Heroic Labors
Deluged by poetic language thick with ancient history and obscure mythology, these Trojans fight on in a heroic quest to conquer the classics.

Perched on her desk, Victorian lit professor Hilary Schor gazes at 30 subdued faces and smiles brightly. It’s Thursday morning in week five of her “Quality of Life” core 102 class. If the freshmen look rather dazed, they have a right to: already under their belts are Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses.” Still to come are Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, Shelley’s
Frankenstein, James’ Portrait of a Lady, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. As for today’s reading assignment, it’s the first half of Virgil’s Aeneid. In more ways than one, these students are discovering what it means to fight on like Trojans.
Seeing their drooping posture, Schor asks how they stay awake when they’re reading. It’s not sarcasm. She’s serious.
“Read out loud,” hazards a student whom the professor calls by first name. (Schor repeats this stunt again and again until it’s clear she knows everyone.)
“Yes!” Schor affirms. “We’re not so far from the oral tradition of bardic, heraldic poetry.” Her next remark draws chuckles: “Yell at the book, talk to the book, throw the book. By this time your book’s spine should be broken. There should be Post-its hanging out. There should be underlined and highlighted passages,” Schor says. Then, reaching for a homespun simile, she drops this charmer: “A book is like a pair of shoes. It can’t be your favorite until you break it in. I want you to get in there and get dirty! Make it your own.”
Warming to her sermon, the long-time Thematic Option instructor recites (for perhaps the 50th time this semester) her well-worn catechism: “Great literature cannot be read, it can only be reread; just like ...” (and here the whole class drones along like a Greek chorus) “... great essays can’t be written, only rewritten.”
Pleased, she rolls back her sleeves and gets down to business. Schor teaches by the Socratic method, coaxing insights from her students much like the crafty Athenian philosopher did. Though she clearly loves the “great books” she teaches, her approach is playful, bordering on the irreverent. Today, she encourages the students to pick apart the strengths and weaknesses of arguably the greatest figures of Western literature – Odysseus and Aeneas – as if they were comic-strip superheroes. At one point she invites comparison between Homer’s Achilles (“hero or killing machine?”) and the cyborg assassin of James Cameron’s The Terminator (the 1983 sci-fi thriller also appears on the syllabus). She likens hapless Aeneas to Al Gore: “He’s a company guy – stiff. He makes the right speeches, but his men don’t trust him.”
Soon Schor opens her own split-spined Aeneid and begins a close reading from Book I. The section describes shipwrecked Aeneas gazing down at bustling, prosperous Carthage, its citizens at work like “busy bees above a field of flowers in early summer amid sunbeams.”
“This is a really famous passage,” volunteers one student as Schor pauses, “especially nice in the Latin.” It’s the sort of brown-nosing comment that would normally draw groans, but here it passes unremarked. (Classics professor Tom Habinek once asked how many of his T.O. students had taken Latin – two-thirds of the hands went up). Schor continues, skipping ahead to the middle of Book II: a recital of the sack of Troy, building up to the dramatic moment when Aeneas spies Helen cowering amid the ruins. The furious hero lifts his sword to strike when his goddess-mother Aphrodite intervenes:
She stayed me with her hand,
And from her lips of rose
this counsel gave:
‘O son, what sorrow stirs thy
boundless rage?
What madness this?’

Rrrrrnng … rrrrnng … rrrrnng.

 Schor breaks off her reading. The students look up as if awakening from a trance. The fire-alarm clangs on. With a collective sigh, the class resigns itself to the inevitable. As the students shuffle toward the “Exit” sign, there’s a palpable resentment against the interruption. Far from feeling saved by the bell, these culture-craving students have – for today – been cruelly thwarted by it.

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