THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU, who teaches literature at SUNY Oswego in New York state, has sent the syllabus to his Western Heritage course in response to recent discussion here about college literary studies. The syllabus includes compelling remarks on the moral dimension of literary studies:

The study of literature is the single most important and life-changing element in an undergraduate’s four years of matriculation towards his or her baccalaureate.  The study of literature is not only a discipline; it is the discipline.  Understanding difficult, extended texts requires patience and perseverance, a putting aside of distractions, and a determination to suspend all hasty or childish judgments.  Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish writer of the Nineteenth Century, once said of life that while one perforce lives it forwards, one only ever understands it backwards.  So it is with studies, most especially with literary studies: we perforce read forwards, but only ever understand once we have finished reading, “backwards,” as it were.  Moral commitment remains indispensable to the endeavor …

…  The term discipline shows remarkable richness of meaning and deserves contemplation.  It not only signifies submitting oneself to a regimen – to the regular, lonely duty of paying careful attention to extended narrative, page by page, remembering the important characters and incidents – but it implies, in addition, becoming the disciple, if only temporarily, of the author, thereby adopting his point of view, if only hypothetically.  As Simone Weil wrote in her essay on “The Correct Use of School Studies,” education demands faith from those who claim to want it.  Because – quite as Kierkegaard observed – we can only ever understand our endeavors “backwards,” the relevance of studies can rarely, if ever, be grasped forwards, or while studies are actually happening.  From this arises the necessity of trust, or faith.  Now Faith, in its turn, is difficult, because it seeks, rather than has, its own explanation.  Some of the books that we will study in English 210 are also themselves difficult.  This means that students will feel the temptation to be defeated by them.  Fighting this temptation and sticking with the syllabus together constitute an inestimably important task for all students.  Were it the case that understanding is the intellectual goal of literary studies, as indeed it is, then finishing the book would be their moral requirement.  Few people talk about the moral component of education nowadays.  I shall have a good deal to say about it throughout the semester.

Here are the texts Mr. Bertonneau teaches in his Western Heritage I:

1. Apuleius, The Golden Ass.  Translated by E. J. Kenney. 
2. Augustine, Confessions.  Translated by Outler.
3. Hesiod (& Theognis): Theogony and Works and Days.  Translated by Dorothea Wender. 
4. Homer, Odyssey.  Translated by Palmer.
5. Plato, Symposium & Phaedrus.  Translated by Jowett. 
6. Vergil, Aeneid.  Translated by Billson.  
7. J. F. Webb (Editor), The Age of Bede.  Penguin. 
8. Colin McEvedy, The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History.

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