The First of Many

This is my last semester at Montana State, as I assume it will be for most, if not all of us in this class. We will be looking back on our career as English Lit. majors and it seems an appropriate way to exit our final semester, because where there is an end, there must be a beginning. And to arrive at the end is to arrive at the beginning, because education is not strictly linear, but cyclical. We are coming back to revisit what we've learned in in the past and see how our past education effects our present, and how our present education effects our past. We return at the beginning having hit the open road from our river bank and learned new things about the world, about literature, about ourselves. It is our homecoming. Our return. The return of Mole, Rat, Badger, Toad. The return of Ulysses.

Epiphany:
two central contexts outlined in our syllabus:
1.a religious understanding of the term stresses a sudden manifestation of a divine being, as Moses and the burning bush, or god Krishna reveals his true form to Arjuna.
2.a literary context, the term is typically associated with James Joyce who understood it as the sudden showing forth of the essential nature of something through aesthetic means. An interesting article to look at is Literary analysis: The role of epiphany in the stories of James Joyce.
(Now the term theophany is the appearance or experience of the divine to humans as I learned in some religion classes I've taken and I couldn't help but notice the similarity to epiphany.)

**see Adam Benson's blog for some good exploration of the term epiphany.