Return of the Blogger

OK- no guarantees, but I am going to try to get my blog running again! This week has actually been relatively easy so I certainly have more time on my hands than I usually would, but blogging should do me good anyway… it makes me feel closer to home.

I don’t really follow Canadian politics any longer. In fact, I’m slightly ashamed to admit that don’t really keep track of anything that goes on outside the Princeton gates. But I still have plenty on my plate!

I’d actually like to use this page to talk a little bit about what I have been learning in my classes (as much for me as for you!) and more generally about life in Princeton.

I’d like to start today with a few words on the Divine Comedy, which I have been studying for the entire semester with a truly wonderful professor called Robert Hollander in a ‘freshman seminar’, which is a small class capped at 12 students and open only to first year students. It has been a very interesting experience for me because I must admit I wasn’t initially sold on the poem! I like reading and I like writing, but I was for the first few weeks very dubious about the kind of work we were doing, which basically involves analyzing each line of the poem, sometimes from the most unlikely angles, to extract meaning which never gets past the point of conjecture.

In a way, I’m still not a fan of this kind of work –I guess it’s called literary analysis, but I have found in the past couple of weeks that it has allowed me to connect with the poem on a deeper level and certainly helped me enjoy it more. While I have been able to confirm that I will surely never end up teaching in a language department, I have also gotten to a point where I feel I can pick up a more opaque work of literature and understand it in a way I would not have been able to at the start of the year. In fact, to my great surprise, I found myself last night falling asleep reading the first few Cantos of Purgatorio (the second volume of the Divine Comedy which we have not covered in class) and actually enjoying it!

So although we can debate the value of literary analysis and ask ourselves whether the fact that a certain word appears a certain number of times in certain regular intervals matters at all, the process of reading a work like the Comedy slowly and carefully, taking the time to consider even the most far-fetched hidden-meanings, does make future reading more fun. I guess that’s the point of it all.