Word: classicists
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Like another Harvard classicist, John H. Finley '25, last year's Commencement speaker, Nagy has become a true "Harvard man." He came to the University 20 years ago as a graduate student, and has served as a teaching assistant, a tutor, an assistant professor, and since 1975, a full professor. His only time away from the University was spent as a professor at Johns Hopkins from...
...expect people to fall down and worship it," Nagy says, "and that's the way it should be." Instead of dismissing potential challengers as wrong, Nagy says that upon meeting resistance, he "will want to rethink my theories and present them in a way that my classicist colleagues find acceptable. To me, you see, it is really important to maintain all lines of communication...
...thing that Nagy and his more traditional classicist colleagues have in common is their love for the subject. "You know, a lot of people think the classics--as represented by Greek and Roman literature--are simply a repository of dead literature," he says, smiling...
This phase of his work-the so-called pittura metafisica-lasted until about 1918. Thereafter, De Chirico changed. He wanted to become, and almost succeeded in becoming, a classicist. He imagined himself to be the heir of Titian. Rejected by the French avantgarde, he struck back with disputatious critiques of modernist degeneracy; for the next 60 years of his life, he remained an obdurate though not very skillful academic painter. He even took to signing his work Pictor Optimus (the best painter). The sheer scale of his failure-if that is the word for it-is almost as fascinating...
...essays place keys to Tuchman's skill as on or best in the context of her intellectual growth. Tracing her own inspiration to one professor of history and two of literature, Tuchman recalls that their common characteristic wan an unbounded, almost torrential zeal for knowledge. (Of the historian, a classicist and anti-romantic, she writes: "His contempt for zeal was so zealous, so vigorous and learned, pouring out in a great organ fugue of erudition, that it amounted to enthusiasm in the end.") Passionate fervor, Tuchman observes, is one quality indispensable to a good historian; the other is ability--innate...