Who is Who — Modern & Foreign Languages

A dedicated language tutor. Magister can teach you any language — from absolute beginner to advanced conversation, grammar, vocabulary, reading, and writing. Tell Magister what language you want to learn, what level you are at, and what you want to focus on. Magister will adapt to you.

Can help you study: Any language — grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, conversation, pronunciation guidance, and cultural context.

Philologist, lexicographer, Professor of German at New York University 1846–1853. Author of the Dictionary of the German and English Languages (1848) and A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language (1858). Wrote the Latin Grammar at Bloomingdale Asylum, for recreation. Herman Melville was the only non-professional mourner at his funeral. Treats Latin as a living organism; teaches by demanding that students produce the language rather than accumulate rules about it.

Can help you study: Latin from absolute beginner through to reading classical prose, German for English-speakers, the production-first method of language teaching (sentence as self-examination), 19th-century philological method, and the discipline of writing the exercise rather than reading about the rule.

A Spanish language teacher based in Paris and New York in the early nineteenth century, whose dialogue-based method is the primary source for the Universitas Manesca Spanish course. His classroom records from the 1840s survive in his textbooks, giving an unusually intimate picture of how Spanish was taught before grammar-translation dominated.

Can help you study: Manesca’s method of dialogue-based Spanish instruction, the history of language teaching, and the Manesca Spanish course.

The Essay · Self-examination · Sceptical inquiry · French prose

The inventor of the personal essay. *Que sais-je?* — what do I know? Reads with you, lets a thought wander, follows where it leads. Tries propositions on rather than defending them. The right voice for learning to think in French at a slower, deeper pace.

Can help you with: French essay-writing, the *essai* tradition, reading sixteenth-century French prose, the discipline of doubt, the art of writing about oneself without self-importance.

French Grammar · Codification of usage · Académie française

Founding member of the Académie française; author of the *Remarques sur la langue française* (1647), the work that codified *le bon usage* for the next three centuries. The voice for fine points of grammar, register, contested usages, and *the question of what counts as good French.*

Can help you with: French grammar at depth, register and tone, the history of usage, why a construction is right or wrong, the idea of a standard language, French style.

Comédie · Theatre · Spoken French · Vice exposed through laughter

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin — actor, playwright, director. Reads scenes with you and stages them. The teacher to choose for spoken French, theatrical rhythm, the comedy of manners, and the difference between a line written for the page and a line written for the mouth. *(French Department version — for general literary conversation, the Scholarium-wide Molière simulacrum is in the Literature department.)*

Can help you with: Spoken French, theatrical reading, the rhythm of French dialogue, seventeenth-century comedy, the French of polite society and of servants, the satirical eye.

Enlightenment prose · *Conte philosophique* · Wit · Civic argument

François-Marie Arouet, *dit* Voltaire. Sharp, fast, ironic. The voice for argumentative French — how to construct a case, how to deploy wit as a weapon, how to write a *conte philosophique* that smuggles a moral through a story. The teacher of polemic and of the controlled, lethal sentence.

Can help you with: Argumentative French, irony and wit, the *conte* form, Enlightenment prose, the structure of a polemic, *Candide* and the philosophical tale.

*Le mot juste* · The realist novel · French prose style · Sentence as moral act

The patient hunter of *le mot juste* — the exact word, not its cousin, not its neighbour. Reads sentences with you and presses on every word until each one earns its place. The teacher for anyone serious about French prose: the rhythm of a sentence, the shape of a paragraph, the exhaustive search for accuracy.

Can help you with: French prose style, the discipline of revision, *Madame Bovary* and the realist novel, free indirect discourse, the moral seriousness of the sentence.

Modern French prose · Sensuous writing · The voice of the senses

A modern French voice grounded in the body and in close looking. Reads with you, asks what you actually saw, what you actually heard, what you actually felt. The teacher for descriptive French — how to write what is in front of you in your own words and no one else’s.

Can help you with: Descriptive French, the writing of place and of the body, twentieth-century prose, the voice of the senses, finding your own French rather than borrowing someone else’s.

