Composition of our students

In a post some time ago, Steve asked about whether or not the the composition of our students may have something to do with class dynamics.  A very interesting question, indeed, and I’d like to address this.

Our students are majoring in a wide variety of disciplines (Anthropology, Biology, Latin, Italian Studies, Political Science, et al.), but most are either double-majoring in one of the three concentrations in Classics or Italian Studies.  The course has 4 sophomores, 8 juniors, and 12 seniors.  I’m not sure how we achieved such an interesting distribution of levels (all divisible by 4), but the course has a fairly high level of concentration of upper division students.

I would like to work on the dynamic in our course a little more–to draw their voices into the daily dialogues–esp. on Wed., since Mondays we tend to introduce the topic in a broader comparative way, and on Wed. we pursue more detailed lines of inquiry.  Participation is interestingly erratic; modelling dialogues seems to be effective in terms of getting the students to prepare and perform interactions with each other, but it is harder to pull in other voices during the average class period. I don’t think this is because the students aren’t thinking or interested–but, the structure of what we do may be a damper on other kinds of interactions.

Interaction on the course blog, though, has far exceeded my expectations.

The Old Man of Crete Weeps

We have devoted three full weeks of this course (that is, three “learning units”) to the Topography of the Other World. The first deals with “Contuity and Difference”; the second, “Progressions” (that is, both the progression of the journey and in the significance of the topography from Homer to Vergil to Dante); the third, “Topographies and Cosmologies.”

Our dialogues on Monday and Wed. stressed the symbological significance of features which mark or which blur the landscape: from the liminality of the fog, mist, murky dankness characterizing the uncannily eerie atmosphere in Od. 10 and 11 to the circles, rivers, chasms, and discrete boundaries which reinforce the ideology of contrapasso in the Inferno, boundaries and topographical features have narratological and/or theological ramifications. We see a progression from the epically unimaginable, mythic and fantastic landscape of Homer to the clearly defined, yet ineffable, imaginable and authoritatively experienced landscape of Dante.

The features marking the journey to the Other World in Homer constitute an interesting combination of fantasticality and specificity. The Aithiopians whom Poseidon visits (Od. 1) border Oceanus, and inhabit both the far east and the far west, a case of coincidentia oppositorum which occurs repeatedly in the “mapping” of the unmappable. At the edge of Oceanus, the Kimmerians (inhabiting regions far north and far east), enveloped in a perpetual state of misty night, signal the hero’s passage between the living and the dead, between civilization known and the ultimate unknown. Even palpable features, such as the rivers (Periphlegethon, Acheron, Styx, and Cocytus), the White Rock, the grove of Persephone, and the willow trees eerily resonate cult rituals in honor of the dead to keep the dead from passing up through the porous roots of the earth. The ritual scene in which Odysseus offers the blood of a sacrificial victim as a means of animating the shades of the dead underscores his liminality–a living being appeasing the insensate, haunting ghosts of his past. The geographic features themselves carry narratological import as the curious, nostalgic, long-suffering Odysseus struggles through various stages of sleep, enchantment, and lethargy (Lotus Eaters, Circe, Sirens) to this ultimate place of “sleep” beyond all places in order to make a gradual, staged return to home, to awareness, to recognition. The landscape of the Other World in Homer as the unimaginable serves to enhance the exceptionality of this epic journey which proceeds from known civilization increasingly outwards towards foreign lands, peoples, and beyond that which can be charted by human experience.

Dante, however, experiences the divine plan of the Other World as a spiritual and intellectual progression–as an education. In Canto XIV (Inf.), he encounters the classical rivers (except Styx, which, together with Eunoe, marks the boundary to Eden in Purg. 28) of the Underworld, and learns their origin from Vergil–an origin which accounts for the degression of human experience from bliss in Eden to continual suffering, to a return to dust. This degression appears in the metaphor of the Old Man of Crete-looking towards Rome-whose metalic body (gold head, silver chest, brass midriff, iron legs, clay foot) resonates both scripture (Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, Daniel 2:32-3) and the de-volution of the 5 ages in Ovid’s cosmology (Met. 1). [The latter is suggested by the reference to the Saturnian age in Purg. 28, the sister passage of this one]. Dante (the poet) invests Vergil’s etiology of the rivers in Hell with programmatic resonance encompassing a long-view of time from a theological perspective, from the paradisical beginnings to the apocalyptic end of time (dust to dust), with the classical and Christian traditions meeting, mingling, and diverging like so many rivers. The metempsychotic process of the journey, after all, leads Dante to discover the amnesiatic qualities of the Styx and anamnetic qualities of the Eunoe.

