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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Jon Baskin

History and the love of literature

14 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Analytic Tradition, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Politics, Reading and Recitation

≈ 2 Comments

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academia, Ashley Barnes, Benedict Anderson, Benjamin C. Kinney, Bryan Van Norden, COVID-19, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Johann Gottfried Herder, Jon Baskin, Matt Wilkens, Sumana Roy, William Shakespeare

Many years ago, as a master’s student in development sociology, I took a course on nationalism with the late Benedict Anderson, renowned for his idea that the nation is an imagined community. The topic and the professor attracted a cross-disciplinary audience; about half of us students were in programs of sociology and political science, the other half in programs of literature. The distinction between the two, as I recall, became apparent when, from theorists and philosophers of nationalism, our reading turned to a work of literature, the sentimental anti-slavery novel Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. We wrote brief papers articulating our reactions to and thoughts about the work. The social scientists were moved by it; one fellow sociologist said she cried while reading it. But the literary theorists, as I remember, all thought it was (in Anderson’s words) a “dreadful” novel, worthy of study merely as something symptomatic of its historical period, at best. I had taken other classes with several of them, and become friends with some, and it occurred to me that I had never heard one of these literature students express love for any work of literature, with the sole exception of Joyce’s Ulysses.

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