The author | Xu Ben
A hundred years ago, what classic works did peking university students read?
I have in my hand a textbook from National Peking University, which Hu Shi prefaced on June 28, 1922, and the paper has become yellow and brittle, and some parts of it are moldy. In my old home in Suzhou, this book lies in a pile of old books, and no one has touched it for more than half a century. This is a surviving book after being raided twice during the Cultural Revolution. When I was a teenager, I only used it as an English textbook, and as for its compilation intention, I couldn't understand it at all, and I had no interest at all. Later, I went to the countryside to join the team, and my interests changed, so I never looked at this old book again.
Unexpectedly, half a century later, I hosted the course "Reading the Classics of Western Humanities" for the audio program myself. When selecting articles and explanations, I re-read this old book, and only then did I realize the hardships of the enlightenment scholar Yanlu Blue Wisp a hundred years ago.
In 1922, Hu Shi became provost and acting dean of liberal arts at The National Peking University. The Chinese title of his preface is English Tessi Literature: Selected Greco-Roman Literature (hereinafter referred to as "Tessian Literature"), the first of four volumes. The other three books are The Bible and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and The Modern. I only have the first volume in my hand, after the "Cultural Revolution" raided the house, some of the remaining books in the family are also incomplete, whether there are the remaining three volumes, because my father has been ancient for more than 20 years, and there is no way to inquire. The Western classic humanistic readings I teach are similar in compilation to this set of books, but are divided into five parts: Greek, Roman, Early Christianity and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.
The Four Volumes of Tessie Literature, each of which is eight works (selected from the tome), were designed for a 32-week course in an academic year. The four books, intended for students to study for four years at university, were essentially textbooks for "humanistic education" or "universal education," although there was no such term at the time.
Six of the Greco-Roman books are Greek—Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus' Agmanon, Sophocles' Oedipus, Teripides' The Women of Troy, and Socrates' The Apologetics. Rome had only two works—Terence's Phormio and Virgil's Aeneas. From today's point of view, there are too few Roman writers and works. In terms of the weight of individual works, Greece surpassed Rome, but the literary types of the Romans were more clear and diverse than those of the Greeks, and the number of people passed down was also greater. In terms of its direct influence on later literature, Rome could rival, or even surpass, Greece.
Peking University
The editor of the Tessie Literature is A. Thompson. E. Eduard Zucker (1890-1971), who was then an assistant professor at Peking Union Medical College. Hu Shi was very respectful of him in the preface. It was an eye-opener for me. According to the current ugly view of Chinese universities on seniority and professionalism, some people must suspect that an assistant professor who teaches in a medical school has actually compiled textbooks for students in the English Department of Peking University.
However, in the eyes of Hu Shi in 1922, such doubts were simply superfluous. He was a pragmatist and a visionary. He didn't have the professionalist prejudice of the small door in our universities today, he only looked at the works, not the origins.
Don't underestimate this assistant professor who taught at the medical school in 1922. His compilation of "Tessie Literature" was also used as a textbook at the University of Maryland in the United States after 1924. After returning to the United States in 1923, Drock taught at universities in Maryland, North Carolina, and Indiana, retiring in 1961. He has published 45 works, some of which have been translated into five languages, and the library houses 3,730 volumes of his writings. He died in 1971 and was arguably a rather influential professor.
Drock published a treatise on The Chinese Theatre in 1925 and is still used as a reference book. His most famous book was Ibsen, The Master Builder, Henry Holt, New York, published in 1929, which was translated into several languages. His interest in Ibsen was similar to that of Hu Shi. Ibsen's plays are storytelling on stage. Unlike his contemporaries, Ibsen was more concerned with telling stories that were as if they were happening in life than "dramas" tailored for stage performances. Hu Shi is very conceited in the preface to Taisi Literature that he was the first to introduce Ibsen in China, and he admired Ibsen and Shaw because they were the same kind of atypical realist playwrights, and their plays were more suitable for reading than for performance (as was sartre's plays). In terms of preference for such playwrights, Hu Shi and Zhuo Ke can be said to have similar interests.
