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"The Great Gatsby, Revisited",,"When asked what my favorite book is, I often quickly answer with The Great Gatsby. I first read The Great Gatsby in 2009 in my 10th Grade English class and fell in love. I loved the description of the clothing and parties of the 1920s. I loved the characters, I thought the (spoiler alert!) unrequited love between Daisy and Gatsby was so romantic, and I felt heartbroken by the tragic ending nearly every character received.
Throughout the years, I have defended this novel from students who claim it is boring and adults who describe the characters as self-centered. They were, in my opinion, misunderstood. Recently, I realized I had not re-read The Great Gatsby in a long time and decided it was the perfect time to re-read. Wow, was I wrong.
Perhaps it is because I am now looking through the lens of someone who lived through a pandemic or the lens of being nearly 30- I am not sure what changed but something has and wow are these characters insufferable! Everyone is privileged, entitled, and whiny. What I once saw as romantic (buying a house with a view of Daisy's dock) now seems creepy and manipulative. The characters who I once loved now seem like absolute trash people.
As I reflected on the way my thoughts on this book have changed, I thought about the importance of perspective and lived experiences. It gave me more insight into how my high school students might interpret things differently than I do and how important it is to bring multiple perspectives in as often as possible.","F. Scott Fitzgerald","The Great Gatsby",,"Summer 2021","Maggie Jones, 28, Social Studies Teacher",,,,,,great-gatsby-revisited,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Change,Fitzgerald, F. Scott,Learning,Literature",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/4/522/northern-lights-3273425_640.jpg,Text,Educators,1,0
"Richard Wright's Native Son",,"I first encountered Richard Wright's Native Son from an admittedly privileged point of view. I included it as part of the comprehensive exams required for my PhD in English literature. I had read Wright's Black Boy, so I was acquainted with his style and profound depiction of the American south.
Wright is a major literary figure, so of course he belonged on an exam list. But I couldn't have been prepared for Native Son's captivating, visceral portrayal of Bigger Thomas's plight. Wright depicts the events that surround and subdue Bigger Thomas in a way that illuminates how extant societal structures continually oppress and disadvantage young black American men. The sequence of seemingly unstoppable and harrowing events that snowball as the novel progresses offered me unprecedented access into a world of experience that I, a white male, could never know otherwise.
Together with Black Boy, Native Son shows how outmoded racist ideologies inform many facets of America's southern and northern communities. Experiencing it was not a happy moment, but a moment that remains with me each day as I and so many others do what we can to reckon with racial injustice in our country.","Richard Wright","Native Son",,2018,"Matt Phillips, English Lecturer ",,,,,,wright-native-son,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC GSSR","Literature,Native Son,Privilege,Racial Justice,Wright, Richard",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/502/7222967796_a8e3815f98_o.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"""The Machine Stops"" is Only a Start",,"I was always a voracious reader with a preference for fiction. My family made regular trips to the library growing up, so I had a never-ending supply of books at hand. Yet, one story I read in my high school British Literature class stands out as influential: E. M. Forster’s short story ""The Machine Stops."" The story itself captivated me. In it, humanity lives underground, reliant on “the machine” for all means of life. There is no need to visit others face to face: all communication is carried out through video conferencing and messaging systems. There is no need to leave one’s room or rely on one’s own muscles for support: everything needed is delivered, including air to breathe. One young man is dissatisfied with this life. He develops his strength by walking the hallway and eventually visits the surface, wearing protective gear. Throughout the story it is palpable how much humanity loses in giving up a connection to each other and nature and in rejecting self-reliance. The other characters, however, don’t realize their weakness until the day the tragic machine stops.
This is the earliest book I remember prompting me to think in depth about the human condition and about what we might need for fulfilling and flourishing lives. Forster’s story didn’t just entertain me; it promoted an interest in questions that continue to vex me and which I now pursue through philosophy. It was also one of the first ‘school assigned books’ that made me want to learn about the author’s life and read everything else the author had written. Forster is still one of my favorite authors. Although none of his novels are science fiction, as ""The Machine Stops"" is, all his writing depicts the melancholic beauty of humans in search of authenticity. But it didn’t stop there. Most of Forster’s novels have been adapted to films, and in pursuing those I developed a more general love of Merchant Ivory films. My friends may tease me for being moved by “sweeping British landscapes and gents leaning on mantles,” but for someone who grew up in the working class Midwest, these movies and Forster’s novels helped open new worlds to me and nurtured questions and concerns that have followed me over the years.
","E.M. Forster","""The Machine Stops""",,,"Dawn Jacob, Ph.D. student in Philosophy",,,,,,machine-stops-only-start,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency ","Books & Reading,Dystopian Fiction,Forster, E.M.,Literature,Modernism,Philosophy,Science Fiction,Short Stories",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/469/tunnel-3233082_640.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"St Cuthbert: Just One Voice in a Silent Crowd",,"In the summer of 2017 I was visiting my family in the northeast of the UK as I prepared to begin my Ph.D. in the United States. I had been out of academia for a few years and was eager to get back to working on my passion - the literature of early medieval England. As luck would have it, in that same year Durham Cathedral had launched a new exhibition of the relics of the Anglo-Saxon hermit and bishop, St Cuthbert. After some convincing, my parents and I went up to Durham for the day and my father and I came face-to-face with the incredible trove.
Cuthbert lived in the 7th century and, despite the vast chasm of time between him and us, we know a surprising amount about him. Thanks to the work of the Venerable Bede and his 'Life of St Cuthbert,' his piety and asceticism are well-documented. He lived through the Synod of Whitby in 664, a turning point in Christian history in Britain. He spent many of his years at the monastery of Lindisfarne, and in 676 he moved to isolated Farne Island to live out the rest of his days in religious contemplation as a simple hermit.
Thirteen centuries had elapsed between his death and my visit to Durham Cathedral. His life and works are still remembered. They factor heavily in my research. Yet despite his renown, the collection of 'relics' is meagre. Only a handful of items (most famously his coffin, his cruciform pendant, and his comb) survive to us. Standing in that undercroft, I was reminded how little of the past survives to us. Cuthbert was one of the lucky ones who was able to pass something of himself down to us. How many thousands of people, how many millions of artefacts, have been lost to time? In so many ways, the history of early Britain is a patchwork of fragmentary texts, muddy foundations, and shattered objects. As a researcher, I have to be diligent and avoid the traps of generalising the period and its inhabitants. But we are still discovering things every year, and we are still adding to that patchwork of history.",,"Treasures of St. Cuthbert, Durham Cathedral.",,"July 2018","Will Beattie, 29, Graduate Student ",,,,,,saint-cuthbert-one-voice-silent-crowd,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency","Anglo-Saxon,Artifacts,History,Literature,Material Culture,Medieval History,Museum",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/467/Cuthbert_Icon.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Reflecting on Reality Through Fiction",,"One of my most memorable humanities moments came during a period of my life where I was not enrolled in any academic institution, but instead working full-time in a secretarial position in the private sector. It was during this time, shortly after President Donald Trump’s election, that I first read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Even during my undergraduate education, I had been minimally exposed to feminist critiques and gender studies, despite receiving both an anthropology and a humanities degree. For much of my own life I had done my best to ignore the way in which being a woman affected the way I moved through the world, but as I read through The Handmaid’s Tale I experienced a fundamental shift in how I viewed myself and society within the United States.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the book, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel that takes place in a United States that has been taken over by a new state called Gilead. In this dystopian world, the birth rate has plummeted and fertility is rare among women globally. Part of Gilead’s intention in taking over the United States was done for the sake of taking control of women’s reproductive capacity in order to maximize the potential of any and all fertile women by making them sex slaves to the most politically powerful men in the country.
