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Hollander公但丁课史料
2007-07-10 08:53:43 来自: erwachen (Boston)
学期之初零星记下的Hollander老师印象。
… Prof. Robert Hollander’s Dante. He’s a handsome white-haired man in his mid-70s, with a sort of quietly dominating air and what I would describe as the New York look. He is by far the most remarkable professor I met. He is very nice and accessible but overawes me. I shall never forget his words today, about the commitment you have to make and the honesty that you should have with yourself. Brilliance is very rare, he says. There are those who blow their languages and extent of knowledge, but very few are brilliant. Try to read well one book and really give yourself to it. Keep commen sense and clarity. Try reading all the books of Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso this weekend. They are not that hard but are enjoyable. Read these books six or seven times this term. Memorize. This will reward you. Learn to write a 300-word essay which goes straight to the argument and shows clearly your thought. You cannot hide your weakness in a short essay. There is no paperwriting for this class, only examinations, which will be difficult. You will be answering essay questions and in my class no one ever gets 5 points for the exam. I give 4.5 for the best answers. I am the toughest grader in Princeton. I give more C’s than all other humanities professors give together.
He sits in the front in his wheelchair and talks to us in a friendly and encouraging manner. He is obviously a wise and unusual man. I see he allies himself with the old practical criticism which often goes overlooked today but is in fact indispensable in literary experience.
… He speaks leisurely in class and digresses occasionally. This friendly style lessens my anxiety about the supposedly dramatic intensity of this course. It’s remarkable how he keeps all his intellectual energy with him at this age. I just went through his course material and found his selection of episodes from the Commedia are actually 200 in total!
… Prof. Hollander, in addition to his scholarship, is a lively speaker and joke-cracker. He speaks perfect sentence, never halts or hums in between. He uses swear words — i.e. words like “s-o-b” “crap” “screw” etc — but to good effect and prettily. He wants us to realize how “naughty” Dante is with his text and readers, and how he himself enjoys being a “bad boy in Dante studies.” His class is informative and entertaining, and attracts some professors to come too. Everybody feels it’s a rare opportunity to have him come to Dartmouth. On Oct 12, he invited Lino Pertile from Harvard to give us a lecture. Lino was younger, Italian, devastatingly charming. The whole class fell under his spell when he defended Ulysses’s departure from his Ithaca home and quest for the unpeopled land. What a style, what passion! I enjoy the way he related Ulysses to Machiavelli and to Guido da Montefeltro. Hollander, on the other hand, has no sympathy for any of the sinners in Hell. He thinks all the so-called sympathetic sinners are properly damned, be it Francesca or Ulysses or even Virgil. Dante has a reason for putting these folks down in hell. Hollander sat aside smiling and let Lino hold the class in his thrall. But at the end of the class, he cut in. The two argued against each other in class, grimacing and gesturing, to our great amusement. At one point Lino said to us, in apparent despair: “You shouldn’t believe anything your Prof. Hollander said about Ulysses; his book on Canto XXVI was wrong!” To which Hollander retorted: “Don’t listen to him, he is arguing for Ulysses only because he’s been an oarsman himself. He was in the bowing team in Cambridge!” — We had such a good laugh. They are wonderful scholars. They hold opposite views but are great friends. |
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