Professor Drock's writings and academic interests give us a glimpse into the best aspects of Humanities education in the United States. In 1917, under the direction of Professor Marion Dexter Learned, he completed his doctoral dissertation for Robert Reitzel (1849-1898), editor-in-chief of the Detroit-German-language weekly Der arme Teufel (1884-1998). It is a well-known German-language anarchist journal in the United States, for which Trotsky wrote. Robert Reitz was editor-in-chief of the journal (1884-1898) and was a prominent radical liberal.
In the view of professionalists with academic prejudices in Chinese universities today, where does such an unpopular assistant professor with a "professional background" have any qualifications to talk about Western literature for thousands of years and compile textbooks, is it not arrogant. Facts speak louder than words, however, and the fact that his four volumes of Tessie Literature are placed there shows that he is capable of doing something that all the frogs at the bottom of the well dare not imagine. This enlightening work, he said, was done to "liberate the reader from narrow stubbornness and ignorant prejudices."
Zhuo Ke's inclusion of the Western cultural enlightenment of Chinese students in the field of comparative literature is quite consistent with Hu Shi's ideas. Hu Shi clearly expressed this idea of comparative literature in the preface, repeatedly mentioning the need to use the cultural reality of Chinese theater to understand Western classical theater. Judging from the existing research on Hu Shi, Hu Shi and Zhuo Ke have a fairly good personal relationship. In 1922 In Beiping, there were probably not many intellectuals who were also interested in Ibsen, Chinese drama, and comparative literature, and Hu Shi and Zhuo Ke could have common interests in these three fields, which should be enough to make them like-minded friends.
Hu Shi said in the preface that he himself returned to China in 1917 and wanted to find suitable teaching materials for the English students he taught at Peking University, but he was very disappointed. At that time, there were english books on the market that were nothing more than Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield or Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and several Shakespearean plays, "even the English professors have never heard of George Bernard Shaw." Hu Shi realized that there were two ills at the same time, one was the lack of "systematic knowledge of Taixi literature" and the other was "too little understanding of important contemporary European literary works". He complained that "the teaching materials used by the English professors were used by their missionaries and teachers when they were teaching them."
Hu shi
Today, Hu Shi's words still have a sharp effect. There are many university teachers in China now, and what they teach is only what their teachers have taught them, and they claim to be someone's disciples, and they can't go out of the teacher's door for a lifetime. Their portal views are particularly deep, excluding all knowledge that they consider "unprofessional". Such professionalists are narrow-minded and especially like to hang the word "expert" on their lips, because they themselves guard the small "home" of an acre and a third of the land, and out of this home, they cannot "specialize" in anything. In their eyes, all those who are different from them are all "not doing the right thing" and "arrogant and arrogant."
What Hu Shi wants to break is this kind of paranoia and closure of "passing on the teacher and apprentice" of small doors and small households, and his educational reform goal is to enable students to enlarge their vision and then enlarge it. In his view, this must begin with the compilation of protestant textbooks. In this regard, he has a "two birds with one stone" proposition: the selected text should have both "important (content) information" and introduce the main literary forms. He argues that teaching contemporary literature is particularly important because it gives students an understanding of "contemporary social issues and philosophy." Thus, "John Galsworthy is more important than Goldsmith, shaw is a priority over Shakespeare." However, from the point of view of classical reading, we may not agree with Hu Shi's view a hundred years ago, because no one would doubt that Shakespeare is more important than Shaw in both the history of human culture and the history of theater.
Hu Shi said this in response to the practical problems he saw in the Chinese literary circles at that time, not because he did not attach importance to the reading of ancient classics. He told such a story that happened in his class. Once, after reading Tennyson's Ulysses, "I suddenly asked my classmates, who is Ulysses?" To my disappointment, I called three or four students in a row to get a grudgingly acceptable answer. The student spoke of George Bernard Shaw's The Profession of Lady Warren and Wilde's The Fan of Lady Win, but knew nothing about who Ulysses was. Students may have heard of the Iliad or the Odyssey in a european literature history class, but learning the author or title by chance does not mean that they really have literary knowledge. There is no doubt that a solid and systematic reading of ancient classics is essential. This allows students to be impressed with a long literary tradition... Got some insight". To this end, Hu Shi especially recommended this set of Taixi literature compiled by Professor Zhuo Ke.
