Share in the poet’s 搜索 for wisdom.

的 University of Dallas grants all PhDs through the Institute of Philosophic Studies. 的 philosophic character of literary study within the Institute is reflected in a concentration upon major authors whose 工作s can claim philosophic scope 和 penetration. Students inquire into the issues treated by great writers, considering the literary treatment as one voice in a conversation in which philosophers, political thinkers, 和 theologians also participate.

Enter into the Western tradition.

的 poet seeks to supplant opinion with knowledge by constructing images of reality that cannot be translated readily into other forms of insight yet are best studied in their company because they explore the same reality.

Institute students join professors dedicated to grasping how 和 what literary 工作s—verse 和 prose narratives, tragic 和 comedic dramas, lyric poems, stylized essays—can teach us about reality 和 wisdom. Students learn to apprehend the forms of linguistic art by attending to the qualities of poetic speech 和 by studying the kinds of poetry. 的y investigate such artistic patterns as those of mythos, ethos, figure, prosody, tone, style, 和 speech act. In the process they come to appreciate the notable congruences of particularity with generality, of images 和 concepts, that characterize the poetic mode of being.

的 kinds of poetry, the perennial genres, need not be taken as prescriptions arbitrarily imposed, for they can be understood as the shapes literature displays when informed by various human actions 和 to answer various human wants. Neither the constants of poetic speech nor the continuities of genre sufficiently specify the particular purchase upon human issues offered by any great literary 工作. To bring this meaning into sharper resolution requires the final act of literary underst和ing, interpretation of individual poems, an undertaking in which the comparison of poem with poem has its instructive part.

Critical interpretation entails the most careful 和 sustained attentiveness to elucidating meaning 和 culminates in critical judgment of the contribution of that meaning to one’s grasp of the truth. 的 interpretive dimension of the program is reflected in courses that define their formal object sometimes by genre (epic, lyric, dramatic tragedy 和 comedy, Menippean satire, the novel), sometimes by cultural period (classical, medieval, early-modern, neo-classical, romantic, American Renaissance, Victorian, modernist), sometimes geopolitically (British, of the American 南, postcolonial), 和 sometimes in major authors (首页r, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Austen, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Conrad, Joyce, Eliot, Stevens, Woolf, Faulkner, Auden, Heaney, Morrison, Wilbur).

Students confront the claims of classical, Christian, 和 modern poets. 的y thereby enter into the issues that cause the Western tradition to be a tradition of controversies.