The Imaginative Convervative
theimaginativeconservative.org The Imaginative Conservative
The Imaginative Conservative is an on-line journal for those who seek the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, politics, political economy, literature, the arts and the American Republic in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Wilhelm Roepke, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, M.E. Bradford, Eric Voegelin, Christopher Dawson, Paul Elmer More and other leaders of Imaginative Conservatism.
theimaginativeconservative.org Classical Education and the Future of Civilization by Joseph Pearce
University of Oklahoma great books
One recent example at the University of Oklahoma illustrates this healthy hunger. A course in the Great Books which was described by those teaching it as “the hardest course you’ll ever take” has received “sky high” enrollment as students rose to the challenge. Inspired by a syllabus taught at the University of Michigan in 1941 by the British poet, W. H. Auden, the course requires 6,000 pages of reading: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Horace, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Pascal, Racine, Blake, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, Henry Adams, Melville, Rilke, Kafka and T. S. Eliot. And that’s not all. For good measure, the course also includes opera libretti from Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Bizet and Verdi.
Wilfred McClay, who designed the course based on Auden’s original syllabus, was initially inspired to do so by the negative reaction to the discovery of Auden’s syllabus in 2012. The universal response to the demanding nature of Auden’s syllabus was that today’s students could never survive such a course and would not tolerate the level of work that it demands. Reacting to such negativity, Prof. McClay thought that students might rise to the occasion if set the challenge. Prof. McClay and the two colleagues working with him broke “every rule of the postmodern academy” in designing the course, “creating a highly demanding sequence of classic works, setting high expectations, and eschewing the grayness of theory and the reductionism of identity politics in favor of an intense engagement with the texts themselves.
academia.org University of Oklahoma Brings Back Western Civilization - Malcolm A. Kline
W.H. Auden english 135 Fate and the Individual in European Literature