Author: James Livingston

I’m reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s poignant memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic (2017), treating it as a kind of coda to Emily Wilson’s new translation of Homer. Now Mendelsohn is a classical philologist, just like Wilson, so of course he did his own translations for the book. They read nothing like Wilson’s. The framing story of the memoir is how the father, Jay, a hard-headed mathematician not ordinarily drawn to literary texts, asked his son if he could take the course on The Odyssey that Daniel was scheduled to teach at Bard College. Father and son...

How often does something you read change your mind, or unsettle your beliefs? It happens to me every six months or so, when I venture into a field—ancient history, say—where I have no skills, only curiosity and anger, and I find myself in the midst of strangers who dazzle me with their confidence and erudition. This is different. I have been defending Ta-Nehesi Coates against his critics on the grounds I thought were afforded by Harold Cruse, in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967)—a book that was renovating the tradition of black nationalism on grounds, Cruse believed, afforded...

I teach Mimesis, Erich Auerbach’s improbable masterpiece—he wrote it in Istanbul in the 1940s, on the run from the Nazis—whenever I get the chance, even when it seems extraneous to the content of the course. To be honest, I drag him into every classroom, saying, “This is the most important book of the 20th century, so you owe it to yourself to read it, sooner or later.” Why would anyone make such a preposterous claim, which might well scare undergraduates into thinking the professor is a lunatic? Good question. More important, than, say, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit...