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There are comparisons.Ĭhristensen: And I hope that being able to make some of those connections will be helpful to my students. And Tao Ching is someone who leaves behind the imperial court to live, not on the banks of a pond, but still in a rural area, deliberately leaving behind the…is a little bit like David Henry Thorough. And there are interesting…there’s always some danger of making too facile a comparison, but still, there are some compare like Li He, the so called “Ghost Poet” of classical Chinese poetry is remarkably similar in some ways to Edgar Allan Poe. Well, you have a lot of experience in Asia and I would imagine that when you go over there and teach English literature, or British Literature, what you’ll find is…what they’ll find is, I should say, is that your understanding of their literature will help you teach them well.Ĭhristensen: I certainly hope so.

I think that may have been one of the things that made the committee responsive to my application. I wasn’t in the committee meetings that identified me as a Fulbright Scholar and opened up this opportunity, but I suspect that my having taught Chinese Literature and Translation and I’ve taught quite a number of classes of Chinese literature and translation, a number of which have incorporated the Tao Te Ching in the curricula.

I’ll be in their foreign language department and they expect me to teach in English, which is a very good thing because my Chinese is virtually non-existent, but I think one of the…I don’t know.

I’ve been to Asia a number of times, but this will be for a long…I’ll be a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan teaching at National Taiwan University for one academic year. And, in fact, you’re going to be in Asia this fall. Wyatt: Well, and I think that you’re understating it a little bit. Morty who had taught our Asian Literature and Translation retired and the department chair looked around, “Who can do this?” And somehow, I don’t know how she knew because I hadn’t really put myself forward, but Kay Cook said, “Will you do this?” And I read even more as I was teaching and so, I don’t come with a lot of academic study in this field, but I think reasonably wide reading and certainly intense interest. The Japanese, the Tale of the Heike and the Man'yōshū and then some Chinese, The Analects, the Arthur Waley translation of The Analects was one of my early readings, and then as I transitioned from teaching English as a second language to teaching English literature back to where my…really, my academic training had prepared me here at SUU, I…Professor S.S. And it was that that I began to tell myself, “I need to understand my students better, I need to understand where they come from.” So, I started to read in classical Asian literature. My dissertation is about a very non-Taoist figure, Thomas Carlyle, and I for a time, actually, for a number of years, I taught English as a second language. Could you kind of give us, first of all, kind of an introduction to yourself and then let’s talk about this book.Ĭhristensen: Well, I…my background is actually in British literature. Wyatt: We’re reading this because you suggested it and that…it has been a very interesting time and a reflective time talking through this. I thank you for the opportunity to be here. Bryce Christensen from our English department, teaches literature, welcome, Bryce.ĭr. But why don’t you introduce our guest and he can help us understand better the Tao Te Ching.

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I’m…this is book three out of four of our summer book series and I thought I wasn’t really smart enough to read and understand Hamlet, and I’m telling you that I felt even more that way about this book. It’s great to be together again and talk about another incredible piece of literature. I’m your host, Steve Meredith, and I’m joined in-studio today, as usual, by President Wyatt. Steve Meredith: Hi again everyone, and welcome to Solutions to Higher Education, a podcast featuring Scott L Wyatt, the president of Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah.

Tao te ching