Colloquia

Over the sequence of six class sessions, the aim is to explore the twelve books of the Aeneid in six pairs, and so to monitor the main themes and complexities that Virgil develops across the arc of his complete poem. The further purpose of the colloquium is to capture the spirit of Literature Humanities as a reading-intensive course that is designed to facilitate the close study and lively in-class discussion of works such as the Aeneid. For each session, specific parts of the text will be assigned for closer reading and for careful analysis in our gatherings. Dominant themes will include (i) Virgil’s commentary on the political climate in which he was writing under the first Roman emperor, Augustus, at the end of the 1st century BCE; (ii) Virgil’s multifaceted responses to the preceding epic tradition on which he draws so extensively, especially Homer; (iii) the philosophical properties of the Aeneid as a work that propagates a quintessentially Roman standard of personal morality and behavior; and (iv) the broader literary qualities that make the Aeneid truly unique and unrivaled in the Greco-Roman poetic tradition.

Dates (in person and via Zoom): January 27, February 10, March 10, March 24, April 21, and May 5.

Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, and The Tempest, his last play, have a great deal in common. Each is centrally concerned with the nature and abuses of power – including usurpation and regicide – and each features the supernatural: witchcraft in Macbeth, and magic in The Tempest. Each play is also famously topical: James I, recently crowned King of England when Macbeth was first performed, including before him and his new wife at court, was already known in his native Scotland for his persecution of witches, and he marked his arrival in England by republishing his treatise on witchcraft, Daemonologie (1597; 1603). The Tempest, which begins with a shipwreck, famously responds to England’s colonial ventures and mishaps, including the Virginia-bound ship wrecked in what the play calls the “still-vexed Bermudas” (1.2.229) in 1609, as well as larger colonial projects, including the trade in enslaved Africans and indentured laborers. Like Macbeth, The Tempest was also performed before James I, this time in 1611, during the wedding celebrations for his daughter Elizabeth, whom he was about to ‘lose’ to Frederick, the Elector Palatine in much the same way as Prospero is about to ‘lose’ his daughter to Ferdinand. Finally, both plays feature elaborate performances which resonate with court masques: the apparitions and show of kings in Macbeth (which includes a mirror in which James I is invited to see his own face), and the masque of Ceres that Prospero and Ariel provide for the entertainment of the betrothed couple in The Tempest. During our discussion of these two plays, we will also look at some key source texts, including selections from contemporary writings about kingship, tyranny, and witches, and the entirety of Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” one of the source texts for The Tempest.

Dates (in person and via Zoom): September 16, September 30, October 28, November 11, November 25, and December 2.

Othello, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, engages a wide range of issues, from the nature of good governance and cosmopolitanism to race, gender, and the sanctity of marriage vows. It is also thrillingly dramatic, from its famed handkerchief – one of the most famous props in all of Shakespeare – to the “tragic loading” of the bed with which the play ends. At its center is a marriage, one that begins with a bracing openness between two lovers, and ends with the husband, monstrously deceived, murdering his wife – a woman whose only real defender is another woman. Shakespeare returns to some aspects of this plot in his tragicomedy, The Winter’s Tale, written towards the end of his career. The Winter’s Tale begins with a once-loving husband who starts to doubt the fidelity of his wife, and, with alarming dispatch, sends her and their children spiraling into tragedy. Yet this precipitous tragedy is interrupted by a dramatic choice unprecedented in Shakespeare’s work: a sixteen-year gap in time, in which we change settings entirely, and only return to the original storyline for a radical, and theatrically spectacular, denouement at the end. Like Othello, The Winter’s Tale is about marriage, and it too features an ill-counseled and increasingly intemperate husband, a faithful and principled wife, and a woman counselor of exemplary integrity. And as we will discuss, both plays also understand marriage in political terms.

Dates (in person and via Zoom): February 18, March 4, March 25, April 8, April 22, April 29

This colloquium will be led by Gareth Williams, the Anthon Professor of Latin Language and Literature. Sicily and its charms have featured in countless narratives across the ages, and the wonders of the island are no less captivating to the modern eye than they were to the ancients. Etna fascinated the Greco-Roman imagination that struggled to understand what physical system in nature could possibly power the volcano’s vast explosions; and as the scientific eye began to speculate on rational causation, it had to compete with the power of myth and legend that gripped ancient superstition. In Late Antiquity the Roman poet Claudian set his story of the Rape of Persephone on the slopes of Etna, drawing on Sicilian folklore to map Greek mythology onto the volcano in an extraordinarily original way.

In the Renaissance, intrepid explorers ventured to Sicily and investigated the island and its wonders as if it amounted to a world apart, untamed and therefore beautifully exuberant in comparison with the more formalized world of northern Italy and beyond. In the period of the Grand Tours, adventurers such as the redoubtable Patrick Brydone made a splash by writing wildly popular books about their exploits in touring Sicily and the south of Italy. Romantic poets such as Shelley drew extensively on volcanic imagery and Sicilian evocations so as to map the explosive energy of their emotions onto the conceptual terrain of Sicily. Then D. H. Lawrence: in his 1921 travel book, Sea and Sardinia, Lawrence begins his account of a tour he made to Sardinia by describing his experience of living in Taormina, in the shadow of Etna. The moodiness of the island is captured and reflected in the broodiness of the man himself: he lives in Sicily, but, in a sense, Sicily more truly inhabits him. Finally, Lawrence Durrell’s matchless description in Sicilian Carousel (1977) of a bus tour that he made round Sicily exerts its own kind of magic in evoking much of the island’s mystique. So much for written evocations of Sicily; through pictorial representations, the visual archive of the island is in many ways still more arresting, diverse, and rich than the literary inventory.