Gilead is a strictly hierarchical structure in which men occupy all political positions of power and women serve exclusively in domestic or sexual roles. The only exceptions to these assigned positions are women deemed as “unwomen,” who are sent to work and die in radioactive wastelands. To be deemed an “unwoman,” a woman would first need to be infertile and secondly would have been someone whose identity put them in conflict with Gilead’s ideals, such as an academic in the humanities.
The book’s primary plot follows the life of Offred, who was a “handmaid,” a woman selected as a sex slave because of her ability to bear children. As a read through Offred’s harrowing story I began to feel overwhelmingly vulnerable to social and political changes happening around me in the United States. Suddenly my identity as a woman was something I needed to contend with and think about constantly in my understanding of how I operated within society.
Although I had been reminded repeatedly in college about women’s absence in places of power and in our understanding of history, it was not until reading The Handmaid’s Tale that I learned to appreciate the implications of these absences. Something about the horror and vulnerability I felt from reading the book made issues relating to gender feel far more pressing then they ever had before. Instead of trying to push against gender inequalities and sexism by ignoring it, I began treating gender as an essential part to every story in history and society at large.","Margaret Atwood","The Handmaid's Tale",,2018,"Clara Bergamini, 27, graduate student",,,,,,reflecting-reality-through-fiction,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Virtual Graduate Student Residency 2021","Atwood, Margaret,Dystopian Fiction,Gender Inequality,Handmaid's Tale,Literature,Literature Appreciation,Self-Realization,Women's and Gender Studies",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/464/HM_Handmaid_Tale_Image.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"El yawar punchau verdadero: The time I discovered Jose Maria Arguedas",,"I hadn’t noticed until now how little I remember about the time I first read Yawar Fiesta. I know I had already received my bachelor’s degree and was working as an engineer. Was it 12, 15 years ago? I don’t know the exact time, nor the reason I decided to pick it up. Also, no matter how hard I try to remember, I can’t picture myself in the process of actually reading the book. I just remember a feeling. The feeling of knowing that my life was not going to be the same. The feeling that things will never go back to what they were before. With a feeling like that, I guess the details are not that important.
Yawar Fiesta is Jose Maria Arguedas’s first novel. Arguedas was a Peruvian anthropologist and writer. Yawar Fiesta narrates the intended and unintended consequences of the prohibition of a traditional Indigenous way of bullfighting by the Peruvian government, under the excuse that the practice needed to be banned to protect the “savage Indians” of an Andean town from themselves. In the story, the Native inhabitants defy the prohibition, which leads to a series of events that force all citizens of the town to challenge and question their identities, and to reconsider their connection with their Indigenous heritage.
Yawar Fiesta illuminates all the complexities and contradictions of the Peruvian national identity, one that at the same time incorporates sanitized notions of “Indigenous culture” and rejects Indigenous peoples’ full membership in the Peruvian society.
Before reading Yawar Fiesta, my only previous interaction with Jose Maria Arguedas’s work had been a really bad one. While in high school, I was assigned Agua, a collection of short stories. I couldn’t even finish it. I found it slow, and its blend of Quechua grammar and Spanish words impenetrable. I also lacked the relevant sociohistorical background to connect, as a coastal Peruvian citizen attending a private school, with these stories set in the rural Andes. Sadly, my school didn’t provide any of that background. So at the time, my conclusion was that Arguedas’s work wasn’t for me.
When I read Yawar Fiesta, I realized that not only Arguedas’s work was indeed for me, but that it was exactly what I needed to rethink and reshape my identity as a Peruvian, and my ideas and attitudes about the country, and its past, present and future. It’s been more than a decade since I first read Yawar Fiesta, and it still feels as relevant as ever. When I decided to pursue a doctoral degree in Native American Studies, Arguedas’s work and life informed and inspired my decision. I aspire to become a scholar that shows a level of care and love for the people I work for and with as the one Arguedas’s had for his interlocutors. And I hope that my scholarship, like Arguedas’s, aids in the fight of Indigenous peoples in Peru and all over the world to dismantle the sociopolitical structures that sustain the racism that directly affects them.","Jose Maria Arguedas","Yawar Fiesta",,2003-2006,"Carlos A. Tello Barreda, 36, Ph.D. candidate in Native American Studies",,,,,,yawar-punchau-verdadero-discovered-Jose-Maria-Arguedas,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency 2021","Anthropology,Arguedas, Jose Maria,Identity,Indigenous Authors,Literature,Native American Studies,Peru",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/444/D_NQ_NP_660616-MPE28661714629_112018-O.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Artificial Intelligence Technology in Hispanic Digital Literature",,"It was an exciting discovery when I read Condiciones Extremas by Juan B. Gutiérrez. Beyond the outstanding quality of the content, this digital novel also impressed me with its use of innovative technology. New technology has always amazed me. In this case innovation in literature with AI (artificial intelligence), immediately called my attention.
At the beginning of my PHD program, my advisor asked me what I wanted to focus on. I said I wanted to innovate and attract more interest in literature. I wanted to use my studies in literature and my passion for technology to attract the interest of new generations of college students towards literature. It meant a lot to me because I realized that it could also contribute to attracting more attention to the humanities.
The impact of technology on literature has opened new opportunities to create, transmit, and access literary works. After the printing revolution, digital media reached historic levels with unprecedented global adoption and demand for information transmission. This technology has transformed contemporary literature with literary works emerging from digital environments that have adopted characteristics which make them different from printed works.
Apart from just mere text, I was amazed by literary works using hypertext or multimedia elements such as animations, audio, or video. In Condiciones Extremas, its hypertext requires readers to decide the reading path interactively in each segment. It goes beyond hypertext by applying AI that adapts the sequence of the textual segments based on the interaction of each reader.
This book changed my perspective about technology. I had a romantic view of technology in where every innovation was supposed to be beneficial. I realized that its narrative has a critical perspective on the implications of the close relationship between society and technology. Its conflicts expose an elitist use of the most advanced technological power for the benefit of the wealthier social classes at the expense of the exploitation of the less favored social classes.