Tennyson
I myself taught Tennyson's Ulysses in English literature classes at American universities, and I don't have to ask students who Ulysses is. For as soon as I told them that Ulysses was Oedipus, they knew that they had already read the Odyssey in the humanistic education class of greek thought that everyone had to take. With this knowledge, I can directly compare Tennyson's Ulysses with Homer's Oedipus. Tennyson, a 19th-century Victorian poet, wrote of Ulysses as an old man who had lost his sense of adventure and enterprising, not unlike the energetic hero of Homer's epic. Tennyson used Ulysses as a symbol of the decline and loss of pioneering spirit of Western civilization, and if you think that he is retelling Homer's heroic story, even if every word is well read, it is itchy and missing the point. It can be seen how important the reserve and association of literary knowledge and the orientation of reading are for effective reading.
Hu Shi asked his students to carefully read the introduction and introduction written by Zhuo Ke before reading the works. He cared about his students and said, "In these introductions, Professor Drock put in the results of his research on the history of the Western world over the past many centuries." Drock's introduction to Tessie literature bears similarities to the Norton English Literature or Norton American Literature with which we are familiar. Each volume has a general introduction, and then each work has a separate introduction, not only involving the selection itself and its author, but also some relevant knowledge of other texts. The section that deals with this article is a simple walk-through. Hu Shi's request for students still has considerable reference value for us to guide reading the classics today, and it is a useful suggestion.
We must first know what we are reading, and have a definite purpose of reading, in order to exert the maximum effectiveness of reading and achieve the greatest intellectual and aesthetic gains. Now some teachers one-sidedly advocate "intensive reading", thinking that the guide will only hinder students' own reading. This is not true. Students need teachers because they have more reading experience and knowledge than they do, and professors can reduce the time and energy of students themselves in the dark. If anyone just relies on himself to explore and understand from the beginning, then what he can learn in a lifetime is very limited. Some people even spend their whole lives blindly groping in the dark.
Hu Shi's suggestions for reading methods are clear. He believes that it is not easy for beginners to determine for themselves valuable reading purposes, so they need to have the guidance of a teacher. Hu Shi recommended the introduction written by Zhuo Ke because there is such guidance in it. In Hu Shi and Zhuo Ke, the specific purpose of the instruction is to help students have cross-cultural literary associations. Today we know that this is just one of several possible purposes, and not necessarily the most relevant for most readers. In the early 1920s, however, literary comparison seemed to be a very focused reading purpose for Hu Shi's generation.
The classics are top-notch ramen, and good introductions and guides are delicious seasoning packets
Hu Shi hopes that When reading Taixi Literature, Chinese students will pay attention to why Chinese novels have not been taken seriously, why there is a lack of such things as "tragedy" in Chinese literature, and why the dramatic plot lacks the unity of the plot. He also hoped to provoke reflection on China's "epic," writing, "In studying Homer's epic, students should be shown that epic poetry was strangely absent in ancient China, while this narrative poetry flourished in contrast to modern epics." Was there really no epic in ancient China? Or did it get lost later? Are there traces of epics in the mythological names of Chu Ci? Can the preserved lyric poems of the ancient Book of Verses remedy the loss of the epic? He said that "relatively modern epics" refers to folk literary forms such as "bullet words", "beach springs" and "drum books". Hu Shi also proposed that when studying tragedy, students can think about it, "Which of the dramas of the Yuan and Ming dynasties can be called tragedies." "Han Palace Autumn", "Wutong Rain"? "Can 'Peach Blossom Fan' and 'The Women of Troy' compare? Wait a minute.
Judging from today's humanistic reading associations of classic works, the reading association requirements of the early 1920s were very narrow, limited to some very limited literary problems, which probably reflected Hu Shi's or Zhuo Ke's own literary interests at that time and the very limited reading association ability of English students at that time. This situation has not fundamentally changed in most English departments today, even less than a hundred years ago.
Therefore, today's classic reading introduction or introduction needs to guide students from multiple combinations of politics, society, psychology, cognition, and ethics to form a sufficiently broad scope of thinking, because humanistic reading thinking extensively involves people's understanding of themselves, including thinking, memory, comprehension, imagination, value judgment, and good and evil discrimination. This kind of reading is obviously different from pure literary reading and association. Due to space limitations, I can only give one example here.