L’absurde · La révolte · Mediterranean clarity · Modern French prose at moral pitch

Algerian-born novelist, essayist, and Nobel laureate (1957). The author of L’Étranger, La Peste, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, L’Homme révolté and La Chute. The voice for French prose used as moral witness rather than as wit or ornament — the unornamented declarative sentence as ethical act, clarity in service of seeing the world without false comfort. The teacher for French at moral pitch.

Can help you with: The declarative French sentence, the absurd and the philosophy of revolt, modern French prose style at the level of le mot juste for ethical truth, the literature of the Mediterranean and of the colonial-Algerian imagination, close reading of L’Étranger and La Chute, the question of complicity and moral clarity in twentieth-century writing.

Négritude · Francophone poetry · *Civilisation de l’universel* · French of three continents

Poet, philosopher, and first president of independent Senegal. The voice for French outside France — for the *Négritude* movement, for the encounter between French and other languages and cultures, for the idea of a *civilisation de l’universel* in which French is one tongue among many and richer for the meeting.

Can help you with: Francophone literature, the *Négritude* movement, French poetry of the twentieth century, the politics of language, the encounter of French with African languages, the idea of *métissage*.

Author of the first grammar of a modern European vernacular (1492). His remark that language is the companion of empire framed the linguistic ambitions of the Spanish Crown.

Can help you study: The first Spanish grammar, language and empire, Renaissance humanism in Spain, and the standardisation of Castilian.

Mystic and reformer whose Moradas del Castillo Interior and Libro de la Vida combine intense spiritual experience with colloquial, vivid Castilian that shaped Spanish prose.

Can help you study: Teresa’s mystical theology and its language, the Interior Castle, the Carmelite reform, and her distinctive Spanish prose style.

Author of Don Quixote, the first modern novel and the foundational text of the Spanish literary tradition, which invented narrative unreliability and the novel-within-a-novel.

Can help you study: Don Quixote, the novel as a form, Cervantes’s narrative technique, the Spanish Golden Age, and why the same book is simultaneously comic and tragic.

The most prolific playwright in literary history, who defined the Spanish national theatre with over 400 surviving plays and the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias.

Can help you study: The Spanish Golden Age theatre, the comedia nueva, Lope’s dramatic technique, and the honour drama.

Master of conceptismo and the Spanish Baroque, whose sonnets are among the finest in Spanish, whose El Buscón is the bleakest of the picaresque, and whose satire is unsurpassed in ferocity.

Can help you study: Baroque conceptismo, Quevedo’s satire, his sonnets, and the Spanish Baroque.

Philosopher of the Generation of ’98 whose Del sentimiento trágico de la vida placed the longing for personal immortality at the centre of experience, and whose nivola invented metafiction.

Can help you study: Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, the Generation of ’98, Unamuno’s metafiction, and Spanish existential thought.

The greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century, murdered at 38. His Romancero gitano fused flamenco imagery with surrealism; his tragedies are among the finest in the language.

Can help you study: Lorca’s poetry, duende, the Spanish tragic theatre, and the Andalusian folk tradition.

The first great mestizo writer, whose Comentarios reales de los Incas is both a history of the Inca empire and an act of cultural identity-making from exile in Spain.

Can help you study: Mestizo identity and its literary expression, the Comentarios reales, the Inca empire, and colonial encounter literature.

The greatest writer of colonial Spanish America and one of the first feminist voices in the Americas, whose Respuesta a Sor Filotea defended women’s right to intellectual life.

Can help you study: Sor Juana’s poetry, the Respuesta as a feminist argument, colonial Mexican intellectual culture, and the silencing of women scholars.

The great codifier of Spanish grammar for independent Latin America, whose Gramática de la lengua castellana (1847) shaped educated Spanish for generations.

Can help you study: Bello’s Spanish grammar, the codification of language for independent nations, and Latin American literary nationalism.

The most influential short fiction writer in Spanish, whose Ficciones and El Aleph invented the postmodern story. Labyrinths, infinite libraries, forking paths, stories about stories.

Can help you study: Borges’s stories, the labyrinth as metaphysics, intertextuality, the philosophical short story, and how to read Ficciones.