","Juan B. Gutiérrez","Condiciones Extremas by Juan B Gutierrez",,"May 2020","Leonardo Montes Alvarez, Ph.D. candidate",,,,,,artificial-intelligence-hispanic-digital-literature,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency 2021","Access,Artificial Intelligence,Digital Humanities,Digital Literature,Gutiérrez, Juan B.,Hispanic Literature,Hypertext,Literature,Technology",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/443/cyber-5317026_960_720.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Neruda and the Shimmering Lives of Lifeless Things",,"Reflecting on growing up as a clumsy child with two rambunctious brothers, two phrases immediately come to mind, burnt into my memory like a brand from their ceaseless repetition: ""make your bed"" and ""they're only things."" One of these (""make your bed"") never failed to inspire in me a blood-boiling rage of the Sisyphean sort: after all, what was the point of making your bed if you were just going to unmake it a scant twelve hours later? The other (""they’re only things"") was less affectively charged, but the well-meaning platitude applied like a balm by my mother after this or that was broken never seemed to sit right. I understood the moral sentiment, which underscored the relative importance of social relations over material goods. Yet, while I lacked the language to articulate it, it never seemed fair to cast some of these goods as inert, inherently meaningless ""things."" Scraggly blankets, favourite markers, even the contours of secret nooks tucked away in the crevices of the basement: these beloved things seemed to occupy some special, understated liminal space between person and mere object, between meaningful language and the absolutely mute.
Reading Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things was the first time that I found myself experiencing that electric connection between self and materiality through the mind of someone else—through the eyes of a poet. For Neruda, the life of a chair invokes a rich ecosystem. It is not a utilitarian object, easily cast aside and replaced with another: it is a dynamic actor in a vibrant and distinctive jungle lifescape of sounds, smells, stories, and—ultimately—symbolism. Soap, not just a cleansing agent, is the ""pure delight"" of ephemeral fragrance as it sinuously winds its way through the world, impressing itself on us. And all of these things, taken together, constitute more than an inert backdrop for human life: as Neruda says, ""they were so alive with me/ that they lived half my life/ and will die half my death."" It is Neruda's appreciation for the vitality at the heart of the seemingly mundane, the shimmering lives of lifeless things, that I try to channel whenever I am trying to philosophically express our place in the world and all of its unexpected dimensions—or trying to come to grips with the loss of a favourite coffee mug.",,"Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things",,"Approximately 2014","Sarah (Sadie) Warren, 31, PhD Candidate, Instructor, and Digital Scholarship Associate",,,,,,neruda-and-shimmering-lives-of-lifeless-things,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"National Humanities Center Remote Summer Residency Program ","Books & Reading,Families,Literature,Neruda, Pablo,Poetry",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/408/Amber_Edited.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2020",1,0
"This was your Grandfather's...",,"Around New Year’s Eve 2017/18, I was in Brooklyn visiting my sister and brother in law. There was a pretty significant blizzard, and we were completely snowed in, so I picked up the novel I had brought with me on the off chance that I would have time for pleasure reading. The novel was William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which I hadn’t read since high school. Though I hadn’t realized it when I packed it, it was the copy which had belonged to my (paternal) grandfather, who had passed away about a year and a half earlier.
My grandfather was a minister and a professor of philosophy at a tiny liberal arts college in Jefferson City, Tennessee. My grandfather was not a particularly talkative man, and I didn’t share his love of sports, so we mostly bonded over philosophy and literature. And in fact, we didn’t share many favorite figures or problems in philosophy, so we talked most often about literature. He loved modernist novels in general, but he had a special love of William Faulkner, one which he passed on to me.
Faulkner is one of only two prose writers I have encountered whose work is so beautiful that I often have to set it aside for a moment while I’m reading and catch a breath or two (the other being Toni Morrison, who wrote her dissertation on Faulkner). There’s something about the combination of almost unrelenting lyrical beauty (Hortense Spillers once described Absalom, Absalom! as going through a carwash without a car) with merciless plumbing of the unconscious and history of white Southern society that makes Faulkner unsurpassable for me.
Anyway, the second chapter of The Sound and the Fury, which narrates the day leading up to Quentin Compson’s suicide in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has always been one of my favorite pieces of Faulkner’s corpus, and I decided to read it on that freezing day in Brooklyn. The first paragraph is breathtaking in its own right, but as I read it, I noticed my grandfather had underlined, among a few other sparse notations, the word “Grandfather’s” in the following sentence:
""[The watch] was grandfather’s and when father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; its rather extruciating-ly apt you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.""
There was something haunting about the way the traces of his reading reached me after his death, not to mention the strange coincidences between my own situation in relation to this object and the text of the passage itself. Usually we have to step back from the texts we study, consider them systematically or theoretically; I enjoy that work, and it has its own pleasures and passions. But sometimes the conditions—history, text, place, etc—happen to align such that that scientific distance becomes unsustainable, or perhaps simply unbearable. The safety of that distance gone, your own specificity feels implicated, struck, perhaps (indeed often) in ways that can feel violent, powerful, unwelcome. In my life these moments haven’t been glorious or extraordinary, but they have been impossible to forget.",,"Faulkner's _The Sound and the Fury_ ",,"Around New Year's 2017/18","Benjamin Brewer, Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy, Emory University",,,,,,this-was-your-grandfather,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"VGSSR 2020","Books & Reading,College Teachers,Family,Faulkner, William,Literature,Philosophy,The Sound and the Fury",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/17/395/HM_Faulkner_Watch.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2020",1,0
"That Day and that Professor",,"Several years ago, I was invited to teach a literary translation class at the college in my small town in Montana, something that was completely out of my profession as I was a civil engineer with a master's degree in Information Systems. Moreover, it was not part of my remotest dreams but since at the time I was the only native Spanish speaker in my town, with a master’s degree, I decided to accept the invitation. The experience turned out to be wonderful. So much that a few years later, I had already finished my first semester in the doctoral program in Latin American literature. While being a student, I also had the opportunity to be an intern for the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere in UF. There, I coordinated table events for the Pop-Up Culture Week where students, after learning about the Humanities Moments concept, were able to create their own Moment. It was so successful that we repeated the event a few months later at the International Education Week.
That special day when, in Montana, that professor and now friend invited me to teach changed my life forever. Today, very close to finishing my PhD, having taught, and having worked as an intern, I can say that being a teacher is the most wonderful thing that has happened to me in my professional life and I would not change it for anything in the world. The satisfaction of first seeing my students with their eyes full of curiosity and interest when I mention cultural and life events lived in my country and in Latin America, as part of the language and culture classes, and later, exchanging thoughts and experiences with them at the events reminded me that humanities are not only knowledge but also amazing human being experiences that we share and pass on from heart to heart.",,"An English professor",,"Fall 2007","Nancy Pinzon, PhD Candidate, Latin American Literature, University of Florida",,,,,,that-day-and-that-professor,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, University of Florida","Education,Humanities,Humanities Education,Inspiration,Literature,Science & the Humanities,Self-Realization",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/389/Books_Image_HM.jpg,Text,,1,0
"From the Pequod to the Oil Fields ",,"James Hackett describes how his early encounters with some classics of American and British literature—including Moby-Dick—caused him to become more reflective about life. They also taught him the importance of written self-expression.",,"The works of Henry David Thoreau; Moby-Dick by Herman Melville",,,"James Hackett, CEO, Alta Mesa Resources",,,,,,james-hackett-literature,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,"Heidi Camp","Books & Reading,Business Leaders,Literature,Melville, Herman,Moby-Dick,Teachers & Teaching,Thoreau, Henry David",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/273/Unknown.jpeg,"Moving Image",,1,0
"“Fern Hill”: the fleeting, eternal magnificence of Innocence",,"
I could do several Humanities Hours out of Humanities Moments – there are so many passages and ideas that have animated my imagination. I first find myself drawn to the heart-wrenching climax of Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, but to describe that would be to reveal the ending, which I would feel queasy doing.
