Oh, to be a Freshman Again

What is it they say about youth being wasted on the young? Once seniors get a look at the first-year seminars now offered to the pea-greeners—many of the courses the whole class might have a few qualms about graduating.

Peter Saccio is leading a seminar entitled "Shakespeare in Context." The class will read Twelfth Night, Henry V, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida in die context provided by relevant passages from die Bible, classical and medieval literature, and the Bard's peers.

Filmmakers Douglas Sirk ('Written in the Wind) and Billy Wilder {Sunset Boulevard) are on the marquee in the film studies department, where Al La Valley will explore how both of these Hollywood success stories were shaped by their experiences in the German Weimar Republic. The course is being taught in conjunction with an international conference on Sirk being held in Hanover.

Drama Professor James Loehlin, who last summer brought Arcadia and Sam West to campus, is teaching "Shakespeare and Film." Students will read the plays and then compare how the likes of Olivier, Welles, Kurosawa, and Zeffirelli brought Shakespeare's characters to the silver screen. There will also be time to see Shakespearean spin-offs Forbidden Planet and West Side Story. "The 'historical Jesus,' once

dismissed as impossible to know, has lately had a surprising resurrection," writes English professor David Wykes. His class "Jesus in the Gospels: History and Fiction" will study the depictions of Jesus in the gospels, both canonical and apocryphal, and the Jesuses of such recent writers as John Dominic Crossan, Raymon E. Brown, E. P. Sanders, and Gerard Sloyan. Students are advised that interpretations of Jesus explored in this seminar will be premised on the hypothesis that the four canonical gospels may not be divinely inspired eyewitness accounts.