Both Hu Shi and Drok attached great importance to epics, which occupied three-eighths of the Greco-Roman book of Tessy Literature, and Homer's two epics plus Virgil's Aeneas. After comparing the characteristics of Homer's oral tradition with the characteristics of Virgil's written epics, Drok introduced the Roman literature of Augustus's time, calling it the peak of Roman literature, and praised the elegance, purity, and refinement of Latin poetry of this period. Virgil was a poet among the poets of this glorious era. Hu Shi's own series of associations with epics are also triggered by this pure literary epic.
However, this is not the true Roman literature of augustus's imperial era. This is an era in which the environment of civil liberties has deteriorated badly, and it is impossible for its literature not to bear the imprint of the authoritarian ruling power of the environment of that era. Throughout his long reign, Augustus attached great importance to the ideological role of literature, using it to promote the legitimacy, legitimacy, and prosperity of his empire (peace and stability). Poets who were able to serve this purpose, such as Virgil, Horace, and Propertius, were all examples of privileged people who only created a few works in the early days of Augustus's reign. At the end of Augustus's reign, a censorship system was established through the monarchy to punish literary activities that did not conform to the main theme (such as the New Moral Movement advocated by Augustus). Ovid's exile is an example.
For the Romans, the most praiseworthy form of poetry was epic. Epics deal with issues of great historical significance, depicting the heroes, gods, and wars that shaped human consciousness and culture. The great Roman hero was a political figure, a figure of epic value. Augustus, and only Augustus deserves to be such an important figure.
Virgil's epic Aeneid is a political and aesthetic model for the literature of Augustus's time. It reintroduces traditional Roman moral values and portrays the heroic Aeneas (the ancestor and incarnation of Augustus) as a tall hero loyal to his nation and country, successfully completing a legacy that deified the emperor as a savior. Of course, it also touches on contemporary themes of concern to the Romans of Augustus's time: fate, leadership, respect for the gods, love, duty, community, violence and civil war, Roman values, a mythological fable with the characteristics of the times, not a work of pure literature.
Virgil
When we peruse the entire literature of Augustus, we will inevitably see the imprint of this emperor. Augustus's personal figure is almost everywhere: from the key plots of the Aeneid, to the hymns and letters of Horace, to the lamentations and allegiance letters written by Ovid after his exile by Augustus. Although we cannot simply refer to the Roman literature of Augustus as a state propaganda of the so-called "Golden Age", this intention or implication constitutes a distinct characteristic of the times. Knowing this background, when we read the Aeneas, we will probably associate the large-scale musical and dance epic "Dongfang Hong", rather than "bullet words", "beach springs", "drum books" or "Chu Ci" and "Book of Poetry".
The Odyssey we read today is still the Odyssey of a hundred years ago, and the Aeneidine we are reading is still the Aeneid of Aeneas a hundred years ago. If it is only to read the ancient classics themselves, the texts available for us today are far from being comparable to the Taixi Literature written by Hu Shi a hundred years ago. The reason why the anthology of Taixi Literature is still relevant to us today is that it retains the background introduction and introduction written by Zhuo Ke a hundred years ago, and of course, the purpose of reading explained to us by Hu Shi. We can see many historical traces that have the characteristics of the times, and we can refer to this reading to think about what kind of humanistic reading we need today.
Although reading ancient classic texts themselves is important, without relevant explanations, introductions and introductions, it is difficult to become effective reading, let alone show the awareness and ideological characteristics of the times of reading. For the vast majority of readers, it doesn't really matter who guides them to read and how they read. Leo Strauss said that the guidance of the teacher is the most important thing for effective classical reading. He himself practiced it and worked hard to be such a reading teacher almost all his life. Teachers with different visions, minds, education and problem awareness can guide the classic reading of different intellectual qualities and values. In this sense, the classics are top-notch ramen, and good introductions and guides are delicious seasoning packets, which should not be excessive.
Author | Xu Ben
Edit | Xu Yuedong
Proofreading | Lucy