mmd

Week 9

K2 the Savage Mountain was in many respects a vast step away from what has been read previously in this class. It is the first recounting of an American Climb, and it is in many ways an introduction to what the themes in the class reading is going to turn to – pure accounts of…

Week 8

          Seven Years in Tibet at the very least can be said is off the beaten path of this course. Talking about Tibet in anyway invokes the images of mountains and of the Dalai Lama – both prime subjects of this book. To Harrier mountains are seen as a luxury as…

Week #7 Response

I feel that the readings for this week are a kind of high point in the class. In Fallen Giants the final first successful ascent of Everest is documented with the recounting of Hillary and Tenzing reaching the top after decades of various international failed attempts. Then we also read one of, if not the,…

Week Six

For this week we had to read White Spider – a mountaineering classic and it has been rather helpful to me at least in decoding the enigmatic question we have all been asking since seminar began: why climb? White Spider does not hold all of the possible answers to this question. No, it is a…

Week Five Response

Imperial ascent was certainly an interesting book to say the least. I do not know exactly to make of it honestly, some of the ideas I thought were overly aggressive. For instance I doubt that Dr.Cook’s aim of climbing Denali was to assert his masculinity, no doubt it in all probability was a subconscious factor…

Week Four in Review

With the reading of Fallen Giants the history part of Mountaineering comes into sharp focus. No doubt an angle change from looking at metaphorical mountains and no longer are we studying the mountains of English and Petrarchan poems and works but actual concrete mountains in all of their glory. The angle of time is now…

Week 3

Mountains of the Mind is to say well titled, it chronicles the history of Eurocentric views towards mountains and perhaps more appropriate, it was to me at least, a very difficult book to work through. I found Macfarlane’s metaphors very dramatic and out of place in a nonfiction work; and it seemed to me he…

Metaphorical Mountains

To say that Daumal holds mountains as an ideal would be making a gross understatement. Mount Analogue is filled to the brim with helcionic comparisons between ideal states of being and mountaineering. Daumal makes an excellent point that in myth and folklore mountains are heavily featured as a means in which divinity meets humanity upon;…

Introduction

Hello my name is Megan M. Dolezal, I am an aspiring classicist and this is only my second semester at MSU and also as a History/secondary education major. Previously I was at MSU-B as a Literature Education major but was not as passionate about literature as I am about history. Needing a change in pace…