SCS Blog Author Page
Posts by Ellen Bauerle
|
Amphora: Ancient Narratives and Modern War Stories: Reading Homer with Combat Veterans
For the past seven years, small groups of combat veterans in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont have been making Homer their own. This article details the particular value of these small book groups for the veteran, for the community, and for me as the academic facilitator. The proposal for the book groups originated from the premise that literature is able to provide useful insight into life experience and, more specifically, that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey provide valuable insight—2800 years old—into the problems of soldiers who individually and collectively experienced deep internal conflicts while deployed (Iliad) and who needed somehow to get home (Odyssey). Homer provides a salutary distancing and deflection that, I believe, allows the problems of homecoming to emerge more clearly as a historical problem of the human condition across cultures and political or social organizations: the Read more … |
There Is a Shortage of Certified Latin Teachers: Please Spread the Word!
by Ronnie Ancona and Kathleen Durkin There is a shortage of certified Latin teachers in the United States. Latin teaching positions at the precollegiate level sometimes cannot be filled for lack of qualified applicants. In New York State, for example, where we both teach, in 2012-2013 and 2013-2014, Latin was named specifically as a language with a teacher shortage by the United States Department of Education Office of Postsecondary Education (http://tinyurl.com/mwgdr9j). Not filling a Latin position can result in one of several negative outcomes: the end of a Latin program, the inability to start one, or difficulty with sustaining one. None of these situations is good for maintaining strength in classics at the precollegiate level, where many of our students are first introduced to their excitement about our field. While the shortage does not affect every part of the country equally, it is sufficiently widespread to pose a Read more … |
|
Editing for Good
Elsewhere in this issue, in his article titled The Metal Age, Kris Fletcher discusses the relationship between classical studies and heavy metal music. Examining various metal appropriations of themes, characters, and ideas from classical antiquity, some less orthodox than others, Fletcher notes, “… these songs should remind us that we as classicists do not control this material.” On the SCS website, Mary-Kay Gamel and the Outreach Committee have voiced a similar view concerning the shared understanding of classical material: “We use the word ‘outreach’ not to suggest a one-way communication in which scholars inform others, but a complex interaction in which all involved contribute to a discussion of what Classics is and what it might be.” Not surprisingly, then, in January the Outreach Committee enjoyed a lively discussion of the role of professional classicists and their students as editors of Wikipedia articles on classical subjects. Wikipedia Read more … |
|
The Metal Age: The Use of Classics in Heavy Metal Music
It is a great time to be a fan of both the Classical world and heavy metal music: the two have never overlapped to the extent that they do right now. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2013 not one but two Italian metal bands, Heimdall and Stormlord, released concept albums based on Vergil’s Aeneid. But this overlap is not a new phenomenon—in fact, far from it. Heavy metal music has drawn on the Classical world almost from its very beginnings, and this interest in the Classical world is part of a larger obsession with other times and places—both real and imagined— that is a defining characteristic of the genre. And since metal is a conservative genre (there are clear forefathers to whom almost all subsequent bands owe and acknowledge their allegiance), the interest in these kinds of subjects by earlier bands sanctioned continuous use of them by all subsequent bands. To simplify radically, metal begins in 1969-70, with the debut of the two main Read more … |
|
Tartarus and the Curses of Percy Jackson (or Annabeth’s Adventures in the Underworld)
by Thomas D Kohn A few years ago, I adopted the Anthology of Classical Myth, edited by SM Trzaskoma, RS Smith, and S Brunet (Hackett, 2004), for my Greek and Roman mythology course. And so, some months before the start of the semester, I read through the text, in order to familiarize myself with the selections. At the same time, I began to read the “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series by Rick Riordan. I was amazed by the degree to which the two complemented each other. I like to drive home to my students the point that writers in antiquity did not feel obligated to adhere to one particular version of a myth (for example, the various depictions of Prometheus by Aeschylus, Hesiod, and Plato), and in fact both retained certain details and also made certain changes based on their literary agenda. Part of the delight, therefore, in reading renditions of Greek myth, both ancient and modern, lies not in labeling departures as “wrong,” but in comparing them Read more … |
