Barbarism and Civilization

Though most people automatically associate Herman Melville with his novel Moby Dick, Melville wrote many other important works of literature. Several of these concern the South Seas, an area that Melville had first hand experience with.

This article on a Melville novel, Typee, reflects on Melville's concern with understanding the differences between civilization and more primitive modes of existence, especially the way some civilized people develop a desire to return to a putatively better state of innocence by abandoning civilization for "nature." The article is an excellent exploration of an important work of American literature and how that work can serve us today in thinking about what is worth revivifying in the Western tradition.

Good literature speaks to us today, sometimes in surprisingly relevant ways.

Modern Education

As we work over The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis, you might find this article on education to act as a useful summary/introduction to the book. The article itself refers to Lewis, but the example given derives from our contemporary educational disaster.

The site on which this article is placed is also worth looking at.

Eliot

T. S. Eliot is such a major figure in 20th Century culture that it would be impossible to cite even a partial list of useful works that make his own writings more accessible.

However, as a way into his "Waste Land," this article by R. V. Young does an excellent job of helping one see the grand view of Eliot's purpose in this most difficult poem, and the article also provides numerous helpful coments of specific lines and images.