There are Puritan movements still around today… (muttering)… feminist councils…

Tomorrow I have my last class with Prof Goldgar, who vows to revisit the entire 17th century in preparation for the final. All the italicized quotes in this post are his.

I've never had a student recommend [Dead Poets Society] to me; they seem to think I'd throw up.

Goldgar, the English department's proverbial dead man walking, is a throwback, a holdover from an exceptionally tenacious era. He's an old-school lecturer on a campus where discussion, general education requirements, and all the other liberal arts virtues we learned in Freshman Studies threaten to replace a centuries-old tradition. I'm not saying that the new style of teaching isn't good, it's just that the old style works too, and some teachers seem to forget that.

What's happened to this school? One of the greatest works in the English language and only one of you has read it?

Prof Goldgar takes his turn at British Writers I and British Writers II whenever duty calls. But 18th Century Fiction, Satire, and (my) Milton and the 17th Century class are completely his. He teaches religious poetry (I don't believe in anything. It's not an understatement or "way of speaking", it's literal truth), metaphysical love poetry (…intrinsically dumb poem, you see, but it's a love poem, so I'm repeating myself), epic poetry, plays, and other various forgotten art forms- the grand works of forgotten poets and playwrights.

There is a sense in which I don't believe anything I've ever read. It's fiction, why should I believe it?"

He doesn't believe the religious poetry he teaches, the satire targets dead strangers, and an English class devoid of feminism, postmodernism, and Shakespeare seems like a departmental quirk; but Goldgar is a defender of old works and old teaching styles.

[Spencer] wrote six chapters and planned to write many more, but God is merciful.

The students love him. You can roughly categorize students by the Profs they admire. The Poet loves Prof Bloom, that new professor who inevitably guides class discussions to feminist revelations, bright-eyed all the while because the material is just as new for her. Prof Spurgin I haven't had. Prof Dintenfass doesn't seem to have too many devotees, but Ann speaks of him often.

I was told that I could put this on the computer, and play it from there. I became physically ill after that comment.

Representative Man and myself seem to be the only true fans of Prof Fritzell; Prof Goldgar, the wise, slightly brazen curmudgeon, is a more populist Professor. His class is loaded with English majors who laugh at his every remark, who fawn a little too much for my taste, and who make me (occasionally) ashamed of the other English students.

Well, it's common knowledge… isn't it? St. Patrick… drove the snakes out of Ireland? Remember that?

Prof Fritzell is a genius, but you can't really be sure. He's like a quantum physics theory that no one quite understands: it certainly sounds impressive, the masses admit- but we can't be sure that it's true. With Fritzell a text has its own mythology and several levels of meaning, all put there by an incredibly self-conscious author who was equally aware of the limits of human language. Every text is a bible, and I can see the appeal in that.

This reminds me of a story. A friend of mine was in a Music Appreciation Class once and he had this old German professor. The professor would play a piece of music, look at the class, say "Vasn't that just beautiful!" and then play the next piece. English students seem to think that simplicity and clarity are bad… can't something just be beautiful?

Prof Goldgar, though he may not be as entertaining, is far more lucid than Prof Fritzell, and it's much easier see his intelligence than it is to guess at his manic collegue's. Prof Goldgar is the favorite professor of Lawrence's mainstream would-be literati because he's both intelligent and intelligible. His anecdotes (which are actually funny, in a room full of English majors) are funny and his analysis is correct. Or as he would say:

Dip me in honey and throw me to the lesbians!

Later.