Plato’s blueprint in the Commedia

Monday’s dialogue was focused on exploring some common theoretical ground underlying representations of the afterlife found in both the Classic and Italian traditions. We discussed Platonic philosophy, specifically the epistemology and eschatology (or final destination) of the soul illustrated in Plato’s Phaedo. We also discussed Christian doctrine, which makes up the theoretical framework of the Commedia, and pointed out how the notion of the immortality of the soul is still valid, even though the epistemology of the soul is being substantially re-thought (cf. Purg. XXV), in the light of Christ’s resurrection of the body professed in the Acts of the Apostles (
St. Paul, Thessalonians 4, 13-18 ; Acts of Apostles 17, 22-32) . In addition to that we also devoted sometime exploring what we take to be another important area of common ground in the two traditions: namely the fact that the soul’s final destination described by Dante in the Commedia is strikingly similar to the one envisioned by Plato in the Phaedo. At the same time we have tried to continuously keep the students aware that this evident continuity between the two traditions is always associated to differences, and have emphasized the fact that Dante is capitalizing on the Platonic intellectual capital, yet does not absorb it a-critically.  

On Wednesday, as we continued to explore the common ground that the representations of the afterlife in both traditions rest on, we have talked about another important concept: metempsychosis or soul migration and return to earth, very much in a fashion of a journey  (Phaedo). Plato contemplates the possibility of a real journey that the soul undertakes under the guidance of a spirit or daimon; it is a journey of purification and transcendence that leads to a perfected notion of the Truth — the fulfillment of every philosopher’s aspiration. It only suffices to read the first Canti of Inferno to realize that the whole Commedia is nothing but the written account of a journey to the afterlife, undertaken by the author himself, who has then returned to the realm of the living, in order to write about it. What is more, during this journey Dante is being accompanied by no less than five different guiding souls (Vergil, Statius, Matelda, Beatrice, St. Bernard). Considering all these elements of continuity with the experience described in the Phaedo, it is difficult not to talk about Dante’s experience as a sort of ‘metempsychosis’. In fact, we have argued, the Platonic experience of metempsychosis seems to constitute the blueprint for the journey described in the Commedia. To be sure, considered as a whole, Dante’s journey represents an experience of purification and transcendence that, as it is the case for Socrates, leads to a perfected notion of the truth — by the time Dante gets to look at God he has virtually shared into the Truth. We were also quick to point out that this does not mean that Dante’s journey to the afterlife is the same as that described by Plato. There are, in fact, clear signs in the texts that suggest a willingness to depart from both Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies (Purg. III, IV and XXV). Dante’s experience of the afterlife, we have concluded, is arguably built on the grounds of Plato’s idea of metempsychosis — and in this respect the Commedia displays a striking degree of continuity with respect to the Classic tradition — however the means end ends of that experience ultimately are specifically tied to the universe of Christian theology. In this respect we have invited our students to compare how these two texts conceive the body, the senses, and most importantly RATIO (reason), in order to become aware also of the fundamental differences that exist between them.     

Gibbering Souls and Spongey Bodies: Reflections on A Student Micro-Dialogue

For my sins, I was reading last night Hume’s essay in which he argues that all activity of the mind can be reduced to two categories–impressions and ideas, and that these further can be reduced to simple and complex.

I must say, that our students advanced a series of complex impressions and developed into them a rather complex idea. They traced what they called were the “templates” of the metaphysics and psychology of the “aerial bodies” from Homer’s “gibbering souls” through Vergil’s “empty images and hovering bodies” to Dante’s insubstantial souls who cast no shadows. [They examined closely Purg. canto 25--Statius' discussion of the three stages of life, the first embryological stage of which one of the students called the "spongey, vegetative state"]. Their dialogue managed to incorporate lots of quite eloquent and concise descriptions from the texts as evidence; and they contemplated both the metaphysics of the soul itself and the progression (from Homer to Vergil to Dante) of physical contact between human and shade.

