11/18: confirming a choice

I've been second-guessing (and third-guessing) my decision to end my part of the utopia course with David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy, which isn't as straightforwardly in the utopian tradition as the other works we've read.  In the course of thinking about (and doubting) my decision I ended up having some nice thoughts about the utopian tradition in general as well as the particular texts we've read in the course.  And re-reading Boy Meets Boy this evening made me feel like it really was a good choice.  There are vexatious things about the novel, but it's a good one for the course and especially good as the last one they read with me.

3 comments:

Una said...

If this is not too personal, what exactly do you do? You are a teacher or professor for ancient Greek and Latin and literature and theater? It always sounds so interesting what you write here :)

RR said...

Hi, Una--My main field is Latin and Greek language & literature, and that's most of what I teach. But I do research on post-antique uses of Classical material, and that leads me to study or teach children's literature at times or Victorian literature or theatre. And in the case of the utopia course, that's something I'm teaching as part of my school's curriculum for first-year students: two professors team up to teach a course on a topic of their own choice to a group of freshmen, and my spouse and I are co-teaching a course on utopian literature (me) and utopian philosophy (him). I chose to assign utopian texts written since the 1970s, so that class takes me completely out of antiquity for awhile. That's a long answer to your question; thanks for asking!

Una said...

wow, that sounds really fun. I love Latin and actually translate Latin texts just for fun when I'm bored or have nothing better to do (or when I'm procrastinating). I wanted to learn Greek too. But they didn't teach that at my school...