Category: Great Personalities

Alter on writing The Art of Biblical Narrative

September 24, 2020 at 3:12 pm

Robert Alterisa scholar and translator whose rendition of the Pentateuch into English we read in the first-year Core humanists as The Five Books of Moses. Earlier this year, in January, Alter was invited to deliver a lecture to students in Brigham Young University’s program in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. In his talk, he discusses The […]

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Kendi on antiracism

June 17, 2020 at 9:45 am

You may have read at BU Today that Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar of racism, has been recruited to join the BU faculty and to launch a BU Center for Antiracist Research. Last week, Dr. Kendi was interviewed by TED’s current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers and speaker development curator Cloe Shasha. In their conversation, […]

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The poems of the 2020 Core Poetry Reading

April 15, 2020 at 11:03 pm

On the evening of April 15th, four and a half dozen classmates, alumni, lecturers, and friends, all members of the extended community we call the BU Core, came together on Zoom for our traditional spring poetry reading, an event Core has organized for nearly two decades. Despite a hitch at the start (we were Zoom […]

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From TheTLS: In Praise of Narcissism

May 19, 2017 at 11:10 pm

Shahidha Bari must be applauding her article for the TLS, ‘In Praise of Narcissism”, which attempts a reappraisal at the figure some of us have the pleasure of finding staring us in the mirror. Many wild theories have been proposed to explain these beautiful people, including ones that have expanded their definition of narcissism to […]

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From The Times Literary Supplement: Immense chaos of feeling

May 7, 2017 at 11:23 pm

From Rousseau’s unprecedented confessions to Hong Kingston’sWarrior Women and China Men, Alex Zwerdling traces the history of the memoir in hisThe Rise of the Memoir, reviewed by Frances Wilson for the TLS. The difficulty with memoirs is that they are written to be memorable; enough so to be a steady source of profit after ones […]

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Reading the Romantics

April 29, 2017 at 11:17 pm

Here follows the set-list of texts read at the Annual Core Poetry Reading, held this year on April 11, 2017 (this information is listed in the 2017 Core Almanac, part of the Core Journal published this year, Issue 26: http://bu.edu/core/journal/xxvi): Zachary Bos read After Reading Keats’ Ode by W. H. Auden Extracts from a letter […]

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From The Guardian: How Lenin’s love of literature shaped the Russian Revolution

April 2, 2017 at 11:41 pm

Tariq Ali, military historian and himself a prominent firebrand for the left, has published an absorbing article on Vladimir Lenin’s literary tastes. He loved the classics. He read Ovid, Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal deeply. But Ali states that it his love for the gold might adversely have effected his politics; that is, old was not […]

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From Truthout: Banning Howard Zinn’s Books Is Hardly a Way to Start a Conversation

March 26, 2017 at 10:34 pm

As we all know, Howard Zinn was a prominent activist under the “auspices” of Boston University, best known for hisA People’s History of the United Statesthat was popular in every sense of the word, one of the reasons for its having remainedso powerful. Understandably, on March 2, the governor of Arkansas, Kim Hendren introduced a […]

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From The Nation: After the Inferno

March 5, 2017 at 8:42 pm

It is one of the most valuable purposes of reading imaginative literature that it allows the reader to sympathize with the values of a culture different from his or her own. Having done so, memory, strengthened by the force of narrative, will also preserve those values. Peter E. Gordon therefore aptly begins his review of […]

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From The Times Literary Supplement: Steve Bannon, heir to Plato

February 18, 2017 at 7:15 pm

Steve Bannon (good name) believes in a cyclical theory of history. We do not have the evidence for it, which is just the point, sincethe argument then becomes circular. The nice thing about cycles is that it suggests revolution, something we like here; the bad thingis thatBannon feels perhaps that he is the spearhead of […]

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