Thursday, May 6, 2010

Wycliffe to Wyclef

At yesterday's final event in the spring Lang faculty reading series. my colleague Henry Shapiro mentioned having attended Balliol College, Oxford, one of whose early graduates was the Lollard Bible-translator John Wycliffe...later on, my colleague Ferentz LaFargue mentioned a possible project on Wyclef Jean, who needs no identification--Wyclef Jean was apparently named after John Wycliffe (I don't know why I never put this together before, but I didn't) which makes a neat symmetry! And of course both of their careers raise issues of expanding literacy, new modes of verbal expression, and crossing linguistic boundaries...that would make a trendy course, "From Wycliffe to Wyclef: Vernacular Sampling from the Fourteenth to Twenty-First Centuries." Someone else would have to teach it though!

4 comments:

A.W. Strouse said...

The course could also include readings from W.J. Burley's crime novels, which feature detective Charles Wycliffe.

Nicholas Birns said...

Never heard of this writer! Tell me more about him....

Caroline Hagood said...

This is a great idea. I think I might also smell a book here--just saying.

Nicholas Birns said...

It would be a pretty weird book