Louise Cowan’s essay “Epic as Cosmopoesis”
This lecture provides an overview of Cowan’s essay; it is a poetic approach to Homer and epic that takes the idea of genre seriously in full awareness of the obstacles to taking genre seriously. She sketches the contours of the inner disposition of epic.
A brief note from an obituary of Cowan:
“Louise Cowan, university teacher and nationally recognized leader in humanities education, passed away Monday, November 16, in Dallas. She was 98. Dr. Cowan taught for fifty-three years at the University of Dallas, where she was chair of the English department, dean of graduate studies, University Professor, and the first occupant of the Louise Cowan Chair in Humanities. With her husband Donald Cowan, physicist and president of the university from 1962 to 1977, she worked steadily to build an internationally recognized university with a core curriculum based in the Western classics. She and political philosopher Willmoore Kendall founded the university's Institute of Philosophic Studies, a unique combination of doctoral programs in disciplines centered on the study of core texts, and she directed its growth. The dual focus of Dr. Cowan's life--on building the good city and educating to the fullest all the members of that citywas expressed in her founding, along with her husband and four other intellectual leaders, the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in 1980 to bring the life of the mind into dialogue with the city. She then conceived of and initiated the Teachers Academy at the institute in 1983, a program for Dallas public school teachers that from 1984-87 was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which cited it as a "model for the nation."“
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