Harvard University Press Blog

Remembering Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, the literary critic who championed the Western canon, died at age 89 last month. Lindsay Waters, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities, looks back on their publishing history, their friendship, and Bloom’s great contributions to the literary community.

Harold always lived at 179 Linden, New Haven. Always. “Send the book to my home address. Do you have it? Are you sure? I really need that book.” “Yes. Have it. Will do.” So it’s hard, almost impossible, to remember that he and Jeannie almost moved to Cambridge, Mass. For years no name said Yale as forcefully and clearly as Harold Bloom. I first met Harold when he and nearly the whole Yale School of Critics picked me up at the New Haven Amtrak station in 1981 so I could have lunch—not with all of them, dear God!—but with Paul de Man. Paul could drive, but he did not drive so well, as all the dents and nicks in his car made clear. Harold could not drive at all; Jeannie did. Even then it felt a lot like I was being picked up by all the Marx Brothers, everyone doing their own schtick; looking back to that moment feels funny, fills me with nostalgia.

But back to that moment: I’d been picked up by Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, and Groucho, but my lunch date was with de Man. Still, there they all were—Paul, Harold, Geoffrey Hartman, the heart of the group, missing only Hillis Miller—in a car driven by Renee, Geoffrey’s wife. So they picked me up and drove Paul and me to lunch, not at cozy Naples Pizza, a favorite of Yale Comp Lit, but at Mory’s, a place that might have been as comfortable as Naples when it originated in 1849. Was de Man trying to impress me by taking me to “the tables down at Mory’s”? That was not like him, but who knows? Maybe. The rest of them disappeared. How perfect! I’d already published the new edition of Paul’s Blindness and Insight. Paul and I were in business together. We’d met in Chicago and Minneapolis before. I remember during our lunch at Mory’s asking him about Hans Robert Jauss, for whose book he had just written the introduction for the THL series. I asked him if he thought Jauss, whom I was about to publish, was the equivalent of Erich Auerbach. He tried gently to lower my expectations. In fact, de Man’s introduction had itself been a subtle skewering of Jauss. I did not know Paul so well, as well as I’d come to know him. And I had no idea how close de Man was to Bloom.

Harold’s name was synonymous with Yale for me as a humanities editor from the University of Minnesota Press—Harold, as I said, not a member of the Bush family or William F. Buckley, Jr., author of once-famous God and Man at Yale and then famous for his TV show Firing Line, and a hero to my mother, a conservative Catholic. A few years later, after Paul had died in 1983, I had business with Harold. This would have been 1987, the year Harold gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and dallied in false surmise, to use a Miltonism, the false surmise being that he might move to Harvard. He negotiated for months with Derek Bok, Harvard’s president, and then decided against moving. I would experience the complications of negotiating with Harold several times. Nothing was too small to fuss over. But the very chance that he might move and the fact that he was delivering the Norton Lectures at Harvard helped make the year 1987–1988 a very exciting one for many of us in Cambridge. Those lectures, after touch-and-go negotiations with Harvard University Press director Arthur J. Rosenthal, a publisher as exciting in his own behavior as Professor Bloom, became the book Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (HUP, 1989). What we did not know when Bloom delivered the lectures, and what he probably did not know himself then, was that the book would be the trial run, the off-Broadway tryouts, for what would become his most famous book of the more than fifty books he wrote: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994).

When he accepted the commission to deliver the six Norton Lectures, Harold told Derek Bok that he would not take up the residency at Harvard normally required of the Norton lecturer. “I told them I’d come up for one day only for each lecture over the course of six weeks.” But, having bargained Bok into an arrangement that would see him at Harvard for only six days, Harold in effect moved up to Cambridge for the entire academic year! He was everywhere. We could not get rid of Harold. If the mountain would not move to Bloom, Bloom moved his mountainous self and enterprises with him for a year.

Why is The Western Canon so like Ruin the Sacred Truths? “I write only one book,” before lapsing into deli talk from the Lower East Side: “It is like a very long sausage. I cut off so much here and so much there.” This was, as I said, the trial run for the Broadway show. Harold delivered his pre-Broadway performance at Harvard’s great Memorial Hall, the building constructed to honor the Harvard grads who had died in the Civil War. Think of The Western Canon as Paradise Lost and Ruin the Sacred Truths as the “brief epic” Paradise Regained.

