Preface

When I was entering college, I was a starry-eyed student newly introduced to the vast field of humanities education. Having had a conservatory style education for the most of part of my life, I did not know what to expect at a university like Harvard and I was both excited and overwhelmed by the sheer possibilities presented to me. My academic career at Harvard started with my desperate attempts to make sense of the new environment that I was luckily but suddenly thrown into and over time developed into a bigger project of building onto and finding meaning in things that I was somehow attracted to during the early period of my time in college.

With my background in music, I entered the fields of history, literature, and philosophy through the lens of musicology. “Understanding Beethoven,” the first real interdisciplinary course that I took as a freshman taught by Professor Alex Rehding and Professor Peter Gordon still remains to be one of my favorite courses I have taken at Harvard. It introduced me to the Critical Theory and the aesthetic theory of Adorno, on which I am writing my senior thesis. “Understanding Wagner’s Ring,” taught by Professor Alex Rehding and Professor Eric Nelson, was my attempt, after a semester that was academically and emotionally challenging, to reconnect with the passion I had as a high schooler when I was making the decision not to become a concert pianist but to take the risk of going into a university to explore my interests in the humanities. My first independent research project was during my senior year in high school about Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and its place in German Romanticism. Revisiting the project of understanding Wagner and his music in the context of intellectual history was not only fascinating but also almost therapeutic. “Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” taught by professor Peter Gordon, is probably the class that I most identify myself with. Second semester of Junior year, I was deciding between writing my senior thesis on Adorno’s aesthetic theory or Heidegger’s views on the role of art in the world. This class was so interesting and inspiring that it convinced me to pursue a serious research on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Adorno’s philosophy and even to apply to graduate programs to further explore this issue.

This compilation of lecture notes is not only a body of knowledge that gives an information about how a Harvard student studied and learned, how professors at Harvard carried out their lectures and they were received, and what kinds of contents were treated in different classes in the humanities, but also my personal chronicle of building an identity and meaning throughout college. I thank the professors, TAs, and tutors who have constantly inspired and supported me, my friends who have become my new family at a new home called Harvard, and my boyfriend Jay who’s always had my back since the beginning of my journey at Harvard.