So I’m going with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” instead. Its lyricism conjures the innocence of youth that cannot imagine its own end. That’s kind of what innocence is: a brilliantly perfect inability to envision its own conclusion.
Thomas’s second stanza begins,
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
We are “young once only” and we play and are golden. We all see this in the delight of children and also in the mesmerizing natural panoramas that remind me of a summer evening on a hilltop in Maine. It’s summer vacation all the time. It evokes the feeling that I think that character from Friday Night Lights has in mind when he says, “My heart is full.”
In a way, the ending of “Fern Hill” brings me to what I love so much about Don Quixote and the scene I mentioned a minute ago. Here I am, a middle-aged guy spending every day with teenagers, hoping to share and discuss with them truths about the human condition and our relationships and tragedy and beauty while they, children who are “green and golden” in their “heedless ways,” in their Eden of hope and vigor, start to gain insight about how Time holds them. They are looking toward college and work and beyond, and often they worry and fear, and although for many the curiosity of youth is sputtering, its flame is not out.
Thomas:
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that Time would take me
Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Whenever I read “Fern Hill,” and whenever I think of Don Quixote, I do so from the Experience side of the divide between innocence and experience. I peer longingly over at innocence, and I wish for it…and I feel it as if it were still here. It is the wonder of the poem, and of art, that in its presence we can be both green and dying.
",,"""Fern Hill,"" a poem by Dylan Thomas",,"I can trace it to several instances, including my original interaction with the poem, but the photo I use was taken in July 2012.","Carl Rosin, 51, teacher",,,,,,fern-hill,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"I am a member of the NHC's Teacher Advisory Council for 2018-19","Books & Reading,Casco, Maine,de Cervantes, Miguel,Don Quixote,Experience,Fern Hill,Innocence,Literature,Poetry,Teachers & Teaching,Thomas, Dylan,Wonder",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/9/252/hackers-hill-casco-maine-july2012.jpg,Text,"Teacher Advisory Council",1,0 "Sometimes You Just Need to Keep Reading",,"Growing up in the mid-1960s as a white girl in Tuskegee, Alabama, Mab Segrest attended a segregated private school that her parents had helped found in response to a court order years earlier to integrate public high schools. In the shadows of governor George Wallace’s racist violence, history had “come to [her] front door.” Seeking a better understanding of the U.S. South, she found William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in the local library. Perplexed by the interior monologue of its opening pages, she forged ahead in grappling with the famed Southern writer’s dizzying language. Around page 105, a revelation rewarded her persistence: she had been reading from the point of view of cognitively impaired Benjy, the “idiot.”
Years later, while a graduate student in Duke’s English department, a time during which she eventually came out as a lesbian, she explored the contents of the Intimate Bookshop in the next town over, Chapel Hill. A question in a book called Sappho Was a Right-On Woman transformed her worldview: “What causes heterosexuality?” By shifting the query from homosexuality to heterosexuality, the question was a “revelation” for Segrest.
By continuing to dwell on Faulkner’s novel, Segrest learned the value of perseverance: “Sometimes you just need to keep reading.” In grappling with the queries of a feminist text (“what causes heterosexuality?”), she realized that “how you ask the questions makes a really big difference.” Texts, arguments, and how people struggle with what it means to be human can be “liberatory or revelatory,” whether for a young girl in the midst of an apartheid system or for a lesbian woman in a homophobic society. Together, these humanities moments bookend Segrest’s personal and intellectual formation and her understanding of the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender.
",,,,mid-1960s,"Mab Segrest, Professor Emerita, Connecticut College",,,,,,segrest-sometimes-you-just-need-to-keep-reading,,,,,,"This is Mab Segrest and this is my Humanities Moment. When asked to evoke this moment, I’m taken back to 1965, maybe, in Tuskegee, Alabama, where I’m a student at Macon Academy, a segregated private school that my parents had helped to start a couple years before, when the federal court put out an order in Macon County to integrate Tuskegee High School, where I attended, with three other high schools in cities across the state, and George Wallace sent state troopers on horses to close it down. And my parents helped to shape Macon Academy. And a couple years in, history had come to my front door. I would see the troopers two blocks down, and the media were on my doorstep, and then we would watch ourselves at night on TV, and it had really roiled a lot of reflections for me, as a white girl in a very segregated town, and what the South meant, what this all meant.
So, I went to the little library we had accumulated, that was in Harris Hotel next to the school, next to my house, and I decided I should read William Faulkner, because Faulkner supposedly wrote about the South. So, I picked out this book called The Sound And The Fury, which I had kind of heard of, too, and I started reading it. Now, if you’ve read The Sound And The Fury, you’ll know this. If you’ve not, I need to tell you that it’s done in a series of interior monologues with characters, and the first one is a character Benjy Compson, who is cognitively disabled—in the product of the times, an idiot—and the first hundred pages take place in his head.
Well, I would read the first 60 pages, and I would think, “What in the world is going on here? I’ve never—” And I would start again, and I would start again, and I was more perplexed, just about, than I ever have been with a literary text. And so finally I decided, “You just need to read it more.” And so I got to page 105 and realized, “Oh, wow. It’s Benjy! It’s not me!” This is somebody whose mental—you know, this is an idiot. Which is a derogatory term, but that’s what was I given to think of in the day. And I learned that sometimes you just need to keep reading. And certainly with my culture, I needed to do that, too.
I had a kind of equivalent moment later, 20 years later, when I came to Duke to graduate school. I came out as a lesbian. Well, I came to graduate school, and I had a lesbian relationship, but I wasn’t out as a lesbian, and I was really needing to understand it, in some way or another, so I didn’t go to the Gothic Bookshop at Duke, because people might see me. I went to the Intimate Bookstore in Chapel Hill. I got a book called Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, and I read through it, and there’s a list of three questions that you should ask yourself, and I only remember one. “What causes heterosexuality?” And that question was a revelation to me. Like, “Oh, it’s not what causes homosexuality. It’s what causes heterosexuality.”
I can ask the questions, and how you ask the questions makes a really big difference, so both of those are kind of bookends to how texts, arguments, people struggling with what it means to be human in particular cultural contexts, can be liberating and revelatory to either an adolescent in Alabama struggling with the apartheid system or later on, a woman who is a lesbian struggling with this intensely homophobic culture. And the larger literatures that have come out of African American scholars and women scholars, and queer scholars, on these questions of race/gender, have revolutionized, really, our understanding of the human, of what humanities are, and where we are positioned within them. So my humanities moment, then, is my encounter as a girl in Tuskegee with The Sound and The Fury.