Keep in mind that picture of the Yale Critics crammed into a car—making room for one another to fit—because, although Harold Bloom might seem like the ultimate lone literary superstar, he was, I’d contend, and that is the point of this remembrance of him, always a team player, someone who thrived best when he struck up alliances with others, and those others did not need to be like-minded to become enlisted in his work. Michael Dirda wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Bloom has always been, to echo Kipling, a cat that walks by himself” (Oct. 11, 2019), but I beg to differ. In fact, he ground out much more sausage, if you will, when he had others around him to spice it up.

For all his weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth—all his kvetching about the ruination of the American academy—he kept at his lectern until the end, until just before he died, in fact. Inside the university he had lifelong relations with many, and especially with some. I bring as evidence for what I am contending information about two special people in particular, Paul de Man and Angus Fletcher. He loved John Hollander and Richard Rorty, and he admired Mark Edmundson and David Bromwich. He did not have much use for some famous colleagues. Some had no use for him. I have somewhere a list of the people in the department who voted to deny him tenure. He was unusual, and he had a taste for the unusual. For example, he was inspired by Victoria Nelson, someone whose work I introduced him to, and he was devoted to her books and supported my publishing two of them, one of which, The Secret Life of Puppets (2002), won the MLA prize for best book in comp lit despite the author’s lack of professional credentials.

He would have been categorized by many as a literary theorist, especially since helping to develop the books Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) and Romanticism and Consciousness (1970). But he was not, I’d contend, a theorist like his great friends de Man and Fletcher, and he acknowledged this repeatedly. He was a lover of poetry with a photographic memory. He was also a critic, one who could say what he loved and why, like Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus. He was what Nelson George calls “a hanging critic,” someone who would condemn what he did not like, as he did Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, Jorie Graham, and J. K. Rowling, to name some of those he strongly criticized.

But his connections with Paul and Angus were deeper, abiding, and loving. Harold writes in The Western Canon about how the “long, frequently irascible relationship between Quixote and Sancho is the greatness of the book” (131). This captures the relationships between Bloom and de Man and Bloom and Fletcher. Bloom was hardly a solitary. He was not Hamlet, standing alone on the battlement. As he said, he was Falstaff at loving war with Hal.

Harold always maintained that there was one person superior to him in his generation, and that was Angus. They’d met when they were each starting graduate school in English at Yale in September 1951. As he tells the story, Harold wandered disconsolately into the lounge of the Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale, where he heard a “vigorous performance of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Piano. Sitting down, I listened to its percussive splendor being played by a yellow cowlick bobbing up and down behind the piano.” Beneath that cowlick was “a splendid Scottish youth,” as he wrote in a foreword to the Princeton edition of Fletcher’s Allegory (2012). In one of the two books Bloom published in 2019, he gave repeated testimonials to Angus’s friendship and mind. He wrote, “Of all the literary critics of my own generation, I was always most allied to Angus. I cannot accept that he is gone” (Possessed by Memory, 343). In this book he praised Angus for being in tune with the natural world. There is truth to this. But I believe the deeper reason for their ongoing friendship was that Angus was much more of a thinker than Harold ever was, and that in their nearly daily phone calls to discuss each other’s writing, Angus pushed and probed and forced the fanciful Bloom to make his writing walk on the earth and engage in argument. Harold wrote a stunning blurb to describe Angus for the cover of his HUP book Colors of the Mind: “He is an Orphic seer, a curious universal scholar of Renaissance vintage, a fusion of the best traits of Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke, his true peers.” This tribute sounds great and stirring, but it misses the way Angus continually sliced through Harold’s verbiage. No wonder Angus loved Harry Frankfurt’s book on bullshit! I, too, had the experience of Angus’s continually and sharply cutting through my waffling. I am sure he tried to cut through Harold’s, too. And if those books of Harold’s speak to general readers, as it is clear many of them do, it is, I’d contend, because of how Angus in effect edited them working over the phone with Harold.

If Harold argued with Angus, he argued just as much with Paul de Man. De Man loved Walter Benjamin; Harold did not—he loved Walter Pater. In a story Harold told me in 1996, he recounted how once upon a time he ran into Paul at the Yale Coop. Harold was teaching Freud that day and was carrying five or six books by Freud to his class. Paul laughed at him when he saw him juggling the stack of books, and asked: “Why are you carrying the contents of the Sterling Library to your class?” Paul was carrying one slim book of Walter Benjamin’s essays! Paul laughed at Harold for being so devoted to Freud, not that he disbelieved Freud, but he thought all Freud said was common sense. What really upset Harold about Paul was the way he taught and how he created magic circles of acolytes around himself. There was something mystical and mystifying about his teaching style that caused students to grant him some inexplicable control over them. He complained to me that he loved Paul but did not love his effect upon me: for too long I did not understand that I was too devoted to him.