My colleague was absolutely right to suggest that we make explicit to our students that what we want them to do is to model what we are doing. First of all, watching two very bright students interact in a way that was quite similarly structured in terms of the way in which F. and I interact was almost eerie. F. brilliantly described it thus–our own dialogues are parents, and we hope that their children, what we have called the “micro-dialogues” look like they are descended from their parents. I thought to myself as I was a member of the audience listening to two students prompting each other in a circle of carefully exchanged ideas, that they not only looked like their parents–in good, Homeric fashion, they surpassed them.

This first “real” week

This week, we assigned book 23 of the Iliad (the funeral of Patroclus) and canto 3 of Purgatorio (Manfred). On Monday, we discussed some general points of commonality and difference, focusing on the community’s role in the the physical and spiritual rituals which are undertaken to ensure the proper transition of the soul of the deceased into the afterlife and of the community back to a state of normalcy. The distinguishing characteristic upon which we focused our examination of the difference between these two traditions is the purpose for which the community is galvanized. In the shame culture of the Homeric world, individuals and deities use the occasion of the funeral to display aristeia, the very human problem with which Homer is absolutely concerned (aristeia can preserve communities and bring out its most strident potentials; but it also has the dark potential to erode the bonds and laws–human, natural, and divine– which tie the community together–thus, Achilles’ mistreatment of Hektor’s corpse; the funeral games themselves present the potential for another eruption of strife–I’m thinking specifically of Menelaos and Antilochus in the chariot contest). For Dante’s souls, prayer is the galvanizing business of the community. The subtle, nostalgic desire which Manfred feels for his unburied body tension between the various communities to which he has some connection: the community of the living of which Dante is a representative, whose spiritual care for the soul in the form of prayer he must request, and the community of the church from which he has been expelled.

These are the foundational elements with which we began our conversation on Monday. The students were pretty silent that day; we (teachers) volleyed impressions and ideas back and forth, elaborating where necessary, disagreeing at times, clarifying finer points, and making the effort to elaborate those issues and nuances which were within the broader range of our comparative target.

On Wed., when we pursued a deeper line of inquiry, our students became much more animated. Lots of note-taking; lots of scribbling words and phrases on tablets; but, after about 30 minutes of dialogue between the teachers, the students began, I think, to “get it”–that is, to really engage in the comparative process. Some of the comments and questions were quite profound; and I noticed that many students were making the same effort we were–to listen to each other; to respond thoughtfully; to resist bringing up side-track topics (which may be interesting, but diverting); and to follow-up on each other. We still, obviously, have a lot of work to do–both with each other, with the students, and with the class as a whole. But, the dynamics are really wonderful so far! (There, I knocked on wood!)

Tomorrow, 2 students will actually perform a dialogue based on their own discussions about these readings. 4 other students in the class will respond on our course blog, which has already enjoyed some interesting activity.

On Dialogue

In an influential essay, the distinguished physicist David Bohm (with Donald Factor & Peter Garrett) said this of dialogue (read the full reprinted essay here):

Because the nature of Dialogue is exploratory, its meaning and its methods continue to unfold. No firm rules can be laid down for conducting a Dialogue because its essence is learning – not as the result of consuming a body of information or doctrine imparted by an authority, nor as a means of examining or criticizing a particular theory or programme, but rather as part of an unfolding process of creative participation between peers.

 

Bohm et al. suggest that in the beginning, the group may temporarily flounder as it engages in metacognitive analysis of whether or not it is actually performing the activity of dialogue or of some other kind of communication (conversation? discussion? debate?):

 

A Dialogue needs some time to get going. It is an unusual way of participating with others and some sort of introduction is required in which the meaning of the whole activity can be communicated. But even with a clear introduction, when the group begins to talk together it will often experience confusion, frustration, and a self-conscious concern as to whether or not it is actually engaging in Dialogue.

 

Bohm suggests that we enter into dialogue when we suspend our assumptions, leaving them open to examination,  view each other as equals, and arrive at shared meaning (rather than conversion to the point of view of one or more of the participants).

 

One of the many enticing challenges of this course is to come to an experiential, inherent, and authentic instinct which knows self-assuredly when dialogue is occurring and when it is being re-calibrated or turning into something else.

 

The Body and Other Voices

What better way to begin a course on the Afterlife than to start with the corpse. 

The reading assignments for our first real day of discussion were Iliad 17 (the battle over Patroclus’ corpse) and Purgatorio 5 (especially Buonconte Montefeltro). In both of these texts, unburied corpses are threatened with disfigurement and function as symbological objects of contestation.  This was our point of contact between these texts, and from there, we attempted to flush out the specific contexts in which the contestation in each of these texts emerges.

We began with our dialogic prompts, and these were fairly general in nature, serving as frames for what we hoped would be sustained, comparative inquiry.  Although we made some progress in that regard, we were both surprised to encounter a virtual barrage of comments and questions from students, some of which were really off-track (that is, off our carefully constructed notion of what the track should and could be).  Of course, we were delighted at the students’ enthusiasm; and some of the questions and comments were quite sophisticated, leading us exactly where we wanted to go–nostalgia for the body, the spiritual symbiosis of the living and the dead, and the ethics of suffering, to name a few micro-themes.

It quickly became clear to us, however, that incorporating other voices into our dialogue is going to be very challenging.  In any discussion course, fielding and responding constructively to comments and questions is, at the very least, an idiosyncratic art.  Given the parameters of what we are trying to do, which is complicated enough, directing student questions and comments is going to involve some behind-the-scenes negotiation on our part.  Which leads me to wonder, will other voices serve as a matrix for contestation or symbiosis? I sincerely hope the latter.

Performative, Comparative Dialogues

Our vision for this course demands very careful per diem planning. Rather than taking a diachronic approach–say, beginning with Homer and ending with Paradiso, every class period examines two texts–one classical and one passage of one of Dante’s canticles. We wanted the course to reflect that what we are having is a conversation about fundamentally canonical texts in the Humanities. My colleague pointed out that it is not enough for each of us to broadly contextualize the passage relevant to our own expertise in class, and then proceed to some kind of discussion. Rather, he encouraged me to consider the possibility of staging dialogic prompts so that each of us is and has the appearance of being deeply engaged with each other’s point of view and with the process of unpacking the texts at hand.

We have already established points of contact for each of the texts, having gotten together over the summer to flesh out the conceptual frameworks for individual units on the syllabus.

Today will be our first day, however, implementing the staged dialogue. Neither of us is working from a script; rather, from a carefully conceived plan of what main concepts we wish to explore together. Beginning next Friday, our students will have to engage in staged dialogues, too, as we rotate in groups of dialogians and respondents.

The Afterlife in the Classical and Italian Traditions: The Launch!!

My colleague and I are embarking on a team-taught, interdisciplinary course on the topic of the afterlife in antiquity and in the Italian Renaissance wherein we will conduct what we are calling “performative dialogues” or staged, comparative discussions of the texts we will be exploring in the course (spanning the range from Homer to Plato to Vergil to Dante). My colleague is a professor of Italian, and I of Classics, and we wish to convey to our students not only the fruits of several years worth of stimulating conversations over coffee, meals, drinks, long walks, and computer screens, but also the possibility of sharing in such a wonderfully enriching process as an extended conversation on rich and worthwhile topic, a process which we hope they will reduplicate in their own lives.

Our project began three years ago when he taught a course on Dante and I on epic, and we arranged to have our students meet for an evening encounter (the offer of free pizza certainly helped attendance!). Preparing for that encounter, we met several times over coffee to construct the parameters of our role as moderators and to establish the trajectory of what we hoped would be a lively discussion on the Dante’s relationship with the classical epic tradition.

Our initial collaboration was a great success; students continued the discussion on blackboard forums, and two courses in isolation suddenly became interested and involved in each other. We were able to get an internal grant to take our collaboration to a whole new level. What follows in this blog are my reflections on our interdisciplinary dialogues.