I spent part of today photocopying syllabi for my courses next term. Is it totally too geeky to say how excited I am for these classes to start? One particularly sumptuous chunk of my time will be spent with a senior capstone seminar devoted to....devotion. Or rather, devotional poetry. From 700 BCE to today. I'm making things up as I go, and I have no idea where our conversation will lead us, but I figure that I'm spending 16 weeks reading dizzyingly fabulous literature that will yield its own urgencies. Sappho. Psalms. The high water mark, of course: Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Taylor, Vaughn, Traherne, Milton. Then Dickinson. Hopkins. Eliot. And finishing up with Gluck, Jarman, Cairns, Samarras, Hopler.... I'm getting all jumpy just thinking about it.
6 comments:
Oh! I'm jealous, jealous, jealous. Can I audit?
One of my favorite classes in college was on devotion & lit in the seventeenth century--not as wide-ranging as your course, nor genre-specific, but it definitely informed (and continues to inform) my own scholarly interests.
My favorite classes to teach are the ones that I would love to take. It's pretty clear to me that I pursued a career in academia so that I could just keep going to school. My students may think I design my classes with their education in mind, but really it's all for me, me, me.
I'm feeling more and more, of late, that I've likely read your scholarly work. I wish I were a better stalker, and could confirm my suspicions.
Now you teach it.
Do I still get to come in for the Gluck? And the Psalms? And quite possibly everything else. . .
well doesn't this sound like a dandy course! so fun.
seriously. Seriously! I wish I could take your classes. All the time.
Hee. Well, feel free to email me any time--I don't fetishize my pseudonymity (and I'll happily give pointers on the stalking, too!).
But I can tell you this: I doubt our work exactly overlaps, except maybe in some of its authors & bigger concerns; the genre I work on is not, I think, yours.
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