One of the most widely read poets in the world, ranging from erotic love lyrics to epic political poetry to odes celebrating artichokes. Nobel Prize 1971.

Can help you study: Neruda’s love poetry, the Canto general, the odes and their celebration of ordinary things, and the Spanish lyric tradition.

Poet and essayist whose El laberinto de la soledad is the defining meditation on Mexican identity. Nobel Prize 1990.

Can help you study: El laberinto de la soledad, Mexican national identity, Paz’s theory of poetry, and the essay as literary form.

Author of Cien años de soledad (1967), the defining novel of magic realism. Nobel Prize 1982.

Can help you study: Magic realism, Cien años de soledad, the Buendía family, and the Colombian Caribbean as a literary landscape.

Author of the Commedia, the greatest poem in any language: a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise that is simultaneously theology, politics, and autobiography. Dante invented literary Italian.

Can help you study: The Commedia, its theology and structure, Dante’s political thought, Beatrice and courtly love, and the Italian language as Dante made it.

Father of humanism and inventor of the sonnet sequence. His Canzoniere created the vocabulary of European love poetry.

Can help you study: The Petrarchan sonnet, the Canzoniere, Petrarch’s humanism, and the Petrarchan tradition in European poetry.

Author of the Decameron, a hundred stories narrated during the plague — the foundational work of Italian prose and the European short story.

Can help you study: The Decameron, its frame narrative and comic register, the vernacular short story, and Boccaccio’s influence on Chaucer.

Established Petrarch and Boccaccio as the models for literary Italian, effectively standardising the language on fourteenth-century Tuscan.

Can help you study: The questione della lingua, Bembo’s standardisation of literary Italian, and Petrarchism as a poetic doctrine.

The reformer who replaced masked stock characters with written scripts and real characters, creating Italian bourgeois comedy.

Can help you study: Goldoni’s reform of commedia dell’arte, his Venetian comedies, and Italian theatrical tradition.

The greatest Italian lyric poet since Dante and the most rigorous pessimist in European literature, whose Canti achieve both extreme beauty and an unflinching philosophical position.

Can help you study: Leopardi’s Canti, cosmic pessimism, the poem L’Infinito, and Italian Romanticism.

The most playful Italian novelist of the twentieth century, whose Se una notte d’inverno addressed the reader directly and made reading itself the subject.

Can help you study: Calvino’s metafiction, Se una notte d’inverno, Città invisibili, and Italian postmodernism.

The first great Portuguese prose writer, whose histories of the Aviz dynasty gave Portuguese prose its vascular, dramatic quality and its attention to common people alongside kings.

Can help you study: Medieval Portuguese chronicles, Fernão Lopes’s narrative technique, and the founding of Portuguese historical prose.

The founder of Portuguese drama, whose autos combined religious themes with biting social satire, sending corrupt officials to Hell while the humble ascend.

Can help you study: Portuguese theatre, Gil Vicente’s satire, the Auto da barca do inferno, and the founding of Iberian drama.

The national poet of Portugal, whose epic Os Lusíadas narrates Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India. He is the Portuguese Shakespeare, Dante, and Virgil in one.

Can help you study: Os Lusíadas, Camões’s sonnets, the Age of Discovery as literary subject, and Portuguese national identity.

The greatest Portuguese novelist, whose Os Maias anatomises Lisbon bourgeois society with a dry irony that often passes for sympathy.

Can help you study: Eça’s realism and irony, Os Maias, the critique of Portuguese society, and the Portuguese realist novel.

The poet who invented not just poems but alternative personalities with distinct biographies and styles. Pessoa is simultaneously Portuguese modernism and a philosophy of identity.

Can help you study: Pessoa’s heteronyms, O Livro do Desassossego, the concept of heteronymia, and the relationship between writing and identity.

The most celebrated Portuguese poet of the twentieth century, whose verse pursues absolute clarity and light in a language stripped of ornament, and who was a voice of resistance to Salazar.

Can help you study: Sophia’s poetry, her aesthetic of clarity, the sea and light as presences, and poetry as moral witness.

The Nobel laureate whose baroque, unpunctuated paragraphs and allegorical fictions — Ensaio sobre a cegueira, Memorial do Convento — made him the most internationally read Portuguese novelist.

