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In this passage, the Great Books are works that strengthen the reader's connection to the universe and, in Jiang's formulation, allow contact with God itself.
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In this passage, the Great Books are works that strengthen the reader's connection to the universe and, in Jiang's formulation, allow contact with God itself.
Texts that contain a universe and let the reader access universal secrets, enter a new universe, and create a universe.
He describes his pedagogical project as presenting minority interpretive frames for students to work through themselves rather than delivering settled scholarship.
The class is not meant to certify that students have mastered the great books, but to begin a lifetime of entering them line by line.
The great books, especially Homer and Dante, are presented as an education in what love is because love is where God is.
A Great Book is a universe unto itself because it lets a reader assume different lives at once, speeding up wisdom and enlightenment.
Jiang says the Great Books literally allow readers to connect and talk to God itself.
A great book excites the imagination so readers can peer deeply into the complicated, complex, and dark human heart.
A great book contains characters who become real to the reader and make the world more real to the reader.
Jiang presents Harold Bloom's explanation of a great book as something that helps readers become human because its characters can hear themselves speak.
"So I do this a lot. You give memorable abridgements of the history of ideas and imagination. What needs underlying is the amount that..."
"...very important for us to understand occult ideas embedded in the great books such as paradise lost. Okay. But again, this is a very..."
"course is Dante Okay, and thought they will destroy the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church with his Masterpiece the divine comedy we will..."
"...point of this class is not to Tell you what the book great books are the entire point of the class is to get..."
"Okay? And that's what the great books are about. The great books, even Homer and Dante, they really think deeply about what love is..."
"...to wisdom and enlightenment, right? But the great thing about a great book is it's a universe onto itself. And therefore, you can actually..."
"But it ends from the perspective of the Trojans, okay? It ends with Priam getting back Hector's body, taking it back to Troy and..."
"...to analyze deeper all right and that's why we read the great books because it is literally it allows us to connect and talk..."
"...point of this exercise is to show you that what a great book does is excite your imagination. It helps your imagination peer deeply..."
"...famous American literary critic. Okay? And his explanation for what a great book is, what is a great book? A great book is something..."
"...We have greater curiosity. Okay? And that's the power of a great book. And this is how the Iliad created the greatest civilization on..."
"...that we understand all of this we can also understand the great books. Because what I will show you this semester is if you..."
The lecture starts by warning against overconfident certainty, then rewires from literary method to a hard model of AI: today’s systems are pattern-fitters optimized for compliance, so power becomes control over what counts as...
The Iliad begins as a war of wills and ends as a metaphysics of love: memory is emotion, poetry is consciousness in motion, forgiveness defeats revenge, and forced perspective-switching becomes the big bang of...
A source-grounded reading of Homer as civilizational engine: the Iliad trains Greeks to fight with speeches, poetry projects movies onto the world, language controls time and space, and the poet becomes the flame through...
A source-grounded reading of the Iliad as self-recognition: Achilles becomes a mirror for humiliation and pride, Homeric speech tries to control reality, and the ancient poet becomes prophet and teacher because truth is beautiful,...
A source-grounded reading of the Great Books as initiation: school materialism is named as the great lie, consciousness becomes the real substance of the universe, attention is true wealth, and reading becomes a way...
A source-grounded reading of Jiang's Jesus lecture: Christianity begins as a pile of impossible doctrines, the historical Jesus is thinner and stranger, the Gospel of Thomas makes him a poet-prophet of the divine spark,...
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