When people rose against de Man after the discovery that he had written for a collaborationist newspaper in 1942, and then others kept coming forward to attack him with more sensational charges, Harold never disowned him. He remembered Derrida calling him to tell him dramatically that “we must fight” to save our friend’s reputation. What Bloom said to me was that he’d have nothing to do with such fights. “What happened is between the soul of our late friend and God, if there is a God. I consider the attacks on him to be an offense and obnoxious. My thought is that nothing in the attacks is untrue and none of it matters. The wild publications reveal a certain astonishing lack of responsibility.”

I remember that when Adam Begley wrote a profile of Harold for the New York Times Magazine and I was quoted as having a favorable opinion of Harold, a Harvard colleague wrote to tell me he was surprised to read that. I knew that many people were suspicious of Harold. I had my own questions about some of his work, but in the battle about literature and politics that emerged in the 1980s and has continued unabated, I was always on his side. He remained a true friend to my best friends de Man and Fletcher, and he revered and supported other friends and authors Miriam Hansen and Victoria Nelson. He was a champion of literature. I will miss him.

On Jurij Striedter

Jurij Striedter, a prolific and influential scholar and a Harvard fixture for decades, passed away in June 2016. Below, in remarks prepared for a memorial held last month, Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters recalls his long effort to bring a Jurij Striedter book to HUP.

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I associate Jurij with the days when literary theory was a rumor of something new and fresh and extremely fashionable, a new style that might be coming our way from Europe, and not just from Western Europe, but Eastern Europe as well, not just “as well,” but primarily. In the 70s, there were journals from Turin and Bologna and Ann Arbor that featured essays on Czech and Russian literary criticism and semiotics. My Geiger counter as a scholarly editor was buzzing with excitement that drew me to Tzvetan Todorov and his introductions to Eastern European poets and led me to agree to publish Tzvetan’s Poetique, which became the first book in our Theory and History of Literature series at the University of Minnesota Press.

We had a custom of adding introductions to those books which were not puffs, but incisive questionings of the pages that followed. For Todorov, my colleague Wlad Godzich recommended one main candidate—Jurij Striedter at Harvard. Harvard was a bastion of anti-theory at that point, so who was this Striedter hiding there? Well, it turned out this Striedter had credentials as a literary theorist that were impeccable. We’d already signed up two books by Hans Robert Jauss at Minnesota, so I was familiar with the Konstanz School. What I had not known was that its builders had considered Eastern European poetics to be an essential building block for their project. 

So, I called up Professor Striedter, who was extremely nice on the phone, but said—this was about 1979—that he could not write the intro to the Todorov, because he was busy finishing up a book for the Harvard University Press on Russian and Czech poetics that was way overdue. Time went on, and I never saw the book appear. When I moved to Harvard in 1984 I decided to find out where that book was, because it would be just the kind of thing I’d like to use to campaign for more books of advanced theory. I searched the files and called Professor Striedter and found out that he was still working on the intro for his own book and it was not close to coming out. There was not even a contract.

I am afraid I started hounding Jurij. I got to know him socializing at Adams House, enjoying the famous Christmas feast of those days. Finally, after many phone calls, Jurij and his wife Emanuela invited my wife and me to dinner at their house. And Manu confessed her surprise to find that I did not really look like the monster she imagined I must be when I was a bodiless voice calling on the phone to try to scare Jurij into finishing his book. Oh my, I was so sad to learn how she imagined me. Because that person was the total opposite of the sweet angel I had come to know Jurij himself to be while talking to him and trying to cajole him to finish his book or to write a report on some book manuscript.

Eventually, Jurij’s book did appear. I wish there were a way for me to make great books appear without my having to take on the form of the Big Bad Wolf assaulting Little Professor Red Riding Hood on the way to the Adams House Christmas–Hanukah feast, but fear there is not. But all is well that ends well. We miss him every day.    

HUP Director Announces Retirement

William P. Sisler, director of Harvard University Press, has announced that he will retire at the end of this academic year. As the press’s director for nearly 27 years, Sisler provided vision and leadership during a period of significant transition in the publishing world.