This colloquium will sample these different manipulations and depictions of Sicily during our six sessions, and your own experience of the island, if you have been fortunate enough to visit it, will perhaps add further texture to our readings. The weekly schedule of readings is set out in the syllabus below, and all readings will be provided in advance of each session. Further suggestions for secondary reading are available upon request.

Dates (in person and via Zoom): September 17, October 1, October 15, November 12, November 26, December 3

Whatever purposes we find in college and university mission statements, there are expectations that go beyond them. Here are a few examples that don’t appear in traditional mission statements but are clearly baked into what higher education does today: (1)Colleges are sorting mechanisms--which college someone attends significantly affects that person’s opportunities for economic success and access to career opportunities. (2) Because of their involvement with sorting and distributing opportunity, colleges are expected to offer the possibility of social mobility to those with talent but few financial resources, and to do that in a fair way. (3) Beyond helping individuals be more financially successful, higher education is expected to promote economic growth for the society as a whole.

Our colloquium will look at the various stated purposes and implicit expectations in United States higher education to understand and evaluate them. Columbia will be a regular touchstone in our discussions, but our view will include all of American higher education—other selective universities, public colleges and less selective private colleges as well.

Dates: February 6 and 20, March 5 and 19, April 2 and 16

Sample the wonders of the literature written in Latin in Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The texts that we explore are not just revivalist re-workings of ancient Greco-Roman and medieval precedents, but highly innovative productions that are at the cutting edge of major scientific, societal, and political changes in the late Quattrocento and beyond. The further aim is to show how many of the preoccupations that are visible in these texts are themselves major catalysts for innovation in the later literary tradition extending down to our own times. Through our coverage of such luminaries as Ermolao Barbaro (1454-93), Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), and Girolamo Fracastoro (1476/8-1553), we shall explore, among much else, the origin of term ‘syphilis’; theories that try to explain why volcanic eruptions happen; a passionate account of why celibacy is obviously the best vocation to follow in life; and the origins of modern diplomatic immunity.

This colloquium will be led by Gareth Williams, Anthon Professor of the Latin Language and Literature. All the texts will be supplied by the instructor, and further suggestions for secondary reading are available upon request.

In this course, we follow in the footsteps of the king of Macedonia, Alexandros, son of Philippos, AKA Alexander III, AKA Alexander the Great, during his astonishing, protracted conquest of the Persian empire. The venture was characterized by both disruption and continuity— and our sources insist on both aspects, which are inescapable parts of conquest. We will explore these aspects through a number of test cases and source readings drawn from Alexander’s whole reign.

The sessions will be held on six Tuesdays. We currently plan to run the course in a hybrid format, both in person and online. Moreover, we plan to hold the first session at the Salmagundi Club. Those Friends attending in person will also have the option of joining Gareth Williams and John Ma for drinks and dinner after the class. The other sessions will be held as usual in the Heyman Center on the Columbia campus.

We’ll read two masterpieces by Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (publ. 1875-8) and Hadji Murat (composed 1896-1904; published posthumously in 1912). Anna Karenina is universally recognized as one of the great novels of all times. It shows Tolstoy using fiction to reveal the mysteries of love and death, while also wrestling with social and political questions, as he follows multiple plotlines to ask about the interconnectedness of human lives. After reading this long novel, we will turn to Hadji Murat and find Tolstoy up to much of the same in this much shorter work, which is often regarded as Tolstoy’s swan song. As Tolstoy gives a searing look at the human condition and at empire, he also draws the reader’s attention to the song of the nightingale.

This class will meet on five Wednesdays online.

While it appears to be an ancient word, like democracy or aristocracy or oligarchy, meritocracy was invented as an English word about sixty years ago by a British sociologist named Michael Young. As unlikely as it sounds, his book The Rise of the Meritocracy was a novel, not a work of social science. Since the time of the word’s invention it has become the name for what most people say a society should be: fair, recognizing talent and effort, removing inherited privilege and advantage. This is ironic because, in describing a fictional future society that was fully meritocratic, Michael Young wrote a dystopian novel, not a utopian one. Furthermore, despite the obeisance paid to merit and meritocracy in public discourse today, meritocracy is under attack by writers on the political right, left and center.

The colloquium will explore what merit and meritocracy mean in the United States today, and why those words produce so much contentious debate. Because sorting people through education is central to current meritocratic ideals, higher education is inevitably a vital instrument in realizing a meritocratic society. Therefore, discussions of American colleges generally, and Columbia in particular, will occur throughout our six class meetings. Other subjects we will cover are how notions of merit have evolved since the founding of the United States; how the word meritocracy has come to have connotations opposite to what its creator intended; how meritocratic American society, or a part of it like admission to selective colleges, is today; what it would take for the United States to become truly meritocratic; the wisdom of equating school success with promise of professional success; and whether Young was correct to see meritocracy as a flawed or even incoherent ideal.

Aeschylus' Oresteia was a hit when first performed in Athens in the 5th century BCE, and remains one of the most riveting and obscure ancient tragedies. The trilogy treats the violence and impact of war, the instability of justice, the far reach of revenge, and the fragility of goodness. The plays are moving, bizarre, frustrating, and beautiful. This colloquium will contextualize the trilogy, and then explore the fascinating complications of the drama, which will be framed within philosophical questions about the nature of love, justice, power, and communal responsibilities. We will track metaphors analyze language, and do close readings to excavate some of the profound richness of the plays.