Hogwarts Professor

The only literature class I took in college that wasn’t in Latin or Greek was a German literature course in English translation, a graduate seminar on ‘Mann, Kafka, and Brecht’ I signed up for as a freshman. Talk about fire hoses: I still have bad dreams about the week in which I was expected to read The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks on top of my other class work. At 17, allowing me to sign up for that class should have cost somebody in the Counseling Office their job. I impressed the teacher with a longish essay on ‘Mother Courage‘ (probably evidence of his charitable side or the low expectations he had for the child in his classroom) and escaped with an ‘A’ to conclude my formal education in better fiction.

David Bevington, Chicago’s resident Shakespeare scholar in those days, told me once at a Hitchcock Hall Sherry Hour that it was his great good fortune never to have taken a Shakespeare class as an undergraduate. Compared to Bevington, of course, my time with Virgil, Homer, and Thucydides and the corresponding absence of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton on my transcripts must mean that I was thrice blessed. I was never exposed to the aesthetic or postmodern schools of literary criticism but got a snoot full of Aristotle and Dante with a dusting of Coleridge and Ruskin. Talk about dodging the bullet.

But somedays I stumble on an item that English literature majors must recognize as a cliche and I blush for the Lake Michigan sized lacunae in my purely providential preparations to one day become a Potter pundit. Today, for example, while reading a list of “50 factoids about the 103 NBA players who have scored 50 points in One Game” (no joke), I ran across this beauty at #43 on the list: [Read more…]