“We are grateful that Bill has served Harvard with distinction for so many years,” said Harvard Provost Alan Garber. “The caliber of authors and the number of awards that the press has garnered during his tenure speak to his dedication and editorial command.”

Under Sisler’s direction, Harvard University Press published award-winning books by winners of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award, as well as scholars such as Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, Amartya Sen, Catharine MacKinnon, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Bruno Latour, Mary Beard, and Thomas McCraw.

In addition, Sisler oversaw the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, a groundbreaking historical analysis of the dynamics driving the distribution of wealth in Europe and the United States. Capital in the Twenty-First Century reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and has sold more copies than any book in the press’s history.

Sisler guided the expansion of the press’s footprint in the United Kingdom and Europe, establishing an independent U.K. office and growing sales and content acquisition for a global audience.

During Sisler’s tenure, the press and its partners launched the digital Loeb Classical Library, the open-access electronic Emily Dickinson Archive, the electronic Dictionary of American Regional English, and the Murty Classical Library of India.

“Under Bill’s directorship, the press has become the model of a modern university press—modern in its management and finances while remaining true to its mission of identifying, editing, and publishing scholarship of the first rank,” said William Kirby, chair of the board at the press. “I have seen firsthand the difference Bill’s leadership has made. I and my colleagues on the board are deeply grateful to him for his contributions to the University and to the broader world of learning.”

“It’s been an honor and a pleasure to have worked at Harvard University Press for so long with so many distinguished publishing colleagues, authors, Board of Syndics members, and faculty at Harvard and around the globe, and to extend the presence and influence of Harvard University Press in the international environment,” said Sisler. “I am grateful to have been able to work so closely with so many talented, exceptional people.”

Sisler received a Ph.D. in classics from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 and a master’s degree in administrative science, also from Johns Hopkins, in 1983. After working as a senior acquisitions editor for Johns Hopkins University Press, he served as executive editor and vice president at Oxford University Press (U.S.A.) before coming to Harvard University Press in 1990.

photo by Stu Rosner

Isaac Royall Jr.: Slave Master, Harvard Law School Benefactor

This Wednesday, Harvard students demonstrated in solidarity with black student activists who’ve recently led protests at Yale, the University of Missouri, and other campuses across the country. This Thursday, portraits of black faculty members of Harvard Law School were defaced, an incident being investigated as a hate crime. The vandalism prompted an immediate “community meeting” at the law school, during which Dean Martha Minow acknowledged the issue of racism within the school, and students voiced concern that the administration hadn’t risen to address it adequately. Earlier this month students urged a revision of the school’s seal, which harkens back to the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr., a slaveholder and early benefactor of Harvard Law. They expressed that desire in part by placing black tape on mats displaying the seal, and those very strips of tape appear to have been the material used to deface the professors’ portraits.

In On the Battlefield of Merit, Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball tell the story of Harvard Law School’s first hundred years. The following excerpt from the book details how the Royall family’s violent reaction to a planned slave rebellion set in motion the events that would lead to Isaac Royall’s gift to the school.

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Bookplate of Isaac Royall (top) and the Harvard Law School seal.

The oldest and arguably the most distinguished chair in American legal education is Harvard’s Royall Professorship of Law. Its distinction comes not from its age or its founder, but from those who have held it. These include distinguished figures in legal education: Paul Freund, Archibald Cox, Benjamin Kaplan, John Chipman Gray, Joseph Beale, Simon Greenleaf, James Bradley Thayer, Vern Countryman, Robert Clark, David Herwitz, and Janet Halley. But it is a historical fact that this chair is directly linked to a slave revolt on the Island of Antigua in 1736.

The revolt had been carefully planned and involved about 2,000 slaves, many driven to desperation by starvation and thirst from terrible droughts. Like most Antiguan slaveholders, the Royalls grew sugar cane. A single nick of the razor-sharp cane knives would cause infected wounds, many fatal. Slaves outnumbered white men four to one in 1723, and by 1729, 2,846 more slaves had arrived, with little increase in the white population. In 1727, 6.5 percent of the public budget of Antigua, which included the island’s defense, was spent on “Executions of Negros, for running away and for felony.” The 1736 uprising was preceded by the Ikem dance, performed in broad daylight by the slaves’ leader, “King” Court, “the chief Person in this affair.” This was “an Akan royal ritual meant to seal the support of one’s countrymen, while also giving public and fair warning to those whom one intended to attack.” The white spectators had no idea of what the dance meant, “thinking it an entertainment put on by and for slaves.” There were also oaths, administered with sacred drinks prepared by “an Obeah man,” an “Akan shaman-type figure, who leant the ceremony spiritual gravity.”

