to attend. The University of Chicago Office of Civic Engagement, the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute (UEI), and the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs (OMSA) will have a limited number of tickets available for distribution.

Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children’s Zone, to speak at MLK celebration | UChicago News.

Free ticket information for MLK Celebration.

More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.

As Mr. Whitman put it, “I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.”

Overlooking the Seine and facing the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the store, looking somewhat beat-up behind a Dickensian facade and spread over three floors, has been an offbeat mix of open house and literary commune. For decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.  Continue reading.

Shakespeare and Company

Vienna and Budapest, April 16 – April 23, 2012

The Tour’s Focus:
Vienna and Budapest, during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, seethed with creativity, political intrigue, social change. Experiments in music, literature, and painting changed forever our understanding of the arts. New forms of fiction writing, like stream of consciousness, were born there. Herzl wrote the foundational text of Zionism, Der Judenstaat, while a few coffeehouses over, Trotsky plotted the downfall of the Tsar. Mahler conducted the State Opera in an anti-Semitic society that never fully accepted him. Freud laid bare our unconscious taboo desires while elegant balls played Straus waltzes all night.

The University of Chicago offers this tour because the sounds of the fin de siècle echo in these cities still today. Graham School travel-study programs go beyond superficial sightseeing: when you travel with us, you go deeper, to understand the culture of that era and its continuing relevance today. This is the University of Chicago way of learning: getting to the core.

Personal Note from the Tour Leader:
When I studied in Vienna, I was struck by how the old and new lived together with such dynamic energy. I explored the narrow Gassen of Vienna’s First District, an inexhaustible labyrinth of sights and sounds. I retreated to the fresh air of the Vienna Woods, the same natural setting that inspired Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony. Weekend trips to nearby Budapest, under communism and then in an emerging market democracy, revealed a city so very much like yet so very different from Vienna.

I am offering this tour because I want to share these impressions with you and help you make your own discoveries in these remarkable world cities. I hope you will join us.

–Cary Nathenson