",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Abbott, Sidney,Books & Reading,Duke University,Durham, North Carolina,Faulkner, William,Feminism,Literature,Love, Barbara,Professors,Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism,Segregation,The Sound and the Fury,Tuskegee, Alabama",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/172/Sappho.jpg,Sound,"National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0 "Finding Freedom from the Familiar",,"In 1979, at age 16, Hollis Robbins found herself enrolled at John Hopkins University. Though she was there as part of a program for girls who excelled in math, she signed up for a humanities lecture class. In that day’s class, drawing upon the epic of Gilgamesh, a guest lecturer expounded on the theory of “mimetic desire,” or the idea that we borrow our desires from other people. Unbeknownst to her, the speaker was none other than famed anthropological philosopher René Girard. Yet, Hollis disagreed. In her opinion, culled from reading stories such as those of Herman Melville and Charles Dickens, people actually like “very strange things.” They are drawn to things that are different from themselves.
Today, as a professor of literature, her conviction holds strong, supported by experiences such as teaching Melville’s Moby-Dick. She finds that contrary to present-day despair about their “slow attention spans,” students want to reach across centuries to worlds unfamiliar from their own.
",,"Epic of Gilgamesh; the philosophy of René Girard; Moby-Dick by Herman Melville",,1979,"Hollis Robbins, Johns Hopkins University",,,,,,robbins-finding-freedom-from-familiar,,,,,,"I’m Hollis Robbins and the Delta Delta Delta fellow at the National Humanities Center, 2017–18. I was thinking about how I ended up as a scholar of the humanities and the origin would be in 1979. I had gone to college at age 16 under a math program for girls who were gifted at math. I found myself at Johns Hopkins very young and intending to study math and I signed up for a course in humanities, I think called just “Humanities” with the excellent Richard Maxey.
That fall he had a visiting scholar. I had no idea who it was: it was René Girard, who had just finished writing Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World, in which he set forth his theory of mimesis and mimetic desire. I remember walking into the seminar room one day, from fairly rural New Hampshire and for me books were just things that you read. I had no intention in studying literature in college and here comes this man with these—what I remember mostly is his humongous eyebrows—talking about the Gilgamesh epic and his theory of mimetic desire. That our desires do not emerge from us, but our desires emerge from imitating others’ desires, that we see somebody desiring something and that we begin to desire that. He went through the Epic of Gilgamesh to play out this theory.
At 16 years old sitting in this classroom, the seminar room listening to him, I thought he was wrong. I thought, now I don’t know anything but what I know from reading books, from reading Moby-Dick, from reading Dickens, from reading anything I could get my hands on, that people like very strange things. People are self-indulgent, self-defeating, there isn’t a character in anything written by Charles Dickens that I would want to mirror or desire. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in arguments about—or debates about, or sort of current discourse about—slow attention spans in our students. That our students can’t read whole novels. Can’t sit and digest an epic poem. Couldn’t converse for a two-and-a-half-hour seminar without their smart phone devices.
I think that this is, again, quite wrong. My experience in the classroom—let me just reach for Moby-Dick, which I teach every spring—is that students want something different. They want to reach across centuries. They want to reach across continents. They want not to have what they are familiar with spoon-fed to them. When they are given worlds, continents, thousands of individuals characters, situations, their desires will emerge from the experience of reading literature. I’ve had students in my office who want to talk about poor drowned Pip in Moby-Dick or who want to understand Queequeg’s great dive into the water to save a passenger that has just insulted him.
Literature frees young people from the constant barrage of familiarity that social media is giving them so I’m kind of pleased with myself, actually, at so long ago having my own opinion about René Girard.
",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Baltimore, Maryland,Books & Reading,Dickens, Charles,Epic of Gilgamesh,Epic Poetry,Girard, René,Johns Hopkins University,Literature,Melville, Herman,Mimetic Desire,Moby-Dick,Philosophy,Professors,Teachers & Teaching",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/171/Gilgamesh.jpeg,Sound,"National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0 "Where Dreams Were Made and Humanistic Visions Forged",,"Throughout their son’s childhood, Stephen Hall’s parents, both children of sharecroppers, crafted a “deeply humanistic perch” from which he could “view the world.” Though possessing none of the benefits of class or race privilege, they harnessed the power of the book, searching for what historian Isabel Wilkerson has called “the light of other suns” in the “recesses of their minds.” Their personal library—including the Bible, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Great Books—stoked young Hall’s imagination. The harmonies of musicians, such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, played alongside images of athletes like Muhammad Ali. The ritual of accompanying his parents to vote in local, state, and national elections deepened a conviction: being humanistic entails civic engagement.",,,,,"Stephen G. Hall, Alcorn State University",,,,,,hall-humanistic-visions,,,,,,"It seems from my early consciousness, the humanities were an ever-present part of my being. The son of sharecropper's children, neither which possessed a high school education, they crafted a deeply humanistic perch from which I could view the world. From Durham and Salzburg, North Carolina, respectfully, the search for what Isabel Wilkerson has called the ""light of the suns"" resided in the conscious and unconscious recesses of their mind.
Possessing none of the benefits of class, race, and gender privilege, my mother harnessed the power of a book. A small library composed of encyclopedias, great books, contemporary literature and magazines, nestled in the study between the living room and master bedroom.
In the den, this middle space, where I did my homework daily, was where dreams were made and humanistic visions forged. It seems that all that would come was previewed there. A close reading of the Bible, deep droughts from the wells of encyclopedia Britannica, the great books and great performances, from Bach to Berlin.
My father cultivated in me his love of politics and sport. In the basement, he regaled us with Isaac Hayes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Whisperers on 8-track tapes. As we basked in the melodic cadences of the songs, Mohammed Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, James Foreman, or Tommy Hickman Herms, or Leonard Spinx could be seen on the console television, weaving their pugilistic magic in the ring.
If the basement and study, upper and lower rooms, represented two distinct poles of reality, then the kitchen served as the temple to politics. There my father read the newspaper and watched the nightly news. It was his insistence that politics mattered, which fueled my subsequent interest in political conventions. I watched my first political convention in 1976, and I continue to do so up to the present day.
Convinced that being humanistic entailed civic engagement, my parents always took my brother and I with them to vote in local, state and national elections. It was a ritual of sorts. We obligingly piled into our old 1968 Pontiac Bonneville, arriving at Campville Elementary School, our neighborhood polling place in Baltimore County, Maryland. Once there, they would park the car on the road, and we would watch them make their way through a gauntlet of poll workers, who showered them with campaign literature of one sort or another. Undaunted, they proceeded into the polling place, and stayed for what seemed an eternity. Emerging together as if they had crossed the finish line of a marathon, we could see the exhilaration and the importance of this act.
It was a logical extension of the humanistic constructs in our home. Contact in eventful and uneventful ways, my upbringing among organic intellectuals, a Gramscian designation would surely apply to my parents, shaped my interests in direct and indirect ways.