Testimony in the subsequent official British inquiry revealed that “enslaved people had met regularly in the forest for years: that one night, many years before the revolt, more than 2,000 of them had reportedly gathered and crowned Court their king and leader; and that he had since that time assumed that role among the island’s blacks.” The conspiracy was carefully planned, with three “generals” in command of three troops of 400 slaves each, to attack as the whites were celebrating at the King’s Coronation Day Ball. Communication through fire signals with other slave enclaves was set up to coordinate attacks on arsenals and the distribution of arms. The goal was “A new African or Creole government,” which would make “Antigua the first African nation in the New World.”

A Century of Widener Library

This month Harvard commemorates the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, the university’s flagship and still the largest university library in the world. Along with lectures and events celebrating the library’s life, the university offered the following “ode,” narrated by actor and Harvard alum John Lithgow:

 

To mark the completion of an extensive five-year Widener renovation project in 2004, the Harvard College Library published Widener: Biography of a Library. The book, written by then-Harvard Library Bulletin editor and current metaLAB Associate Director Matthew Battles, tells the story of Widener as that of higher education itself in the midst of the social, political, and cultural tumult of the twentieth century. It’s above all, though, the story of an unsung institution at the center of all that the university was and has become:

The story of Widener is as much the tale of the students, staff, and scholars who used it as it is the record of benefactors and collections. In the life of a library so richly faceted as Widener, one dimension is as irreplaceable as the other. The life of Widener emerges from the archival traces of those people who worked in and used the library; in library rules and regulations; in the letters of students and staff; in the notes and reports of its caretakers; in the photographs and drawings of it, inside and out. Amid its products—the stream of publication, lectures, and courses that flow from it—traces of Widener and its history are obscure. In our historical sensibility, libraries are transmitters not subjects, of historical knowledge. Historian Alistair Black has called the library a transparent institution—its condition is that of medium, not message, and still less messenger.

Battles’s metaLAB home has done much to further our thinking on libraries lately, from The Library Beyond the Book, by Battles and his metaLAB colleague Jeffrey Schnapp, to Cold Storage, a terrific documentary look at Harvard’s offsite book depository, to the drone-shot footage documenting the very scale of Harvard’s collections, as seen in both Cold Storage and Lithgow’s ode above.

“Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?”

“Never during my three years as a law student or two years as a law clerk at federal courts did I hear of the ‘Insular Cases.’ Yet the series of US Supreme Court decisions gathered under this name established a doctrine, in force to this day, determining that the US Constitution does not apply fully to territories acquired through conquest after the Spanish-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1898.” So writes Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow in her Preface to Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of the American Empire, the latest publication from Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. The volume grew out of a February 2014 conference at Harvard that was organized to interrogate this century-old series of Supreme Court decisions that, judging by Minow’s experience, aren’t often given the attention they deserve. As Juan R. Torruella, Puerto Rico-born Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit expressed in his conference keynote—included in the printed volume—“the Insular Cases represent classic Plessy v. Ferguson legal doctrine and thought that should be eradicated from present-day constitutional reasoning.”

In his Introduction to the book, excerpted below, Harvard Law School professor Gerald L. Neuman further elaborates on the need to continually question a doctrine that raises crucial issues of both constitutional law and human rights.

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The US Supreme Court’s decisions in the Insular Cases of 1901 provided the legal framework for the governance of a colonial empire in the Atlantic and the Pacific, loosening the constraints of constitutional principle in order to facilitate rule over the subjected areas and their inhabitants. In the wake of the Spanish-American War and the transfer of several of Spain’s imperial possessions, the metaphorically expressed question “Does the Constitution follow the flag?” became newly urgent. The Supreme Court majority gave a new answer: not entirely.

