| DIRECTOR'S
STATEMENT
Margaret Anne Doody, Director
As we make the, albeit imaginary, transition to the twenty-first
century, amid alarming and violent world events, the study
of literature seems more important than ever. In reading and
listening to literary works we have the opportunity of finding
out more about how human beings function, think and feel.
We become listeners not just speaker, and as soon as we listen
we can hear many voices. Pick up any author and you find that
he or she is connected by a thousand threads with predecessors
and associates. How could Petrarch have written without either
the work of Catullus and Ovid behind and before him or equally
the Islamic poetry of the Middle Ages? Could Samuel Clemens
have become Mark Twain were it not for writers as diverse
as Petronius, Cervantes and Voltaire? or without the oral
culture of the South, tinged with African, Native American
and French influences as well as formed by English Scots and
Irish?
In a world of complexity and difference, literature’s
function is not to simplify. But it does serve us well in
opening our hearts and imaginations, as well as making us
think including about language the element in which we often
try to move like fish in water, as if the words which have
such force were not only a necessary element but an invisible
one.
The Literature Program seems an idea program of graduate
study of the doctoral student who desires to approach literature
as one of the greatest sources of human knowledge and insight,
who see it as ultimately a potential means of bringing human
beings together without cutting corners and pretending that
difference has no validity.
This Program is designed for students who are highly motivated
and who enjoy being pioneers taking new paths. We have only
four required courses. The student is meant to encounter a
World Literature course, fielding by the Program in his or
her first semester. This course is designed to be team-taught;
it is a course in which teachers are also learners. We hope
to throw open some windows and doors at the outset of the
students’ career, and to remind students and professors
alike that there is always more to know. The second required
course put on by the Program is a course in literary theory
touching particularly on central issues of nationalism and
internationalism, discipline and the inter-disciplinary, and
the ever fascinating problem of translation. Each student
is required to take one course in Theology and one in Philosophy,
thus not only getting the benefit of two great Notre Dame
departments but also becoming familiar with the bases of almost
all our literary-critical thinking and interpretive traditions.
Our four required courses reflect our confidence in tradition
and in the possibilities of new discoveries and new connections.
But as well as pursuing such ideals we attend to the reality
of language. We are not content with mere talk about “Otherness”
but honor the “Other” in that primary step of
learning a language well, and thus finding out at first hand
how very differently human beings may think. Through that
valuable medium we find ways of seeing the world afresh.
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