{"id":546915,"date":"2010-04-29T10:06:56","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T14:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=44612"},"modified":"2010-04-29T10:06:56","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T14:06:56","slug":"teaching-as-%e2%80%98a-secular-pulpit%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/546915","title":{"rendered":"Teaching as \u2018a secular pulpit\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

When David Damrosch<\/a> was in ninth grade, a teacher gave him a copy of the novel \u201cTristam Shandy\u201d because she thought it would appeal to his sense of humor. \u201cI was blown away by it,\u201d he said. \u201cTristam talks at one point about his favorite writers, and if he\u2019d said Defoe and Chaucer, I probably would have become an English professor like my older brother Leo, who\u2019s on the faculty here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, Tristam mentioned \u201cmy dear Rabelais and my dearer Cervantes.\u201d Damrosch, just 15 at the time, thought, \u201cI don\u2019t know who these guys are, but if Tristam likes them, I\u2019ll like them too.\u201d He went out and bought some Penguin Classics and \u201cfell in love with the broader panorama of literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

He especially liked satirical novels,\u00a0so when he saw \u201cThe Divine Comedy\u201d listed in the back of one of those Penguin Classics, he went out and grabbed a copy. \u201cI soon found Dante wasn\u2019t quite the thigh-slapper I was expecting,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I was hooked.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time he arrived at Yale<\/a> as an undergraduate, his interests had expanded beyond European literature to ancient languages and cultures. \u201cI\u2019m a preacher\u2019s kid with Jewish roots in the family,\u201d said the Episcopal priest\u2019s son, \u201cso I was interested in the Bible.\u201d He also had a roommate who signed up for an Egyptian archaeology course, to which Damrosch tagged along. \u201cI was really interested in languages,\u201d he said, \u201cand thought: Here\u2019s a chance to learn a language that doesn\u2019t work like the languages I know.\u201d He eventually dipped his toes into Middle High German, Old Norse, and Aztec poetry, finding that once he fell in love with the literature, he tended to want to learn more about the language. He has studied 12 languages, so far.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most interesting case was the Nahuatl language\u201d spoken by the Aztecs. \u201cIn graduate school, I found the language was being offered in the anthropology department. The class\u2019s enrollment doubled when I signed up, and my director of graduate studies in comparative literature threatened to throw me out the window when I asked for course credit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The adviser, he adds, thought \u201csome hiring committees might feel I was just doing arabesques around the literary tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, he wasn\u2019t sure whether he\u2019d go into academia or become a writer or Foreign Service officer. The path he ultimately chose has provided the best of all three worlds, allowing travel and immersion in foreign cultures, time to write, and the chance to open the world of comparative literature to young people.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, teaching is like a secular pulpit,\u201d said Damrosch, who is a professor of comparative literature and the department chair of literature and comparative literature in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences<\/a>. \u201cI have a very evangelical sense of literature as a mode of experiencing the world as aesthetic pleasure that I love to communicate to students.\u201d<\/p>\n

His most recent title was \u201cThe Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh,\u201d and he\u2019s at work on another popular nonfiction title about the cultural history of the conquest of Mexico.<\/p>\n

After spending almost three decades at Columbia University<\/a>, in his hometown of Manhattan, Damrosch decided to make the move to Harvard when the department invited him to help with its new, more global focus. \u201cIn terms of being at Harvard,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s both a matter of helping build a more global department and also integrating the undergrad literature concentration and the graduate comparative literature program. We\u2019ve now created a truly unified department that I think represents global comparative literature better.\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t hurt that his older brother, Leo Damrosch, has been at Harvard since 1989, or that his middle brother, Tom, is a parish priest in western Massachusetts, but scholarship was the real draw.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery quarter century or so, it\u2019s nice to try something fresh,\u201d he said. \u201cI felt there was a chance to do some innovative work here with some very, very collegial colleagues and excellent students.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When David Damrosch was in ninth grade, a teacher gave him a copy of the novel \u201cTristam Shandy\u201d because she thought it would appeal to his sense of humor. \u201cI was blown away by it,\u201d he said. \u201cTristam talks at one point about his favorite writers, and if he\u2019d said Defoe and Chaucer, I probably […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-546915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}