|
For the Girls: An Elegy
In 1954, the girls went out to play “She’s always got her nose in a book,” their mothers said, Serious girls, or rowdy, they got straight A’s, Once they wore red Keds, and collected barrettes; Now it is summer again, and the trees cast Read more … |
|
A New Incarnation of Latin in China, by Yongyi Li
On a wintry day in 1996, I was thumbing through catalogues in a deserted corner of the library of Beijing Normal University when my attention was suddenly seized by some titles in a language strangely familiar. I could easily decipher them because of their resemblance to English words, and I knew the names of the authors as I had read them in translations. Latin! My instinct told me. I relayed this discovery to my teacher of Shakespearean plays, a BA in Classics who had just graduated from Oxford. The next morning saw us standing in front of a counter in the most secluded part of the library, after spiraling flights of gloomy stairs. A long silence ensued before the books were fetched from a bank ten stories above and presented before us. In a thrilled voice, my teacher began to read a Latin passage aloud to me. We had been the first in decades, the librarian told us, to borrow these books, and there were many more such books simply locked in some rooms, as no one had the expertise Read more … |
|
Linking Course to Production: The Oresteia Project, by Ruth Weiner and Clara Shaw Hardy
The Oresteia demands a large canvas. Its trajectory, from the end of the Trojan War to Athena's creation of the first trial by jury, is huge. It is the story of the movement from a tribal cry for blood revenge to a system of justice designed by a god but carried out by men. It addresses the struggle between male and female, chthonic and Olympian gods, tribe and polis, law and tradition, justice and revenge. When we first contemplated the notion of staging the Oresteia at Carleton College we were of course aware of the scale of this undertaking. But even so, the full magnitude of the production that resulted, and its impact on our campus and community, ended up taking us by surprise. The Oresteia was performed in the inaugural season of Carleton’s new theater, and was one of the largest and most ambitious productions we have ever done. For the script we commissioned a new adaptation of the trilogy by Rob Hardy (classicist and poet, as well as Clara Read more … |
|
The Kids Are Alright, or, Nobody Killed the Liberal Arts: Michael Broder and Daniel Tompkins Discuss Joseph Epstein
In September 2012, Joseph Epstein published an essay in the Weekly Standard called Who Killed the Liberal Arts? The piece provoked lively response on the Classics List and at least one rapid, articulate response, by Katie Billotte in Salon. Epstein’s argument is of more than passing concern to academics, scholars, students, and members of the general public interested in current debates about the value and vitality of the humanities and humanistic education, not only because he claims that the so-called liberal arts are dead, but also because he accuses humanists themselves of the murder. Moreover, it is important not to let his ideas go unchallenged, both because they are so often flawed, and also because they are part of a broader pattern of similar laments that collectively seek to Read more … |
|
Labors and Lesson Plans: Educating Young Hercules in Two 1990s Children’s Television Programs, by Angeline Chiu
“Zero to Hero, in no time flat … Zero to Hero, just like that!” The Muses’ song from the Disney film Hercules could apply equally well to the sudden, spectacular rise of Hercules in pop entertainment of the late 1990s. Those proved lively years for the hero in American film and TV, spearheaded by the 1997 Disney animated movie and by television’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, starring Kevin Sorbo (1995-99). The two quickly spun off more TV series: Disney’s Hercules: The Animated Series (1998-99, 65 episodes of 30 minutes each) and Young Hercules (1998-99, 50 episodes also of 30 minutes each) starring Ryan Gosling.* Both spinoffs reimagined the mythological hero specifically for younger viewers and gave him unprecedented exposure in children’s weekday TV.† In terms of the target audience, grade school and middle school years are very impressionable times for encounters with cultural influences. Every spring I teach a large myth course, Read more … |