We Must Call the Classics before a Court of Shipwrecked Men

What if we put to our texts the injunction of the Spanish intellectual Jose Ortega y Gasset—"We must call the classics before a court of shipwrecked men to answer certain peremptory questions with reference to real life"? The answer that emerges from an investigation of several literary works depicting a shipwrecked person who has access to one or more texts—Shakespeare's Tempest , Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , Stevenson's Treasure Island , and, at one point, Dante's Inferno —points to the transformative power of such texts. Ortega's own work lead to an exploration of authenticity and vocation in Vergil's Aeneid

Art · Literature · Pedagogy · Point (geometry) · Power (physics) · Sociology · Tempest · Theology · Transformative learning · Treasure · Classics · Giambattista Vico and Joyce · History · Philosophy · Spanish Philosophy and Literature · University Challenges and Reforms