By the mid-80s, armed with a deeper and more informed sense of my racial sense and my humanistic responsibility, I too became involved in political campaign. As election day approached, we received our poll assignments. My assignment was none other than Campville Elementary School. I arrived early to my post on election day. A lean, lanky boy of 17, I was wise in the arts of politics, canvassing and poll work. The voters came slowly, and then steadily, through the gauntlet of poll workers who handed them literature, and generally cajoled and prodded them to vote for one candidate or the other. All the faces seemed to blur, until I looked across the yard and saw my parents, parking in their familiar place and proceeding to the gauntlet. As my parents proceeded, I felt the weight of the years passing before me, remembering my passive position watching my parents, and present one as an active participant. Now, in our reverse roles, all was clear. As they approached, I beamed with pride. I hugged them, and gleefully announced and introduced them to the assembled throng as my parents.
I knew in that moment all the years of watching, listening, engaging, thinking in our den and basement and kitchen had prepared me for this moment. A moment electric with the preparation of the past, the participatory urgency of the present, and the humanistic possibilities of the future.
",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Ali, Muhammad,Bach, Johann Sebastian,Baltimore County, Maryland,Berlin, Irving,Black History,Books & Reading,Citizenship,Gaye, Marvin,Hayes, Isaac,Hearn, Thomas ""Tommy"",Leonard, ""Sugar"" Ray,Literature,Music,Parent & Child,Professors,Ross, Diana,The Bible,Voting,Wonder, Stevie",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/170/African_American_voter_registration_1960s.jpg,Sound,"National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0 "Discovering How Literature and Art Place Demands on Us",,"From reading Crime and Punishment as a high school senior and the Depression-era masterpieces Absalom, Absolom! and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in college, Gil Greggs describes a personal journey of discovery about the ways literature connects readers to the real world.
Later, he describes how the portraits painted by Rembrandt and photographs taken by Richard Avedon help us notice and better appreciate the humanity of the people around us and to perceive hints of their inner lives.
",,,,,"Dr. Gil Greggs, Director of Academic Programs, St. David’s School, Raleigh NC",,,,,,gil-greggs-learning-to-read-in-order-to-see,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Absalom, Absalom!,Agee, James,Avedon, Richard,Books & Reading,Crime and Punishment,Dostoyevsky, Fyodor,Evans, Walker,Faulkner, William,Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,Literature,Paintings,Photography,Rembrant, Harmenszoon van Rijn,Teachers & Teaching",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/169/kennedys.jpeg,"Moving Image",,1,0 "On the Anxiety of Influence",,"In this account, William Leuchtenburg shares the story of a seemingly routine exchange with literary scholars in the late 1970s which spurred him to new insights about the ways iconic figures from the past influence those who succeed them, whether they be poets, or composers, or U.S. presidents. Eventually, he would share these insights in his major work on presidential legacies, In The Shadow of FDR.
Already an accomplished political historian at the time of this moment, Leuchtenburg demonstrates how the questions and ways of seeing in other humanities fields led him to analogous realizations about his own research.
",,,,1980,"William Leuchtenburg, William Rand Kenan Jr. professor emeritus of history, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill",,,,,,william-leuchtenburg-anxiety-of-influence,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Bloom, Harold,Books & Reading,In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Barack Obama,Leuchtenburg, William,Literature,Professors,The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry,United States History",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/167/bloom-anxiety-of-influence.jpg,"Moving Image","National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0 "Hamilton and the Performance of Poetry",,"Thomas Scherer describes two related encounters which speak to the power of hearing poetry performed aloud. The first is an explanatory talk and poetry reading by the great literary scholar M. H. Abrams at the National Humanities Center; the second is hearing Lin-Manuel Miranda discuss his award-winning rap musical, Hamilton.
Across generations, cultural divides, venues, and artistic voices, the power of lyric poetry to capture and convey powerful feeling is undeniable. And when poetry is performed and embodied, “brought to life” if you will, its capacity to create change is palpable.
","M. H. Abrams, Lin-Manuel Miranda","Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton; M.H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp",,,"Thomas Scherer, Consultant, Spencer Capital Holdings",,,,,,thomas-scherer-abrams-hamilton-poetry,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Abrams, M.H.,Chernow, Ron,Drama,Hamilton, Alexander,Hamilton: An American Musical,Hip-Hop,History,Literature,Miranda, Lin-Manuel,Music,New York, New York,Performing Arts,Poetry,Politics,Popular Culture,Storytelling,The Mirror and the Lamp,United States History",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/10/166/hamilton-marquee.jpg,"Moving Image","National Humanities Center Board Members",1,0 "A Lifetime of Humanities Moments",,"Some years ago, I was asked to give a lecture to students enrolled in a small university’s humanities program describing the personal epiphany I experienced which led to my passion for the humanities. Try as I might, I could not think of an isolated, single experience but rather a series of moments that stretch back to my childhood and have “stuck to my ribs” over a lifetime.
A very early memory: perhaps at the age of six or seven, I became mesmerized by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and repeatedly played it on the phonograph (several 78 discs), deeply affected by the contrast between the brooding, dark and the happier, lighter themes.
Quite obviously, I was drawn to classical music. Some five or six years later, I had my heart set to hear Rudolph Serkin perform Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. An ear infection, quite painful, almost prevented the experience. Against doctor’s orders, my aunt took me. I clearly recall how thrilled I was by the crescendo-decrescendo passage in the last movement—leaving the concert hall pain-free with the infection gone!
During these early years, I was somewhat of a bookworm, transported to different times and places by books which provided delight, wonderment and a number of deeply poignant moments. Initially, adventure stories such as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Willa Cather’s evocative novels My Antonia and O Pioneers!
I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in How Green Was My Valley, Walter Hampton in The Patriots and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I was bowled over by Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra as the young, adoring female in awe of Julius Caesar in the Shaw play and her brilliantly played, contrasting characterization as a mature and majestic woman facing her demise in Shakespeare.
A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—Henry V, Macbeth, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and King Lear—have been at the core. Perhaps one of my most memorable nights of theater-going was a performance by the great husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.
The visual arts, particularly painting, was an important part of my childhood, which continues to be nurtured by museum-going in my own city and around the world. Collecting has also been a joyous endeavor, centered on prints with a focus on Ukiyo-e. Two most memorable moments were encountering Goya’s paintings and prints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. These works riveted me, and I spent a whole day with them alone. Some years apart on a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I found myself in a small gallery, just five paintings by Rembrandt—four self-portraits and one of his mother. I was overcome and could not contain tears—they spoke so deeply of the human condition.
Coming back to adolescent years and literature, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, O’Henry, Herman Hesse, again Twain, were sources of adventure and insights to the human condition and heart. College years introduced me to Homer, the Greek playwrights, and the Roman poets, particularly Virgil, Horace and Catullus. A lifetime of reading followed—English and American novelists and essayists, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Russian authors, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Pages and pages of humanities moments!!
Did he appear because I fell asleep thinking of him? If only I’d known I was dreaming, I’d never have wakened. |
I thought to pick the flower of forgetting for myself, but I found it already growing in his heart. |
Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s Apology and Phaedo? Socrates’ acceptance of the Athenian Assembly’s death sentence and later his refusal to delay drinking the hemlock spoke to me of transcendent self-possession and wisdom.
