• Richard Fisher


Associate Professor of German

Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures
Lake Forest College
Lake Forest, IL 60045

Telephone: 847-735-5284
Email: fisher@lfc.edu
Courses: Fall Semester 2003
Spring Semester 2004
Courses: Fall Semester 2002
  • First Year Studies 157: The World of Ancient Greece
  • CLAS 275: Greek Greats
  • GERMAN 333: Modern German Film
Recent Course Web Pages
  • Director, Lake Forest College Program in Greece & Turkey 2001
  • Greek Civilization 201
  • Classical Studies Program
  • Classical Studies 275: Greek Greats
    • German 333: Modern German Film

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    My teaching interests include comparative literature, the epic, classical studies, the literature of pre-classical civilizations, music and literature, the sociology of music, cosmology, the history of astronomy, and promotion of the study of the liberal arts and sciences at Lake Forest College.

    PERSONAL

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    Gstaad, Switzerland

    Munich

    Paris

    Gebel Mousa (Mt. Sinai)

    Family

    • Friedl--named after Friede or Peace (born in Austria [Vienna], raised in Germany [Nuernberg, Munich], currently Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Director of the Pain Management Center, University of Chicago
    • Benjamin Ulysses--senior at the University of Chicago Laboratory High Schools
    • David Maximilian--honors sophomore at the George Washington University, D.C.


    Interests

    • Travel
    • Music Favorite groups: Led Zeppelin, Cheap Trick, Squirrel Nut Zippers, The Kinks, U2 (Achtung, Baby!), Annie Lennox, Bob Dylan, the Birds, Neil Young, Neil Diamond (just kidding), Eric Clapton
    • Astronomy link to Joe Mohr: Enrico Fermi Institute lectures on Cosmology
    Recent Reading:
    • Der Vater eines Mörders (The Father of a Murderer), Alfred Andersch
    Oblique and understated treatment of the totalitarian-fascist mentality via an account of a harrowing lesson in Greek grammar at a Munich gymnasium (high school), in which a fourteen year-old daydreaming pupil is tormented by the school's director, the father of National Socialist party Gestapo chief-to-be Heinrich Himmler. The antagonist shows clear affinities to the mythical Kommandant in Kafkaís story ěThe Penal Colony,î and along with other parallels the story belongs to a genre of school and classroom dramas also typified by Kiplingís story ěRegulus,î from a not very well known volume titled Stalky & Co.
    • Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
    While Helen Fielding is not exactly Henry Fielding, this British best-seller details the love life and waist-line woes of a manic-depressive London "Singelton," who in one year gains 78 pounds and loses 76, in a comic struggle to come in at under 130 pounds by Christmas and snag an eligible bachelor before her mother reminds her of the tick-tock biological clock one more time. Traditional plot and mild postmodern spice make this more fun than one might think from the gushing Brit blurbs.
    • The Little Book of the Big Bang, Craig J. Hogan
    Lucid overview of the development and current state of the central and best-supported tenet of astrophysics and cosmology, that the universe--this universe, our universe--originated about 15 billion years ago in the singularity of the Big Bang. Balancing conceptual excitement and laymanís physics, this little book presents summaries of evidence more cogently than some longer treatments.
    • Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
    A short novel, restrained and bleakly understated, about guilt and alienation in todayís South Africa. The protagonist is a communications professor who canít really communicate with anyone; the novel is about pain unthinkingly inflicted and pain endured without articulation: pain as a personal, racial and political legacy.
     
    • Dancing After Hours, Andre Dubus
    Smooth stepping stones in a briskly flowing river, these stories take us with great subtlety to the far side of lives both tranquil and turbulent. Characters reappear in different stories; some are veterans of major injuries (from Vietnam and otherwise), who discover profundity, misery and exaltation in daily life. Dubus plunges from surface appearances to inner depths, letting even secondary figures scintillate and resonate with human truths.
          . . . She took a cigarette from the second pack Marsha had given her, and looked at Ted's eyes. "I'll quit again tomorrow. This strange sacrament from the earth."
          He smiled.
          "I've never told you this," she said. But there's something about taking the [grocery] cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot. I don't know when this came to me; it was a few years ago. There's a difference between leaving it where you empty it and taking it back to the front of the store. It's significant."
          "Because somebody has to take them in."
          "Yes. And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world. With your body. And for those few moments, you join it with your soul. You move out of your isolation and become universal. But they were standing there watching me. Then I was afraid: a woman so far removed from nature that the checkout clerk had to tell me which way the wind was blowing. And she heard it from someone in the coffee room. Then the men left, and I pushed the cart back. I live by trying to be what I'm doing. I could do nearly everything I do without thinking about it. But I'd be different."
          His face was tender in the light of the fire; he said: "Yes."
          "They collided with me: all this harmony I work for; the life of the spirit with the flesh. They walked into the kitchen and I said No, God; not like this, and I beat them with a skillet. But I'm not sure that was the answer to my prayer." LuAnn, in "Out of the Snow," after an attempted rape which she fended off by slugging her attackers.
       
    • Girl With A Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier

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    • Shopgirl, Steve Martin

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    • The Reader, Bernard Schlinck

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    • Spending, Mary Gordon

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    • Night Train, Martin Amis

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    • Before the Beginning, Martin Rees

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    • remembered raptures, bell hooks

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    • Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Christopher Moore
    Pleasantly low-brow caper of failure, love, stolen body parts and wacky pseudo South Seas folk mythology of "shark people," made entertaining and at times even stylish (albeit funkily so) by the author's skillful storytelling, a melange of T.C. Boyle, Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins, the author who was so obsessed with the Camel cigarette pack, and wrote Only Cowgirls Get the Blues.
    • Committed to Memory, John Hollander
    104 great poems (not the only great poems!) in a nicely selected and ordered anthology, based on a kind of reader-poem intimacy and the affection readers used to have for their favorite poems.
     
    • Great Books, David Denby
    New Yorker film critic David Denby takes a wry, loving, at times bemused and unapologetically post-PC plunge back into the core reading list he suffered through as a freshman at Columbia, commenting on everything from Homer to Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf, and glad of his experience both then and now.
     
    • Blind Watchers of the Night Sky, Rocky Kolb

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    An astronomer from the University of Chicago provides a pithy, often humorous account of the human effort to understand what the night sky reveals and conceals, laying out the main stages from the ancients to the Hubble Space Telescope and demonstrating the errors of those who thought they knew everything but didnít.
     
    • The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking

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    • The Sciences Times Book of the Brain, Nicholas Wade
    • Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid

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    • Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett

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    • Possession, A.S. Byatt

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    • Elementals, A.S. Byatt

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    • Roots of Street Style, Zeshu Takamura

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    • Familie Mann: Ein Lesebuch

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    • Das Theater Richard Wagners (Richard Wagner's Theater), Dieter Borchmeyer

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    • How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain de Botton; The Year of Reading Proust, Phyllis Rose; Marcel Proust, Edmund White (one of the terrific Penguin Lives series)
    Proustís monumental Remembrance of Things Past is the great novel that most people want to read and never get around to. Hereís the next best thing: meet all the families, flavors and flirts of the original through the minds of writers who have absorbed Proust into the rituals and souls of their own lives.
       
    • Music, The Brain and Ecstasy, Robert Jourdain
    From the plucked string to the inner ear, from Mozartís Requiem to that annoying pop song that noodles through your brain, this is a book that explains everything acoustical, psychological, aesthetic and experiential about the loveliest and most elusive of the arts.
       
    • The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
    No anthology dedicated to a single writer can surpass the magnificence of Nabokovís short prose. Elegant, succulent, heart-stoppingly stylish and cerebral, the best of these stories (and there are dozens of them) have the aesthetic frisson of the riotously varied butterflies that the lepidopterist Nabokov loved to collect, transfiguring human emotions into prose jewels.
     
    • Greek as a Treat, Peter France
    • The Art of the Motorcycle, Guggenheim Museum Exhibition Catalogue
    • Music, The Brain and Ecstasy, Robert Jourdain
    • Critical Dictionary of the New Cosmology, Peter Coles
    • Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
    • Principles of Physical Cosmology, P.J.E. Peebles
    • Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
    Still one of the most harrowing accounts of domestic violence ever written. Strangely, I don't recall Cathy and Heathcliff actually ever running across the moors to embrace, yelling out each other's name, although the popular imagination has them doing so. (One source for this charming but bogus cliché could be the satirical skits of Irish comic Dave Allen [Dave Allen at Large], who would have the lovers running frantically toward one another only to collide head-on and start squabbling, rather than sating their pent-up passion.)

    • Mahler, Jonathan Carr
    • Schubert's Vienna, Raymond Erickson
    • Schubert and His World, Peter Clive
    • Franz Schubert: A Biography, Elizabeth McKay

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    • Dionysus at Large, Marcel Detienne
    • Ancient Egyptian Literature (3 vol.), Miriam Lichtheim

    Link to the Department Page

       Under revision; updated 10/03