Childish Enthusiasms and Perishable Manias

Catalog description

The underlying premise of this class is simple: Effective scholarship doesn't have to suck the joy from the world. This message may be even more relevant to older students and graduate students than it is to undergrads. A graduate seminar room, we understand, is a serious place. But should we leave childish things behind: favorite movies, games, cartoons, books, indeed the very idea of "favorites." Need we leave behind things that once absorbed so much of our energies, that once even helped to define what we think of as our "self." The task of graduate education is to search for deeper meaning, to gain the tools that will allow an understanding of the way the world works, the better to affect, or even change, it. Serious questions need to be asked in serious fields; serious meanings need to be derived from serious texts. Graduate school requires gravitas; weighty work is expected. But what of levitas - a lighter, more playful category? Harrumphing in 1922 about the blaring, blazing, crassly commercial electric advertisements of Times Square, the British writer G. K. Chesterton interrupted himself with the realization that, "If a child saw these colored lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any other coloured toys; and it is the duty of every poet, and even of every critic, to dance in respectful imitation of the child." Once we leave childhood behind, wonder is a rare commodity and a fragile thing; it's in especially short supply amid the fustiness of academia. What might it mean to do scholarly work that respects a child's engagement with the world? To retain (or recover) the intensely pleasurable relation to particular objects or habits that we were allowed when younger? To indulge a perishable mania or two. Does intellectually credible work depend upon a "critical distance" between the scholar and the object of study? Can we take something seriously…