amimetobios: Recent Episodes
Amimetobios
We look at Yeats a little more, then "Michael Field," and then Housman's poem about Wilde and other poems about his own sexuality, and about the intense, Horatian ephemerality of life. A class in part about why I hope poetry, or some poems, will matter to the students throughout their lives.
Wilde in prison, or in Dante's hell, and the differences and similarities between the grimness of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and the charming, dazzling self-delight of his earlier self-presentations, in a class guest-taught by Princeton's Professor Jeff Nunokawa.
Another Kipling poem -- "Danny Deaver" and the horror of hanging (in partial anticipation of Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol"), and some discussion of Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as context for Lionel Johnson's "Dark Angel." Then two versions of Yeats's "Cradle Song."
We discuss one poem of Amy Levy in the context of her short and painful life, then look at Robert Bridges's version of sprung rhythm -- how it differs from his friend Hopkins's and then after a brief and fractional defense of Kipling from the worst that could be said about him, we consider his poem "In the Neolithic Age."
The way metaphor works in one of Stevenson's songs of travel, a little attention to George R. Sim's punning in one of his "lunatic laureate" poems, and then close reading of the amazing Alice Meynell, in particular "Renouncement," "A Cradle Song," "The Modern Mother," and "Parentage," with some attention to the experience of Catholic guilt.
We look at an interesting poem by Louisa S. Guggenberger, a very short poem by George MacDonald, and a couple of formal experiments by Stevenson, which mean the explanation of pantoum-like poems and triolets or rondeaux more generally -- examples of triolets from Hopkins and Chesterton. Then the sublime original envoy toA Child's Garden of Verses.
A lot of greats to do in a single day, and not wanting to miss Eliot we begin with a little contextualization of three of the sonnets from "Brother and Sister," then move on to a few grim Hardy poems, and then to Hopkins: "As kingfishers catch fire" compared with one of the "terrible sonnets," "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."
We discuss "The Garden of Proserpine" and the ways that it anticipates or instantiates Freud's idea of the death drive: all the repetitions in the poem. Then we turn to the poet most opposite in attitude: Hopkins, and talk briefly of "Pied Beauty" and "That Nature is a Heralcitean Fire." Discussion in Instress and the Duns-Scotian term haecicity that makes it possible, as opposed to Thomas Aquainas' universality. We'll finish considering Hopkins next class.
We have to abandon Fitzgerald because time is short, so mainly on to Modern Love, with some context, then Hopkins's "Binsey Poplars," Swinburne (and Buck Mulligan quoting The Triumph of Timein Ulysses), and an intro to "The Garden of Proserpine," via Spenser's "Garden of Adonis" in The Faerie Queene(which I discussed a little while ago here), and Milton's account of how Eden is even greater than the fair field of Enna where Persephone gathering flowers by gloomy Dis was gathered.
We talk about George Meredith for a while -- "Lucifer in Starlight" (and the 1882 transit of Venus) and his relation to his wife, Mary Ellen Nicolls, and the relationship of both of them to Henry Wallis who'd painted Meredith as Chatterton. We plan to return to Modern Love, but first we begin reading through Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, after quoting him on its form and its moral: "Drink--for the Moon will often come round to look for us in this Garden and find us not."
A couple of poems by Patmore, a somewhat tedious excursus into propositional attitudes and game theory, then the rest of "Goblin Market."
We conclude our discussion of D.G. Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," paying particular attention to the passages in parentheses and the subtlety of what they suggest about the speaker's sense of the Blessed Damozel's perception of him. We then move on to begin reading "Goblin Market," trying not so subtle account of its subtle sexuality -- or maybe it would be better to say a subtle account of its not so subtle sexuality
A brief introduction to Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting: the perceptual psychology that it brings us to notice. A close reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's amazing "Woodspurge." A little bit on his "Blessed Damozel," followed, via a Mr. Magoo-inflected reading of Lewis Carroll's "Mad Gardener's Song," by a more general consideration of rhyme and in Victorian poetry and the question of its prominence or lack thereof: important as well to "The Blessed Damozel," but we ran out of time and may not get to discuss this next class, when we will certainly do Christina Rossetti.
What amours de voyage are. What it means to idealize what Keats calls "The fair creature of an hour," as Claude does. How such idealizations derive from "Juxtapositions." What it means to see through one's own idealization, by understanding its biochemical substrate. What's wrong with seeing through that idealization. With examples from Proust (and his differences from Freud). All relevant tangents, or so I think. With some interesting information about Andrea Aguyor.
Mainly Clough, mainly a kind of intro to Amours de Voyage, with some historical (Mazzini, Garibaldi) and biographical context as well as context in narrative theory, especially of the epistolatory novel. Clough the atheist and port-Darwinian, and his views of nature. Then a quick and fun reading of "The New Decalogue," and a plan to return to Amours de Voyagenext class.
Most of the class is on Edward Lear, and what his kind of nonsense poetry (very different from Carroll's) tells us about how poetry works in general. Then a return to Clare, to complete "The Winters Spring."
We begin talking about Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" and what makes comic poetry what it is -- making the arbitrary tight(the way OuLiPo does, so this is this semester's excursus on OuLiPo). Then a little about the plot that some of the students may have missed. Following which, an introduction to John Clare, and the first stanza of his poem "The Winters Spring," which we'll continue with next class.
Having considered the title in the last class, we do the whole of R. Browning's " ' Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' " today, looking at how he (Browning/ Roland) undoes the difference between success and failure: "Just to fail as they seemed best, / And all the doubt was now - should I be fit?"
We start with a few lines from much later in EBB's Aurora Leigh (and their near explicit critique of Tennyson), then finish discussing "Development" (and its relation to modernity), then look at Pope's translation of the Thamyris passage in Book II of The Iliad, and the surviving fragments of Sophocles's play about him, and then spend the class on "Thamuris Marching," which has Aristophanes describing Sophocles's play in terza rima, and we end with the title of "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'" the poem to which we'll return next class.
Feminism and poetry for EBB. Poetry as a counter to a technocratic world and the constraints it tries to put on poetry. We begin discussing Robert Browning's late poem "Development."
A couple of great student modernizations of Barnes' "The Turnstile" (worth listening to! Don't fast forward) and then some discussion of the subtleties of Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and its relation to the rise of the 19th century novel (Jane Eyre), with some attention to just a few lines of Book 1 of the poem.
Poetry and nature as the surrounding world is industrialized; dialect and the local; experienced attitudes towards prior innocence; what "tomorrow" means in Brontë; dialect spelling; and then the amazing and heartbreakingly moving William Barnes, especially his poem "The Turnstile."
First some process shot accounts of 19th c. affiliations between a lot of the figures we're doing. Dialectic poetry. Rubaiyat stanzas. Then Tennyson's great "Tithonus" with some attention to its similarities and differences from "Ulysses"
A consideration of the opening of "The Lotos Eaters" and the amazing way Tennyson handles sound. Repetition. How he does something similar in some despairing stanzas from "In Memoriam."
One of Tennyson's epigraphs: "Astronomy and geology: terrible muses." The importance of Arthur Henry Hallam's death to Tennyson, especially because of his religious skepticism. Gibbon on St. Simeon Stylites. Dramatic Monologues. "Ulysses," in Carey's translation of Dante and then Tennyson's poem. The great Achilles = Hallam, but we know the ending from Dante -- he won't see him again.
First class on Victorian Poetry. The best and largest corpus of really good poetry in English -- really good because the novel is the bid for greatness now. But really good is really good. Victorians relationship to some modernists (just a little) and to the Romantics, especially Shelley and Wordsworth, illustrated in poems by Robert Browning, Beddoes, Patmore, Meynell, and Christina Rossetti.
N.B. Text will be Christopher Ricks, ed. New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.
After some last class paper topic business we spend most of the time finishing our discussion of Elisa Gonzalez's amazing "Notes Toward an Elegy", and its relation to Bishop in particular (not only "Casabianca" but also "Love Lies Sleeping"; cf. Gonzalez's "And now I lie awake pretending / everyone in the world lies still the way the living are still," which is a kind of summary of Bishop's poem). And so farewell to the class!
People pretty punchy in penultimate palaver, but we finish discussing Bishop, amidst lots of whackiness and then start Elisa Gonzales's great poem "Notes Towards an Elegy" from 2021 (published just before the murder of her brother) -- we are treating this poem (as will I hope become clearer next week in the last class) as the third in the line from Hemans through Bishop.
More on forms: in particular the ghazal, and the way poems quote, as in Shahid Ali's relineated quotations from Adrienne Rich, and Bishop's quotation from Hemans' "Casabianca." To be continued.
Understanding things (poems, songs, etc.) more deeply than their creators as an incentive for rewriting. How poets rewrite their precursors. Example: Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Dickinson's "I died for Beauty."
A bit about forms and what they're metaphors for, and then mainly Stevens's "Emperor of Ice Cream," with other Stevens ("The Snow Man," "Auroras of Autumn") mentioned briefly.
Discussion of Ruskin's pathetic fallacy; the metaphor of the villanelle in Rowan Ricardo Phillips; some villanelles, by AE Stallings, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop; Stevens's "Emperor of Ice Cream."
A quiz (not recorded) based on the set of poems the students could write about, and some discussion of the answers. Then the conclusion of Shelley's "Mont Blanc," with some discussion of the pathetic fallacy, to be continued.
Some reminders about metaphor, and then more about the contest between mind and mountain in P.B. Shelley's "Mont Blanc." So far the mountain is like the Astros, leading the mind 3 games to 2, more or less. (This comparison is not going to have staying power, but there you go.)
Assignments for a paper on metaphor. Salty discussion of metaphors, of plagiarism, of past and future assassinations. Then (most of the class) a beginning of a discussion of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" and the contest to see what is metaphor and what is reality.
Metaphor: Ezra Pound (and Wordsworth). Some more consideration of sonnets and their relation to metaphor and simile: Alice Oswald, Elizabeth Bishop. Waley's translation of Tao Yuan-Ming and its similarity to Shakespeare's sonnet 73.
Sonnets and metaphor: Wyatt and Surrey's translations of Petrarch, and then Some Shakespeare (with remarks about Starbuck)
Some more on Pope and how the sound seems to be an echo to the sense; another line of Milton's -- "Awake, arise, or be forever fallen" -- and how it divides; Wyatt's "They Fle From Me."
More on iambic pentameter. Examples from Milton and Pope. A bit on sonnets. Why poetry tends to flirt with prime numbers -- five feet per line, seven pairs of rhymes in sonnets, etc. Examples from Shakespeare.
More on the theology of Paradise Lost; I keep wanting to get back to the formal surface but we talked a lot about content and context. Also: The thirteen men effect!
Not what I meant to be doing to day, but it turned out we talked about the opening of Paradise Lost, and certain theological issues about free will, temptation, judgment of God, and justification of his ways.
Different sorts of stresses and their superposition. A lot on one line in Paradise Lost: "Is this the region, this the soil, the clime...?" And a bit on one line in Yeats: "Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose." And then the opening line of Paradise Lost: the stress in the word "first," the countervailing stress on the word "disobedience."
What every poem is about: its own form. Garden path sentences (e.g. "The old man the boat.") as showing how form is almost always announced. Speaker vs. poet. Dialogue that turns into one speaker taking charge. Wordsworth's "We Are Seven."
Ashbery's "Wrong Kind of Insurance" -- and how to read Ashbery. Dactylic ending of that poem (or, yes, anapestic; it can be a matter of choice how you time it): "Each night / Is trifoliate, strange to the touch." Then two Cummings poems. Hearing vs. seeing. Reading vs. seeing (how the intelligence agencies dope out people who claim they don't understand a language). (NOTE TO JEFF: I learned this from Goffman's Strategic Interaction. Text me as soon as you see this.) Brooks' "We Real Cool," and its line endings.
What is the most important criterion for a text's having a claim to being a poem? What if it's not a text? what if it's oral poetry, like Homer? What authorizes us to say that there are five feet in a pentameter line, or six in a hexameter, when Milton and Homer recite their verses orally, or Shakespearean actors utter blank verse soliloquies on stage? Are lines (unrhymed lines, anyhow) just artifacts of printing? Hint: no. Are they ever artifacts of printing? Hint: yes.
Tennyson's "The Skipping Rope." Dialogue: dramatic conflict and rhyme. Ballad meter and alternation. A note on Lyrical Ballads.
Cole Porter's "You're the Top." Eighteenth Century bouts-rimés. The poetic task of making arbitrary rhymes make sense. Jakobson on the poetic function of language.
How trochaic words overlap iambic feet. Loose onsets, strict endings. "Brought death inTO the world"? Or "Brought death INto the world"? Or both? "After great pain a formal feeling comes."
We talk about Merrill's "b o d y" and its relation to Macbeth and then the words et cetera = etc. et cetera, especially in Alice Notely's wonderful four line poem "The Comfort," with some attention to enjambment and end stop.
This is actually the second class, since we had an introductory class last week. This is a course in the close reading of poetry. Today's class largely on James Merrill's poem b o d y, on the limits of close reading (if any), and on "Roses are red..."
Syllabus outline, to be updated periodically:
Topics
This syllabus is done by topics. In order to remain flexible I will update weekly with specific readings. Right now the syllabus is aspirational, and will give you a general sense of the order of topics and the issues we’ll discuss. But if, as is likely, we don’t get to everything, we’ll have to decide what to spend less time on.
Th Aug 25 Introduction, etc.
Handout, including:
“b o d y” (James Merrill)
“Easter Wings” (George Herbert)
“The Comfort” (Alice Notely)
Excerpt from Don Juan (Lord Byron)
“My sweet old Etcetera” (Cummings)
T Aug 30 Rhyme
Cole Porter: “You’re the top”
Skelton: “Tunning of Eleanor Rumming” (excerpts)
“Lullay lullay like a child”
Auden: “Lullaby”
Th Sept 1
T Sept 6
Th Sept 8
T Sept 13
Th Sept 15
T Sept 20 Meter
Th Sept 22
T Sept 27 NO CLASS
Th Sept 29 First Paper Due
T Oct 4
Th Oct 6
T Oct 11 Interplay between rhyme and meter
Th Oct 13 NO CLASS (“Brandeis Monday”)
T Oct 18 NO CLASS (“Brandeis Monday”)
Th Oct 20
T Oct 25
Th Oct 27 Metaphor
T Nov 1 Second Paper Due
Th Nov 3 More forms
T Nov 8
Th Nov 9
T Nov 15 Revisions
Th Nov 16
T Nov 22
Th Nov 24 NO CLASS
T Nov 29
Th Dec 1 Two extremes: free verse and hip hop
T Dec 6 Third Paper Due
The last class this semester. Cleopatra and her dreams of Antony. Her death. Ass unpolicied vs. lass unparalleled.
We continue going through the play, to Antony's loss of himself ("the heart of loss"), his botched suicide, and his reunion with Cleopatra.
Beginning of Act IV. More on Antony vs. "an Antony." The latter is an object in the world, has worldly being. The former is the extravagant, isolated subjectivity which is the tragic waywardness which is more and more where he is: in "the heart of loss." If extravagance -- waywardness, wandering outside of any world which is one's own, Binswanger's Verstiegenheit -- weren't more intense than worldliness, if things didn't get more intense as one loses everything, tragedy would be of no aesthetic interest. A brief adumbration of the difference between daemonization (for Macbeth) and extravagance (for Antony).
We conclude Act III, and discuss how well people know Antony, and how well Antony can know Cleopatra. His anger at her, and his recovery from that anger. Enobarbus' loyalty, and then his planned defection. Enobarbus compared with Horatio, Kent, and Banquo.
Antony's insistence on fighting by sea: his loss, and anger at Cleopatra
"I am so lated in the world that I..."
("Have lost my way forever.")
"Fall not a tear, I say."
This is where the play starts getting to be Shakespeare's greatest play.
We continue close reading of Act III, but then the last half hour, in response to a series of questions, is about how to interpret drama: what freedom and what constraints are there on how actors interpret? How should we interpret? Taking Dworkin's dictum that we should interpret in a way that makes the work the best possible work it can be, how does that apply to Shakespeare? What is the meaning of canonicity? Something like: a work that is open to lots of possibility for great interpretation. I thought that last half hour or so was interesting.
I am team-teaching a class on Wittgenstein this term. The person I team-teach with, a philosopher, is too careful about how to put things to want the class podcast. The class largely consists of us disagreeing. He thinks (like lots of Anglo-American philosophers) that Wittgenstein was sloppy and couldn't make his case in a systematic and well-organized way. I defend Wittgenstein, and I usually do it in the spineless liberal way that I was brought up in: "Even accepting everything you say..." after which I try to say that LW is still great. There may be a little of that in this, but in any case, in class the other day, I found myself talking non-stop for a bit, defending my Wittgenstein against his idea of Wittgenstein as a brilliant failure, and more generally against the idea of some systematized exposition of Wittgenstein, even Cavell's. I should say that in calling him my LW I am also very much indebted to a teacher of mine's LW, as you'll hear if you listen. Anyhow, this short post is the non-stop portion of the class.
We continue reading through the play: Pompey disappoints Menas; Ventidius comments on who gets credit; Menas, Agrippa, Ventidius, and Enobarbus are represented as belonging to the same type (so that Menas's turn away from Pompey will adumbrate a very intense later scene); the love between Octavian and Octavia; her contrast with Cleopatra; Cleopatra's news management; Charmian's encouragement. Alexandrian vs. Roman Feasts. We're now well into Act III.
We continue with Act II. The treaty between Pompey and the Triumvirate. Cleopatra and the messenger who reports Antony's marriage. I should have said that her relation to the messenger is a version of the third person imperative force of the play: she demands what can't be demanded, that the truth be different from what it is.
News for Pompey. Characterization of Antony in his absence, again. Delicate negotiations. Octavia. Enorbarbus predicts what Antony will do: his amazing description of Cleopatra. Antony confirms that he'll go back to Alexandria.
Cleopatra's character. Antony and Cleopatra as, essentially, the one life-affirming tragedy: the tragedy that does what comedies do. "Strong as death is love." Versions of the verb "to bear." Jokes at Mardian's expense. Apostrophes to Antony. How they are together in separation. What I didn't quite say is that Rome and Alexandria are established as social spaces, while Antony is between them and so gone during the period of his transition from one to the other,. More uses of the word where: Where is Antony? Where he is asking, Where is Cleopatra?
We continue our close reading, especially of the clash of mood or tone between characters in scenes 2 and 3, in the way Shakespeare is representing people trying to set the dominant mood of the scene: Antony and Enobarbus, and then Antony and Cleopatra. Some attention to the extremely subtle foreshadowing and creation of perspective in those scenes. Similarities and differences between Antony's relation to Enobarbus and his relation to Cleopatra.
Since we're now online, and since it is Antony and Cleopatra, we're going to go through the play scene by scene. Here we looked at the clash of tonalities between the soothsayer and Cleopatra's women, in 2.1, and also the way Antony treats the messengers from Rome.
First class on Zoom. I recorded the class as though in class but I was sitting at my computer. That means there's more me and less them, alas.
Anyhow: we talked about being Mark Antony (cf. Being John Malkovich) and the odd phrase "an Antony." Comparing that to the king's two bodies. And we talked about time frames again: how Octavian is always the age he is at the beginning, and Antony and Cleopatra always the ages they are at the end.
After a 15 minute discussion of Covid-19 (not recorded here) we talk about the actual ages of various characters, and the ages that Shakespeare wanted them to be: not only in A & C but in Richard II, 1 Henry IV and the romances: the idea that you can go from the start of adulthood (Octavius) to the maturity that makes you fit for tragedy and old enough to have lived long enough (Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra) within 16-18 years or so. Shakespeare's highly skillful stage setting in scene 1. Too all over the place, but I am hoping that if classes aren't canceled as they're being at many of our sister institutions, we'll settle down in to focused discussion.
We finally really begin Antony and Cleopatra, discussing Plutarch's interest in character, and Shakespeare's, and what makes a tragic character interesting since we know what the plot will be. Aristotle on pity and terror again: usually the protagonist or main is someone innocent or at worst someone like ourselves: not so in Macbeth. After which we start analyzing the opening scene, with comparisons to Lear and to Hamlet as well (on the quantification of love). Many corny jokes.
A class where we finally talk about the whole soliloquy, with which I am obsessed, in which Macbeth calls or Seyton and considers how his way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf." We get there by means of Sonnet 12, but that means talking about the sonnets: first the nature of sonnet sequences from Petrarch through Wyatt to Sidney and Shakespeare, then of course (via Wyatt) about Tottel's miscellany, and then a discussion of Sonnet 73 and its echoes of Macbeth's soliloquy, and ultimately about the nature of interruption, here as well as in Lear:
Prithee, go in thyself: seek thine own ease:
This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in.
To the Fool
In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty,--
Nay, get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
Fool goes in
Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?
Macbeth interrupts himself to call for his last loyal servant; Lear to dismiss him.
A class which turned out to be a lot on verse drama, and how and why it works, partly based on Evelyn Tribble's ideas about "fluent forgetting" (which I mentioned before) in her book Cognition in the Globe. Lots of stuff on proto-Indo-European and on how poetic lines work: "loose onsets, strict endings." How Shakespeare makes us focus on particular words but also justifies that focus. Hint: rhyme. We finally get to talking about 5.3, and to Shakespeare's bad Dad pun on Macbeth's refusal to "shake with fear." Antony and Cleopatra officially starts next week, but we'll have one more day on Act V of Macbeth.
A class which first is about Protestantism and Catholicism in Shakespeare, and the idea in Protestantism that theological issues take on a psychological air. That is, they are interiorized. Then a digressive account of time in Shakespeare (and many others, including Ashbery and Kafka), with the idea being that as you get older -- as the Macbeths get older -- time is interiorized.
A class on doubling, literal and metaphorical, e.g. Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff, Hecate, etc. The meaning of doubling. The conglomeration and dissolution of social groups. Simmel (of course!) on spatial relations as both the condition and the symbol of human relations. The quickness of friends (in anticipation of Antony and Cleopatra). Miscellaneous digressions, not all my fault.
We start with Coleridge's insight (followed by Bloom) that Macbeth confuses his own pangs of conscience with imaginative fear. Then some discussion of remorse vs. repentance as analogous to that confusion. A couple of jokes, and then a close reading of the line "Which of you have done this" when Macbeth sees Banquo.
A class I actually liked some of: on daemonization (Lionel Abel's term in his article "Daemons true and false") and character. How the most practical matters of representing character on stage (what we hear about Macbeth vs. what we see) give insight into the deepest existential-psychological. This is me essentially trying to turn aspects of Macbeth into L'attente l'oubli. With digressions and a digression on digressions.
A student brings up Banquo and tries to relate the line of kings to the edge of doom to Dante's Inferno. Which leads to a discussion of Banquo and the more general tension in Shakespeare between friendship and love, solved in the comedies but always part of the loss in the tragedies. Considerations of this issue in Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, and of course Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
Mainly about witches: Reginald Scott's skepticism, James's motivated belief in them, the King's touch, the relation of witches to the soothsayer in A&C (vs. the one in JC), and some attention (again, as in other courses) to Dan Decker's Anatomy of a Screenplay and the insights it affords into Shakespeare's construction of scenes: the way soothsayers and messengers are similar and the way they differ. At the end a brief consideration of what De Quincey means by sympathy.
Elements in Macbeth that were more or less likely to come from elsewhere. Who played whom. Robert Armin (and Will Kemp). Johnson on whether the reference to Antony and Cleopatra (Macbeth's genius overmatched by Banquo's as Antony's is by Caesar) is an interpolation. De Quincey on the knocking at the gate, and the effect that the juxtaposition of scenes has.
Holinshed, Knocking at the gate, Banquo, self-fulfilling prophecies, as psychological and causal, subjectivity: who in the story is the story for? Who is real in the story?
Coleridge on puns in Shakespeare. Aristotelean unities and how Shakespeare violates them. Doctor Johnson's bad conjectural emendation. The great line he wishes to emend: "Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."
Why editors change the originals -- canonical words and lines, as we now know them. Theobald on Autumn/Antonie. Theobald on "this bank and shoal of time"
Introductory class in this course on Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Punning and equivocation.
A long class, chiefly on Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Kahn. I think I realized some things about the latter worth realizing. (N.B. I repeat a mistake I made earlier: the apparently supernatural episode that isn't isn't in "Michael," as I misremembered, but in "Peter Bell.")
We complete our discussion of the Prelude by looking at the Snowdon scene in Book XIII, with a lot of comparison to the unfortunate and enfeebling revisions Wordsworth made in Book XIV of the 1850 version. One student reads Oppen's "The Forms of Love" as a kind of pendant to the Snowdon scene. I notice a bunch of things that I don't think I ever did before a connection to King Lear for example, and something about Wordsworth's prosody in the 1805 version.
A little about Hurston's "Gilded Six Bits," and a lot about management of desire. Newcomb's proposed as something to think about at the end.
The structure of The Prelude. The amazing way, in Wordsworth, that we get to now in the absence of some connection to then. The way then is always retrospective. The spots of time.
Relationship between loss aversion, preference, and anxiety. The two envelope game. Is happiness a preference, or is it another name for the existence of preferences? A Serious Man and Suspicion.
A kind of culmination of the material on maguffins, loss aversion, and the management of longing. The sunk costs of antes. The symbolic value of the last cigarette before you quit. That last cigarette being a kind of maguffin which allows for making it satisfy both the desire to smoke and the desire to quit.
A lot of stuff on rhyming, on emic and etic understanding, on phonemes, before we finally get back to Wordsworth, in particular Simplon Pass and what follows: the strange melancholy mansion they stay in; then the Winander Boy: all about estrangement from nature, and being at home in that estrangement, at home in homelessness.
Narrating gambling. Getting the benefits of the breaks. Kinds of gambling narratives: present tense as you're playing and presenting yourself to the other agonists, and past tense: stories of loss.
Powerful anticlimaxes. How being estranged from childhood, and then recognizing that childhood is already the beginning of estrangement, is to achieve the destiny of being at home in homelessness. [Wild turkey flies into a window across the quad and freaks us all out, one way or another.] Mention of Frankenstein. Some of Book VI of The Prelude.
A class -- since no one is keeping up with the reading, to put it mildly -- on the effect that endings have on our desires for narrative. The way endings turn all preferences into short term ones, whereas with the whole novel, movie, epic, series to go, long term preferences will tend to clash more with short term ones. This is (though I don't mention him in the class) one of the ways that convergence works, e.g. in Dan Decker's Anatomy of the Screenplay.
Money offer on the table when we came in! Loss aversion -- it depends how you present things, as Thaler et al show. Medical versions. A brief introduction to Bayesianism and why MD's need to learn some Bayesean analysis. Brandeis's plan to sell its art collection and the "endowment effect." Wins above replacement.
We finally get to the end of The Intimations Ode, after detours again through "Frost at Midnight" and the nature of nature in The Prelude and the relation of nature to death.
In which I try and fail to remember the form of a good paradox about loss aversion; some discussion about narratives and macguffins, and the two word summary of every exciting story with a happy ending: "loss, averted"
Echoes of Milton in Wordsworth. More of the Intimations Ode with a detour through Tintern Abbey. The shockingness of "O joy!"
MacGuffins in Hitchcock, as an intro to Ainslie. Why we like suspense fiction. Hitchcock on suspense. Rereading. Relation to the sublime vs. the beautiful as described by Smith and Kant.
We start on Ainslie -- hyperbolic vs. exponential discounting and we broach the question of what Ainslie calls "the management of longing."
More about the Prelude -- the skating scene, the boat-stealing scene, Wordsworth's later revisions for accuracy but against memory or wishful memory or the superpositions of memory. Shades of the prison house in the Intimations Ode. The child and its two worlds.
Money burning a hole in your pocket. Strategies of Commitment Lotteries as savings devices. Hyperbolic discounting.
We go back briefly to the intimations ode and to Montaigne's that philosophy is learning how to die -- intimations of mortality. All philosophy is. Then we knock around The Prelude -- recumbent o'er the surface of past time, the two consciousnesses, and some of the boat-stealing scene, with a digression on metaphor: sex as a vehicle in that scene about vehicles.
Poker. Common knowledge, where everyone's knowledge of what everyone else knows converges. The psychological components of games of skill. Turing tests and reverse Turing tests.
The difference between new money and old money. The value of old money, or of high culture -- its relation to value. The idea that that kind of value is related to the potlatch as a marker of status which precisely refuses monetization. Cultural capital in subcultures. (Essentially Bourdieu's ideas, though I don't explicitly cite him.)
Blake's view of Wordsworth, as reported by Henry Crabb Robinson in a letter to Dorothy Wordsworth and in his reminiscences. Robinson on Wordsworth's technical death in 1814: his indifference to tyranny after the fall of Napoleon. Return to the Intimations Ode and the subtle new start manifested in stanza 5.
This ended up being a class on common knowledge -- that is on games (and puzzles) with complete information.
We start with the Intimations Ode, which means we really start with "My Heart Leaps Up" -- and after the fourth stanza, which is where Wordsworth broke it off, we go to the glad preamble of The Prelude. Some attention to echoes between Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Since no one had read The Gambler, this class was a kind of summing up of thinking from Mandeville to Kant under the rubric of Mauss -- how credit, gratitude, obligation bring in other minds and differentiate our credit with them from the way money is a bookkeeping measure.
Basically a class where we rush through "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," with a little reference to a couple of Shakespeare sonnets Wordsworth was probably thinking of -- 73 and 104.
In which we go over the answers to the midterm -- you don't need to read it, since I read the questions out. A little discussion Merchant of Venice: paying with all my heart, and of Ulysses: Leopold Bloom's joke advertising jingle, "Tell me where is fancy bread? At Burke's the Baker's, it is said."
Using the game show Golden Balls, we look at some Prisoner's Dilemma situations, and discuss Golden Balls as a more classic PD than it might seem at first (it's certainly at the least a modified PD). Episodes for watching are available here (an anthology) and here ("Weirdest split or steal every"). Different ways of valuing, different ways of strategizing.
Wordsworth on Gray in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Like Blake he channels Milton's view that poetry is something other than artifice, and like Blake he corrects the Miltonic example. Home at Grasmere vs. Paradise Lost.
Adam Smith on utility and beauty -- revealed preference as a tautology -- utilitarianism -- Smith on how preference isn't a tautology -- different from Mandeville. Smith on utility here. This will lead to Smith on self-command.
Mostly Wordsworth and the mysterious power of the absurdly great "We Are Seven," as well as a consideration of "Lines Written in Early Spring" and "Two April Mornings."
More about ballads and their relation to the supernatural, in a discussion of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Some exemplary ballads. "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" as an example of an apparently supernatural ballad which isn't one. Beginning of "We are Seven," with Coleridge's collaborative first stanza.
A little more on Mandeville and the line that leads from him through Hutcheson (whom I didn't mention by name) to Hume and Smith. The nature of inflation, due to money's only having exchange value, and the nature of stimulus, as analyzed by Hume. A beginning of a discussion on the beauty of utility, according to Smith.
Mandeville's analysis of acting for reputation -- does it, can it, make sense, and if so how? Here's the fascinating passage we began looking at:
The Soldiers, that were forc’d to fight,
If they surviv’d, got Honour by’t; [p. 22, l. 1]
[From Mandeville’s notes:] The Man of Manners picks not the best but rather takes the worst out of the Dish, and gets of every thing, unless it be forc’d upon him, always the most indifferent Share. By this Civility the Best remains for others, which being a Compliment to all that are present, every Body is pleas’d with it: The more they love themselves, the more they are forc’d to approve of his Behaviour, and Gratitude stepping in, they are oblig’d almost whether they will or not, to think favourably of him. After this manner it is that the well-bred Man insinuates himself in the esteem of all the Companies he comes in, and if he gets nothing else by it, the Pleasure he receives in reflecting on the Applause which he knows is secretly given him, is to a Proud Man more than an Equivalent for his former Self-denial, and over-pays to Self-love with Interest, the loss it sustain’d in his Complaisance to others.
If there are Seven or Eight Apples or Peaches among Six People of Ceremony, that are pretty near equal, he who is prevail’d upon to choose first, will take that, which, if there be any considerable difference, a Child would know to be the worst: this he does to insinuate, that he [72]looks upon those he is with to be of Superior Merit, and that there is not one whom he wishes not better to than he does to himself. ’Tis Custom and a general Practice that makes this Modish Deceit familiar to us, without being shock’d at the [79] Absurdity of it; for if People had been used to speak from the Sincerity of their Hearts, and act according to the natural Sentiments they felt within, ’till they were Three or Four and Twenty, it would be impossible for them to assist at this Comedy of Manners, without either loud Laughter or Indignation; and yet it is certain, that sucha Behaviour makes us more tolerable to one another than we could be otherwise.
It is very Advantageous to the Knowledge of our selves, to be able well to distinguish between good Qualities and Virtues. The Bond of Society exacts from every Member a certain Regard for others, which the Highest is not exempt from in the presence of the Meanest even in an Empire: but when we are by our selves, and so far remov’d from Company as to be beyond the Reach of their Senses, the Words Modesty and Impudence lose their meaning; a Person may be Wicked, but he cannot be Immodest while he is alone, and no Thought can be Impudent that never was communicated to another. A Man of Exalted Pride may so hide it, that no Body shall be able to discover that he has any; and yet receive greater Satisfaction [73]from that Passion than another, who indulges himself in the Declaration of it before all the World. Good Manners have nothing to do with Virtue or Religion; instead of extinguishing, they rather inflame the Passions. The Man of Sense and Education never exults more in his Pride than when he hides it with the greatest Dexterity;1 and in feasting on the Applause, which he is sure all good Judges will pay to his Behaviour, he enjoys a Pleasure altogether unknown to the Short-sighted, surly Alderman, that shews his Haughtiness glaringly in his Face, pulls off his Hat to no Body, and hardly deigns to speak to an Inferior.
After a snow day, a special guest leads a class on Blake's Milton and the dynamics of the relations among the Immortals. We focus in particular on Milton himself and Urizen and how Milton overcomes his own spectre.
Some discussion of sunk costs and throwing good money after bad, poker strategy, the doubling cube, