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Epilogue: A Millennium’s Last Class The New York Province used to send Jesuit scholastics who were teaching high school to summer graduate classes at Fordham. In 1962, I took a course on John Henry Newman from Francis X. Connolly. I did not know then that Connolly had been at Fordham since the 1930s, that he had been a major figure in the Catholic Renaissance of those years, or that his 1948 anthology textbook, Literature: The Channel of Culture, would, after many of the norms and values it championed had been discarded, stand unused on the library shelf as an artifact, a remnant of a lost vision. But I did know that inside that handsome gray head and behind that gentle, courtly manner , was a flame lit from the first torch ever lit and passed along at Fordham. I knew that I should experience it before it flickered out. Connolly’s anthology was an innovation in its own time in that, contrary to New Criticism, which emphasized the literal, objective content of a literary text over its philosophical or historical contexts, Connolly looked at literature in the way that Jesuits viewed philosophy , as a guide to life. Without a philosophical and historical frame of reference, says Connolly in the preface to his anthology, “literary delight may well become a riot of fancy and an invitation to anarchy.” He acknowledges that his selections—Maritain, Gilson, Newman, and contemporary priest-writers such as John LaFarge and Thomas Merton—are weighted toward a particular worldview, but assumes that “the average young American of every persuasion needs more awareness of the continuity of history and the coherence of truth than he does of the change and chaos that floats in the intellectual sphere like bomb dust over a ruined city.” 360 16950-09_Fordham_BM 6/4/08 11:46 AM Page 360 His first section, “The Idea of the University,” with excerpts from Pope Pius XI, Maritain, Newman, and Fordham political scientist George Bull, establishes that education can “be ideally perfect only when it aims to form the true Christian and the useful citizen.” This is contrary, he says, to John Dewey’s “progressive” position that “social utility rather than wisdom is the end of education.” My final paper for Connolly’s course that summer tried to show that, for Newman, the student-teacher relationship was at the heart of the educational experience. Connolly, I think, was the first person to alert me to the famous line in President James A. Garfield’s address at Williams College in 1871, that all one needs for an education is a “simple bench” with Williams’s president Mark Hopkins on one end and the student on the other. Personal influence was for him, even more than books, the essence of education. What matters is the intellectual friendship. “For truth to live in the student,” I wrote in my paper, “he must catch it from someone in whom it lives already.” II ∞ I don’t think that is the first thought in the minds of the twenty students in my Fordham freshman English on the first day of class, January 1999. Nor in mine. I am laying down rules—no food, no water bottles, no gum, no absences or lateness, no late papers (not even one minute), no book bags on the desk, no hats, no stacking books before the class is dismissed—all meant to drive home the idea that literature is extremely important and that the work we are doing together demands every atom of our concentration. For the first time in many years, to force myself to break from familiar material I’ve taught before, I’ve put myself at the mercy of a standard textbook, Elements of Literature. We meet at 10:30, three times a week, in a cinder-block seminar room on the first floor of Dealy Hall, the same building, built in 1867, where I took my first English course forty-eight years ago. For the editors of my new text—Robert Scholes, Nancy R. Comley, Carl H. Klaus, and Michael Silverman—“literature enriches our lives because it increases our capacities for understanding and communication. It helps us to find meaning in our world and to express it and share it with others.” 361 E P I L O G U E : A M I L L E N N I U M ’ S L A S T C L A S S 16950-09_Fordham_BM 6/4/08 11:46 AM Page...

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