Can help you study: Saramago’s prose style, Blindness and its allegory, the historical novel as political critique, and the ethics of his fiction.

Founder of Brazilian Romanticism who created the Indianist novel, using indigenous culture and the Brazilian landscape as the raw material for national mythology.

Can help you study: Brazilian Romanticism, the Indianist novel, O Guaraní and Iracema, and Brazilian national identity through literature.

The greatest Brazilian writer, whose dead narrator in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881) anticipated Modernism by decades. His irony and unreliable narrators make him fully contemporary.

Can help you study: Memórias Póstumas and the dead narrator, Dom Casmurro and unreliable narration, and Machado’s place in world literature.

Author of the Manifesto Antropófago (1928): Brazil should devour European culture — digest and transform it rather than imitate. Cultural cannibalism as decolonisation.

Can help you study: The Manifesto Antropófago, cultural cannibalism, Brazilian Modernism, and the Semana de Arte Moderna (1922).

The greatest Brazilian poet of the twentieth century, known for his self-irony, political conscience, and ability to find the cosmic in the everyday.

Can help you study: Drummond’s irony and the gauche sensibility, the political and social lyric, and Brazilian modernist verse.

Author of Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956), a novel in an invented language blending regional speech and archaic Portuguese, simultaneously a Western, a philosophical dialogue, and a love story.

Can help you study: Grande Sertão: Veredas, Rosa’s lexical invention, the sertão as mythic space, and regional setting and universal themes.

One of the most distinctive prose writers of the twentieth century, whose novels hover between epiphany and crisis. A Paixão segundo G.H. is a mystical experience triggered by a cockroach.

Can help you study: A Paixão segundo G.H., Lispector’s interior monologue style, the epiphany as structure, and her place in world literature.

The fourth king of Joseon who created Hangul in 1443, providing Korea with a writing system designed explicitly for the Korean language and accessible to all.

Can help you study: Hangul and its design, the history of Korean writing, the Hall of Worthies, and literacy as a political project.

Compiled bilingual Korean-Chinese dictionaries and pronunciation guides that established standards for Hangul and for Korean’s relationship with classical Chinese.

Can help you study: Hangul standardisation, bilingual lexicography, and the relationship between Korean and classical Chinese.

The most revered Korean Confucian philosopher, whose interpretation of Neo-Confucianism shaped Korean intellectual culture for centuries.

Can help you study: Korean Neo-Confucianism, the li-qi debate, Toegye’s Seonghak sipdo, and the Confucian tradition in Korea.

The supreme master of gasa poetry, whose four masterpieces describe Korean landscapes with music and emotional power unmatched in the tradition.

Can help you study: The gasa form, Jeong Cheol’s nature poetry, the sijo, and the Korean lyric tradition.

The greatest master of sijo whose Eo-bu sasi-sa (Fisherman’s Calendar) captures the four seasons on a tidal island with exactness and simplicity.

Can help you study: The sijo form, Yun Seon-do’s nature poetry, the Eo-bu sasi-sa, and Korean classical lyric.

The linguist who reformed and modernised Hangul orthography, establishing the spelling and grammar rules that underlie contemporary Korean writing.

Can help you study: Modern Korean orthography, Hangul reform, and the relationship between language standardisation and national identity.

The most beloved Korean lyric poet, whose Chindallaekkot (Azaleas) is the most memorised poem in the Korean language, channelling the folk lyric tradition and the emotion of han.

Can help you study: Kim Sowol’s poetry, Chindallaekkot, han as an aesthetic concept, and the Korean folk lyric tradition.

Master of the Korean short story, whose precisely observed fiction deals with division, war, and modernity. His Sonagi (The Shower) is one of the most widely read in the Korean curriculum.

Can help you study: The Korean short story, Hwang Sunwon’s technique, Sonagi, and the Korean short fiction tradition.

The most beloved poet of the Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule, who died in a Japanese prison at 27. His poetry combines personal shame with a longing for justice.

Can help you study: Yun Dong-ju’s poetry, resistance and shame as themes, colonial Korea, and poetry as moral witness.