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I never understood ‘classics’ as a subject. Feels like it should be refactored into dead languages and history curricula. Most access for modern literary scholarship should rest on translation into living languages maybe?
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Here I become a traitor to my class and defend Princeton’s decision to remove Latin and Greek from its required curriculum for classics majors: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ (Traitor to my Latin class, that is.) In @TheAtlantic
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The name “classics” should probably go. If you replace it with “Greek and Roman antiquity and its influence,” or something along those lines, the field makes more sense
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How is scholarship/pedagogy on other ancient European languages contemporary to ancient Greek/Latin structured? Where would you go to learn to read old Norse runes or Gaelic for eg?
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Probably weaker, but that’s kinda an accident of history more than anything? Greeks and Ronan’s just wrote down a lot more. You can certainly devote resources in proportion to material available, but preservation of designation as “classic” is sort of a reactionary fetish.
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This gets us to the question of whether “classics” (or “great” as in “great books”) is a moral designation, or an objective description of the vast influence this tradition has had on the world. The latter seems beyond dispute