The most important of the 1901 decisions was Downes v. Bidwell, in which the court divided five to four in favor of congressional power to discriminate between the mainland and the new territories in customs matters. In retrospect, the crucial opinion was the concurrence of Justice Edward Douglass White. He accepted that the US Constitution governed the actions of the United States at any location, but he contended that it was still necessary to determine the appropriate geographical scope of each constitutional provision. The applicability of a constitutional limitation to a particular territory would depend on the situation of the territory and its relations to the United States. If the United States acquired a new territory and did not admit it as a state, then Congress could choose whether to “incorporate” the territory into the United States as an integral part or to treat it merely as a territory appurtenant to the United States. White thereby adopted a distinction that had been suggested by the political scientist Abbott Lawrence Lowell in an article in the Harvard Law Review, although White added some elements of his own in elaborating the consequences. For incorporated territories, the Bill of Rights and other constitutional limitations would apply in the usual way. For unincorporated territories, only “fundamental” restrictions on government power would apply. Moreover, an unincorporated territory could be kept in subordination indefinitely, without the prospect of future statehood. The United States had to have the same power to acquire and govern overseas territories and populations as the European colonial powers were exercising under international law.

The Rise of American Mathematics

From today’s vantage, it comes as a surprise to learn how slow the American academy was to embrace the practice of original mathematical research. It was at Harvard that the pursuit finally gained a foothold in the 19th century, and the history of the university’s mathematics department tracks well with the rising regard for mathematics in America. Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau trace these developments in A History in Sum: 150 Years of Mathematics at Harvard (1825-1975), which they introduce below.

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These days, the importance of math is widely recognized. The ongoing revolution in computers and communications devices, to take a familiar example, owes to advances in information theory, solid-state physics, and other disciplines that are, themselves, rooted in mathematics. Our country considers mathematics education a priority (even though existing programs often fall short of our goals). In terms of understanding the world around us, many people realize that the physical laws that govern our universe are—in their clearest form—mathematical statements. As Galileo Galilei once said, “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”

Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation is summed up in a simple mathematical expression that accurately describes the motions of objects in our solar system. Newton’s law has since been subsumed into Albert Einstein’s broader theory of general relativity, which encapsulates the workings of gravity in ten linked equations. String theory is more ambitious still, attempting to explain the particles and forces of nature (including gravity) through the geometry of tiny, hidden six-dimensional spaces. Carnegie Institution researcher Daniel Kelson, who hunts for distant galaxies, claims that his work in astronomy is “100 percent” mathematics. MIT astrophysicist Max Tegmark goes even further, suggesting that the universe we inhabit is, in itself, a “mathematical structure.”

Americans, however, have not always valued mathematics in this way. When Harvard College, the nation’s first institute of higher learning, was founded in the 1630s, “arithmetic and geometry were looked upon … as subjects fit for mechanics rather than men of learning,” the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote. In those early days, students did not need to demonstrate any proficiency in mathematics to gain admittance to Harvard, nor did they receive any training in the subject until their third and fourth years of school. The training they did receive was often far behind the times. Algebra, for instance, did not make its way into the Harvard curriculum until the 1720s or 1730s—roughly a century after René Descartes introduced modern algebraic notation. Calculus instruction began in the 1720s as well, more than 50 years after Newton and Leibniz put the discipline into a form that’s recognizable today.

"A Promising Member of That Race"

W. E. B. Du Bois, revered as a leading American intellectual of the 20th century, was formed in the nineteenth. After time at Fisk and then Harvard, he went on to the University of Berlin in the early 1890s, where experience outside of the United States contributed greatly to his developing understanding of the nature of racial identity. In Lines of Descent, new this month, Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the German world of ideas in which DuBois was immersed, a matrix of philosophical and social scientific inquiry from which ideas about the social construction of race emerged.

An African American traveling to Europe for graduate studies in the late 19th century was no common occurrence, especially for a person of modest means, as was Du Bois. His time at Fisk, in fact, was financed with money donated by neighbors and the congregation of his Great Barrington church. He then worked his way through Harvard, earning a second bachelor’s degree and an MA in history. With his sights set on Germany, Du Bois appealed to the John F. Slater Fund for the Education of Freedmen, endowed by the philanthropist in 1882.

Here’s Appiah:

Determined to make a scholarly pilgrimage to Germany, Du Bois petitioned the Slater Fund for a fellowship, firing off a series of letters and testimonials to its head, former President Rutherford Hayes—the very man who gained the White House by agreeing to dismantle Reconstruction. (“To properly finish the education thus begun, careful training in a European university for at least a year is, in my mind and in the minds of my professors, indispensable to my greatest usefulness,” the Harvard graduate fellow wrote Hayes.) At last, the fund agreed to provide a stipend for up to two years, and Du Bois, recalling his flush of exhilaration, tells us that, when he left a meeting with President Hayes, the promise of a scholarship secured, he was “walking on air.”

Du Bois’s application for funds was supported by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot, who wrote to Hayes of a “young colored man” who’d be just the sort to “invest in” for anyone helping “promising members of that race.” That remarkable letter follows.

 

Emily Dickinson, Available to All

Baffled for just a day or two [first line] Autograph manuscript, signed, [1860] MS Am 1118.2 (17a). Bequest, Theodora V. W. Ward, 1974. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

We are extremely pleased to join a whole host of collaborating institutions in announcing the launch of the Emily Dickinson Archive, an open access website collecting high resolution scans of most of Dickinson’s extant poems.

While Dickinson is one of literature’s most loved, it’s perhaps not widely known among her legions of admirers that she did not publish in her own lifetime. Given her tendency to write multiple variations of poems—and her embrace of esoteric punctuation—generations of Dickinson scholars have debated interpretations and transcriptions of her manuscripts. The site now allows both scholars and casual readers alike to see the originals for themselves, absent the layers of mediation added by their posthumous publication.

At the Emily Dickinson Archive readers may browse Dickinson’s manuscript pages by first line, date, or recipient, or search across the full text of poem transcriptions. Readers can also refer to past editors’ transcriptions and use the site’s tools to create their own transcriptions, annotate images, or zoom in to look closely at Dickinson’s handwriting.

In the video below, EDA General Editor and Houghton Library Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts Leslie Morris introduces the site and some of its features.

 

Under the guidance of Morris and an Advisory Board of distinguished scholars, EDA is a growing collaboration that includes Amherst College, Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Boston Public Library, Digital Public Library of America, Emily Dickinson Lexicon at Brigham Young University, Harvard Library, Harvard University Press, and Houghton Library at Harvard.

The Heroic Tradition

Since the late 1970s Gregory Nagy has taught a Harvard course called “Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization,” passing his enthusiasm for the classics on to thousands upon thousands of students. This spring, though, with an adaptation of the course being offered as a HarvardX MOOC (“massive open online course”), he’s likely topped those numbers in one swoop—and it’s not too late for you to join in.

The course, now titled “The Ancient Greek Hero,” is a survey of ancient Greek literature focusing on classical concepts of the hero and how they can inform our understanding of the human condition. We at HUP are quite pleased to be publishing a companion volume, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, perfect for those who prefer their learning a bit less massive and not so plugged in.

In the video below, Nagy explains the course and book:

 

And, from the HarvardX folks, a bit more on the course:

What is it to be human, and how can ancient concepts of the heroic and anti-heroic inform our understanding of the human condition? That question is at the core of The Ancient Greek Hero, which introduces (or reintroduces) students to the great texts of classical Greek culture by focusing on concepts of the Hero in an engaging, highly comparative way.

The classical Greeks’ concepts of Heroes and the “heroic” were very different from the way we understand the term today. In this course, students analyze Greek heroes and anti-heroes in their own historical contexts, in order to gain an understanding of these concepts as they were originally understood while also learning how they can inform our understanding of the human condition in general.

In Greek tradition, a hero was a human, male or female, of the remote past, who was endowed with superhuman abilities by virtue of being descended from an immortal god. Rather than being paragons of virtue, as heroes are viewed in many modern cultures, ancient Greek heroes had all of the qualities and faults of their fellow humans, but on a much larger scale. Further, despite their mortality, heroes, like the gods, were objects of cult worship—a dimension which is also explored in depth in the course.

The original sources studied in this course include the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey; tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; songs of Sappho and Pindar; dialogues of Plato; historical texts of Herodotus; and more, including the intriguing but rarely studied dialogue “On Heroes” by Philostratus. All works are presented in English translation, with attention to the subtleties of the original Greek. These original sources are frequently supplemented both by ancient art and by modern comparanda, including opera and cinema (from Jacques Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffman to Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic Blade Runner).

The true hero of the course is the logos (“word”) of reasoned expression, as activated by Socratic dialogue. The logos of dialogue requires both careful thought and close (or “slow”) reading, which is a core skill taught in this class. The course begins by considering the heroes of Homer's epics and ends with Plato’s memories of the final days of Socrates—memories which can only be fully understood by a reader who has gained a thorough comprehension of the ancient Greek hero in all his or her various manifestations.

Registration for “The Ancient Greek Hero” is open through the end of June.