Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context Selected Essays for the Fifth Annual Conference of the Association of Core Texts and Courses

by Cowan, Bainard; Lee, Scott; Zelnick, : Stephen; Brown, Eva; Marks, Gregory; Densmore, Dana; Melbourne, Lucy; Hinz, Michael; McMahon, Robert J.; Shulman, Harvey; Walter, James F.; Richards, Joan L.; Franke, William; Sepper, Dennis L.; Arbery, Virginia L.;

• ISBN13: 9780761821618
• ISBN10: 0761821619
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-18
• Publisher: UPA

Summary

Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context is a selection of essays, presented or further developed from the 1999 Association of Core Texts and Courses conference in New Orleans, focusing on a few of the vertices or vortices, where an intensified sense of the interplay between the ways of knowledge may be glimpsed, or a memorable moment in the past when all briefly achieved a greater congruity may be revived for new consideration. These essays fall into an organization according to the major scheme each posits as unifying, or attempting to unify, the liberal arts.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Acknowledgments	xi
Practically Educated: The ACTC Director's Address	xiii
Stephen Zelnick
On Education
Uniting Students' Learning	1	(10)
Eva Brann
Waiting for Herot to Burn: The Core Vision of Beowulf	11	(6)
Gregory Marks
The Rewards of Reading Copernicus	17	(6)
Dana Densmore
(Re)discovering the Rationale for a Liberal Arts Core: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in Interdisciplinary Context	23	(6)
Lucy Melbourne
Knowledge, History, and the Creation of Human Nature	29	(8)
Michael Hinz
Teaching Students to Ask Questions About What They Read	37	(4)
Robert McMahon
Educating the Educators: Core Curriculum and Peripheral Faculty	41	(6)
Harvey Shulman
From Wandering to Journeying with Core Texts in an Honors Curriculum	47	(8)
James F. Walter
Acts of Reading
Euclid Through Ages of Reason	55	(20)
Joan L. Richards
The Interpretive Journey and the Allegory of Reading: Introduction to the Inferno as a Humanities Text	75	(8)
William Franke
Prospero and the Times of Reading	83	(6)
Dennis L. Sepper
Character and Reading: The Absent Speaker's Presence	89	(8)
Virginia L. Arbery
Texts as Gathering Points
At the Core of the Social Sciences: Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws	97	(16)
Catherine H. Zuckert
Teaching the Bhagavad-Gita in a Traditional Great Books Program	113	(4)
Philip Freeman
Confucius in Dialogue with the West and Today's Students	117	(8)
Stephen Varvis
History in the Service of Life: A Dynamic Systems Approach to Intellectual History	125	(6)
Jeff Bell
What the Classics of Science Can Teach Us: Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine and Erwin Schrodinger's What Is Life?	131	(10)
Phillip R. Sloan
The Ethical
Tragedy, History, and Rhetoric in the Core: Sophocles and Thucydides	141	(8)
J. Scott Lee
Adam Smith's Other Great Book: The Theory of Moral Sentiments	149	(8)
James R. Otteson
Questioning ``Our Western Tradition.''	157	(10)
Margaret Heller
Core Events as ``Core'' Context: The Holocaust as a Test Case	167	(8)
Peter C. Brown
The City
The Holy City	175	(4)
James D. Hardy, Jr.
Dante and the Synthesis of the Medieval City	179	(6)
Christine N. Cowan
Shakespeare's Cities	185	(6)
Gale H. Carrithers, Jr.
Unraveling the City: ``Bartleby'' and the Mid-Nineteenth Century	191	(6)
Bainard Cowan
The City in Toni Morrison's Paradise	197
Carolyn M. Jones