These stoic strains were fully developed over the ensuing five hundred years and come full-blown with the appearance of the stoic philosophers—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. How can one forget the admonishment in the Enchiridion of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his Meditations advising, “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” These words speak deeply to such as myself who has been so greatly privileged. I went on to major in philosophy and have continued my interest over a lifetime, initially with special focus on Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in later life centered on political and moral questions.
As can be surmised, music—orchestral, chamber, vocal and opera—has been my greatest passion. As I entered my adolescent years, my musical horizons were expanding, particularly with my introduction to Baroque music—J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and Telemann. Handel’s Messiah was an early favorite, and the joy I felt on hearing the aria and chorus “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” is indescribable. This lead to Bach cantatas, his Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Christmas Oratorio with its joyful and triumphant opening chorus. No Christmas is complete without that ringing in my ears, and who cannot be moved by the opening aria, “Ich habe Genug” from the Cantata of the same name.
Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:
Finally, in my more adult years, I am blessed to hear and play (violin) chamber music—string quartets, piano trios, various combinations of strings, winds and keyboard. The list of profound and touching moments is endless. I have only to mention Mozart’s Viola Quintets K.415 & 416, Beethoven’s late string quartets Op. 127-135; and Schubert’s quintessential Cello Quintet in C major as examples.
How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!
",,,,,"Peter A. Benoliel, Chairman Emeritus, Quaker Chemical Corporation",,,,,,benoliel-lifetime-humanities-moments,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,Antony and Cleopatra,Aurelius, Marcus,Bach, Johann Sebastian,Beethoven, Ludwig van,Books & Reading,Business Leaders,Caesar and Cleopatra,Cather, Willa,Classical Music,Cooper, James Fenimore,Corelli, Arcangelo,Cyrano de Bergerac,Dickens, Charles,Dostoyevsky, Fyodor,Drama,Dumas, Alexandre,Dürrenmatt, Freidrich,Eliot, George,Epictetus,Film,Goya, Francisco,Handel, George Frideric,Hesse, Herman,Homer, Virgil,Horace, Catullus,How Green Was My Valley,In Search of Lost Time,Literature,Melville, Herman,Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life,Modern Painting,Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus,Mrs. Dalloway,Murasaki, Shikibu,My Ántonia,O Pioneers!,Performing Arts,Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte,Philosophy,Piano Concerto no. 5,Plato,Poetry,Proust, Marcel,Schubert, Franz Peter,Shakespeare, William,Shaw, George Bernard,Socrates,Symphony no. 8 in B Minor,Telemann, Georg Philipp,Thackeray, William Makepeace,The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,The Deerslayer, or the First War-path,The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757,The Mysterious Island,The Patriots,The Tale of Genji,The Three Musketeers,The Visit,To the Lighthouse,Tolstoy, Leo,Twain, Mark,Verne, Jules,Vivaldi, Antonio Lucio,Woolf, Virginia",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/10/165/virginia-woolf.jpg,Text,"National Humanities Center Board Members",1,0 "Learning How to Read a Poem",,"Janet Napolitano, President of the University of California, reflects on her life growing up in New Mexico and how a low grade on a poetry analysis assignment in college encouraged her to master the craft of writing. She notes how her writing abilities and exposure to the humanities served her well in a career in government and higher education.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
",,"""Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God"" by John Donne; Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather",,,"Janet Napolitano, President of the University of California",,,,,,janet-napolitano,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Analytical Skills,Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God,Cather, Willa,Citizenship,College Teachers,Cultural History,Death Comes for the Archbishop,Donne, John,Humanities Education,Literature,Music,New Mexico,Oakland, California,Santa Clara University,Santa Clara, California,Science & the Humanities,Teachers & Teaching,University of California,Writing",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/5/147/Willa_Cather_1912.jpeg,"Moving Image","California Humanities: “We Are the Humanities”",1,0 "For the First Time It Felt Like Someone Was Writing About Me",,"English teacher Justin Parmenter describes how his encounters with essays by Thoreau and Emerson, and later with the poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” helped him to understand how literature can provide both an escape from the troubles of life and a connection to others who’ve seen and felt the same things though they may have lived centuries before. By seeing himself in the transformative literature of Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Emerson, Parmenter felt like he had “the power to make changes” in his own life. Wordsworth’s Romantic vision and Thoreau’s and Emerson’s Transcendentalist philosophy jointly endowed Parmenter’s worldview with a greater meaning. As a teacher, he strives to cultivate a sense of personal connection between his individual students and works of literature.",,"The works of William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson",,,"Justin Parmenter, Charlotte Mecklenburg School District, NC",,,,,,thoreau-emerson-wordsworth,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"American Renaissance,Books & Reading,Emerson, Ralph Waldo,Essay (Literary Form),Inspiration,Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,Literature,Nature & Civilization,Poetry,Teachers & Teaching,Thoreau, Henry David,Tintern, Wales,Transcendentalism,Walden, Or, Life in the Woods,Wordsworth, William",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/4/144/Tintern_Abbey.jpg,"Moving Image",Educators,1,0 "Not Too Far Off",,"While I was a teenager about to go off to college, I watched Death of a Salesman at the theater. At the time I was struggling with the transition I was about to embark on, but I found a deep connection to Biff's character. I felt like I was always running a never ending marathon for the amusement of those around me. After seeing Biff finally stand up to Willy and tell him that he was tired of trying to be something that he could not achieve, I felt a sense of clarity. I had to pursue what I wanted in life not just seek the approval of others. I started to implement this attitude in my daily life and saw that I began to enjoy life much more. You never know what will be your changing point until it blindsides you.","Arthur Miller","Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller",,"Spring 2014","Brian Finke, 21, Student at Texas A&M",,,,,,not-too-far-off,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Alley Theater,Death of a Salesman,Houston, Texas,Literature,Miller, Arthur,Performing Arts,Self-Realization,Students,Texas A&M University,Theater",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/134/Death_of_a_Salesman.jpeg,Text,,1,0 "Literature and Its Worlds of Possibility","Coccia enlists the words of feminist theorist and poet Adrienne Rich to articulate the power of the humanities: “I came to believe a child’s belief, but also a poet’s … that language, writing, those pages of print could teach me how to live, could tell me what was possible.” Literature can open up worlds of possibility, encapsulating what the humanities can offer us.","In middle school, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird inspired Emily Coccia to imagine the possibilities of the law to bring communities closer to justice. In college, it was the world of critical theory—such as feminist and queer theory—however, that helped her understand the other paths available to those wishing to enact social change.",,"To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; queer and critical theory by Adrienne Rich and others",,,"Emily Coccia, the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress",,,,,,literature-worlds-of-possibility,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Books & Reading,Critical Theory,Feminism,Justice,Lee, Harper,Lesbian Authors,Literature,Queer Theory,Rich, Adrienne,To Kill a Mockingbird,Women Authors",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/11/126/adrienne-rich.jpg,"Moving Image","Kluge Scholars",1,0 "The Jungle: Personalizing the Historical Struggle of Workers","Sinclair famously quipped that