Summer Courses

     I miss Shimer during the summer.  I read things and wish that I had a class to discuss it in.  I miss being on the Shimer floor and seeing Shimer people and walking across the IIT campus. But this summer will be different!
     Not only will I be working at Shimer during the week, I am also going to take a summer class with Stuart Patterson.  I am super excited!  Stuart is going to teach at Oxford next year, so this will be one of the few chances I get to take a class with him before I graduate. The last course I took with him was Natural Sciences II and it was wonderful.
     This course is called "Metaphor" and the description reads:

This course will explore the uses of figurative language - chiefly metaphor, but also simile, metonymy, synecdoche, and analogy - in all three areas of the Shimer curriculum.  We will begin by studying theories of metaphor and figurative language from literary, philosophical and cognitive psychological perspectives. We will then use these theories to examine core texts in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences; we will revisit some texts from the Shimer core (e.g. Aristotle, Darwin, Smith, Marx, lyric poems, Homer) for the uses they make of figurative language as a means of creative expression,  rhetoric, exposition and argument. Students’ reading will be self-directed to some extent depending on their primary area of interest.

     I have heard that summer courses are different in many ways from fall and spring, and I sure am excited to see that for myself!

Also, if you have some free time, read a poem by Cindarella Gregory, one of the co-founders of Shimer College.

Comments

[Samuelhenderson]

As the person responsible for circulating that poem, there's something I should mention. I've recently come across something that puts Miss Gregory's authorship in question: the poem appears verbatim in Frances Wood's hand, in her memory book from 1838-1842, i.e. approximately a decade earlier, alongside various other poems from what seems to have been a fairly torrid friendship with one "blue-eyed Mary."

So it seems that Miss Gregory copied Miss Wood's teenage poem into Miss Wood's own memory book... an act undoubtedly fraught with symbolism, though *exactly* what it signified to the two of them I don't expect we'll ever know.