The Great Conversation Colloquy


Co-conveners:  Bruce MacLennan (4-5067, maclennan@cs.utk.edu) and Linda Bensel-Meyers (4-5401,  lbenselm@utk.edu )

Website:  http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/GC/

Focus:  The Great Conversation is an interdisciplinary colloquy of faculty and graduate students devoted to a critical examination of the Western Canon (covering the period, approximately, from Homer to Freud).  It is based on the premise that the Western worldview makes assumptions and poses issues that can be historically traced.  The colloquy meets regularly to discuss readings from the Canon and continues the discussion on an internet list.  Many of the works we will be discussing this semester deal with nature and technology. These include Bacon (New Atlantis), Shakespeare (Tempest), Rousseau (Origins of Inequality), Goethe (Faust), Shelley (Frankenstein), the Romantics, Emerson (Nature) and Darwin (Origin of the Species). The complete list follows:

    1.     Montaigne [1580-92]: Essays selections
    2.     Francis Bacon [1627]: Essays and New Atlantis
    3.     Shakespeare [c. 1611]: Tempest
    4.     Milton [1644]: Areopagitica
    5.     Voltaire [1759]: Candide
    6.     Rousseau [1754]: Discourse on Origins of Inequality
    7.     Goethe [1808, 1832]: Faust (Pt. I & Pt. II)
    8.     Shelley [1818]: Frankenstein
    9.     Emerson [1836]: Nature
    10.     Nietzsche [1883-92]: Thus Spake Zarathustra selections
    11.     Romanticism [1789-1832]: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Scott, Schiller, Novalis, Poe, Longfellow,...
    12.     Darwin [1859]: Origin of Species selections
(This is subject to change, according to the interests of the participants.)

Supplementary Resources for Fall 2001 readings.

Sponsors:  The colloquy currently sponsors the University Studies Great Conversation course sequence (US 210, 220, 310, 320, 410, 420), which has been taught since Fall 1998.

Colloquy listserv Information

To get on the colloquy listserv (so that we can continue the "great conversation" after our meetings), send mail to listserv@listserv.utk.edu (note that there is no "e" in "listserv"). The body of the message should be:
SUBSCRIBE CONVERSE your name
Don't put anything in the Subject line (or just a blank).