he “aimed for the public’s heart” but accidentally “hit it in the stomach.” His novel hit Shedd in both places. The Jungle personalized the hopes and struggles of those living in the era that she would eventually study as a modern U.S. historian. Sinclair’s story prompted her to seek answers to questions: How did this novel prompt policy change? How did it capture the struggles of historical actors and immigrants in the early 20th century? What other novels did Sinclair write? What institutional structures need reform in order to be more just?","An early encounter with muckraking American novelist Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed Kristen Shedd to issues surrounding human rights and animal rights in the early 20th century. For Shedd, the 1906 novel exposed the intersections of fiction, policy, history, and social justice. Sinclair’s story prompted her to seek answers to questions: How did this novel prompt policy change? How did it capture the struggles of historical actors and immigrants in the early 20th century? What other novels did Sinclair write? What institutional structures need reform in order to be more just?",,"The Jungle by Upton Sinclair",,,"Kristen Shedd, Fullerton College & The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress",,,,,,shedd-jungle-personalizing-history,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Animal Rights,Books & Reading,Boston (1928 novel),Emigration & Immigration,History,Human Rights,Kluge Scholars,Literature,Muckraking (Journalism),Policy,Professors,Sacco-Vanzetti Trial,Sinclair, Upton,Social Justice,The Jungle",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/11/124/The_Jungle.1.jpg,"Moving Image","Kluge Scholars",1,0 "Baseball, Jackie Robinson, and Racial Identity Formation","Reading a short biography on Jackie Robinson and developing my own racial identity were important ways that the humanities helped me in this moment.","As I grew up in rural South Carolina in the 1980s, baseball was my favorite hobby and pastime. For most of my 7 year Dixie league/recreational league baseball career (ages 5 to 12), my dad was my coach. I don’t remember watching baseball on television because we only had three to four channels and did not have cable. On my first baseball team, I was the only black player; and then after that most of my teams were majority black. At this time I only had vague notions about race, although I knew that I was black. Because both of my parents worked, my brother and I attended a day-care facility in town. The day-care provider was a thirty-something year old white woman and most of the children in her care were also white. Again, I had little sense of my blackness. Of the many books on hand at the daycare, one day I discovered a children’s book about Jackie Robinson. By this time, I’m in the third grade and am a good reader, so I read the book very quickly. Just as quickly, it becomes one of my favorite books. I was extremely excited for several reasons: Never before I had a read a book with a Black main character. I knew there were black baseball players, but did not feel like I knew any very well. The book discussed racism that Robinson faced and how he overcame it and became one of the best baseball players in his generation (Rookie of the Year and MVP). It was the first example of people facing hardships because they were black and Jackie Robinson overcame the hardships. And lastly, a big part of my own racial development and understanding was that being black was not just about facing hardships in the past and overcoming them. I continued to study Negro league baseball. Read several books and became fascinated by these invisible men who participated in a separate but unequal league, but had equal or superior baseball talent.",N/A,"A children's book about Jackie Robinson (I don't remember the title)",,"I was a third grader in the 1980s.","Jamie Lathan, 39, teacher and school administrator, husband, father, son, brother, friend.",,,,,,baseball-and-racial-identity,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"African American History,Baseball,Biography,Black History,Books & Reading,Children's Literature,Introspection,Literature,Negro Leagues,Race Identity,Robinson, Jackie,South Carolina,Teachers & Teaching",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/9/115/download-1.jpg,Text,"Teacher Advisory Council",1,0 "Getting Carried Away by a Book","The reason the moment stands out is that it was the first time I remember getting totally absorbed in a book. As I was reading, I lost track of the fact that I was reading and seemed to experience the words on the page almost a events I was living through. I remember that when I put down the book, I suddenly became aware that I'd lost track of time, of turning the pages, of the entire situation I was in. Only later when I heard of the idea of getting absorbed in a novel did I recognize that, yes, I've had that experience.","When I was young, maybe around 13 years old, I read a fantasy novel by Raymond Feist called Magician. I enjoyed reading since I was young, but I lived in a house where the TV was always on and I was easily distracted. On this occasion, I was reading on my bed in my quiet bedroom. The scene was some kind of chase, in which the main character is running away from something (maybe some monsters?), and he looks totally defeated. But suddenly, the hero's emotions produce some kind of magic effect and he defeats whatever it was that was chasing him.The whole of that poem was me. It “affirmed” my lived experience. Poems do that every day. They clarify a feeling, give us a glimpse into ourselves or, if we’re paying attention, into some other person or place. And they can show us how to live.
Hearing poets talk about their work is another experience all together. Clifton was being celebrated by writers like Toni Morrison and Sharon Olds that evening, and hearing that story from this dazzling artist in the company of her peers not only inspired me personally but also helped me remember that in the midst of all the research and interpretative work I do, it’s the art and the community around it that matters. The structure of the poem, with its repeated call to “come celebrate,” reminds me that we have to remain open, regularly invite people to join us.
","Hearing Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me” at a celebration of her work is the Humanities Moment that offered both comfort and a model for how to navigate life as a Black academic. I was a new English professor and was unprepared for the isolation I felt in the academy when a senior colleague invited me to the Clifton event. The evening was packed with more dazzling poets than I can remember, and I really couldn’t take it in. I still don’t remember much about it except hearing this poem and the story behind it.
Clifton had been named a distinguished professor of the arts and because she didn’t have all of the right credentials a man in the office next to hers didn’t think she deserved the honor and took time out of his day to tell her so. The poem is her response. The whole of that moment was affirming, not just the poem but the reason it came to me. More than affirming me, it showed me how to live this life of the mind—to do the work with fierce joy and to invite students, colleagues, and my communities to celebrate it with me.
The whole of that poem was me. It “affirmed” my lived experience. Poems do that every day. They clarify a feeling, give us a glimpse into ourselves or, if we’re paying attention, into some other person or place. And they can show us how to live.
Hearing poets talk about their work is another experience all together. Clifton was being celebrated by writers like Toni Morrison and Sharon Olds that evening, and hearing that story from this dazzling artist in the company of her peers not only inspired me personally but also helped me remember that in the midst of all the research and interpretative work I do, it’s the art and the community around it that matters. The structure of the poem, with its repeated call to “come celebrate,” reminds me that we have to remain open, regularly invite people to join us.
","Lucille Clifton","“won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton",,"2005 (ish)","Patricia Matthew, 49, English professor living in Brooklyn, New York",,,,,,the-perfect-invitation,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Clifton, Lucille,Community,Literature,Morrison, Toni,Olds, Sharon,Poetry,Professors,Vocation,Women of Color,won't you celebrate with me",http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/7/101/poetry-960x590.jpg,Text,#Humanitiesinclass,1,0 "A Quiet Desperation",,"In my late 20s, I knew that I wanted to make a vocational shift, but I struggled to find the courage to do so. One day, I came across the lines of Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he wrote in Walden in 1854.