Leslie
Kurke
Professor,
Classics and Comparative Literature
Leslie Kurke, one of Berkeley’s MacArthur Fellows, received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr and her Ph.D. from Princeton. Her wide-ranging intellect can be seen in the fact that she has both served as editor of the journal Classical Antiquity and taught a course on “Psychoanalysis and Detective Fiction.” She says that “every course is a kind of contract of good faith: I offer students my intellectual seriousness, sustained effort, clarity of structure and organization and (most importantly) honesty—and I find that most students respond to this in kind.”
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
My goal in all my courses is a double one: radically to defamiliarize the subject matter while simultaneously encouraging in students the highest level of intellectual engagement. Defamiliarization is an important part of my role because students at every level usually come in with a traditional, comfortable set of assumptions about "the Classics" and the ancient Greeks (e.g., Oedipus is a "tragedy of fate"; the tragic hero; the birth of philosophy and democracy). My goal is to demonstrate that, although this is the standard presentation of the Greeks as "just like us," Greek culture of the 8th through the 4th centuries BCE was, in fact, radically different from much of the Western tradition that appropriates the Greeks as source and origin, and also different from the conventional model many students have absorbed in high school.
I want to convey to students my sense of ancient Greece as a profoundly alien culture that we need to approach with the combined skills of literary critics, historians, and anthropologists. Hence I build my courses around non-canonical topics (like gender and sexuality or Greek popular literature) which offer students a space for reading non-canonical texts (e.g. law court speeches, medical writing, The Life of Aesop) juxtaposed to the central texts of the Greek canon (e.g., Homer, tragedy, Herodotus). Students are often most excited and engaged by the strange, non-canonical texts that challenge and resist their easy assumptions about "the Greeks."
I often have the feeling as a course proceeds that I am breaking through a sediment of blandification that coats these "classic" texts for most students; when that happens, students become genuinely excited about the reading and writing assignments and produce more original, adventurous work.
My goal is to challenge students with ideas and critical thinking. In a sense, every course is a kind of contract of good faith: I offer students my intellectual seriousness, sustained effort, clarity of structure and organization, and (most importantly) honesty, and I find that most students respond to this in kind. Students are exhilarated by the presentation of clear and complex ideas; they respond by reading and talking more, thinking harder, and writing better than they themselves perhaps thought they could.
I once had an older student come to me after he'd taken "History of Sexualities" and complain that his girlfriend thought he was crazy, because he now saw the workings of a culturally constructed gender ideology wherever he looked. This was (admittedly) putting a strain on their relationship, but at the same time, I regarded it as a signal teaching success. For this, I think, is the mark of the best teaching: it changes the way students think and interact with the world.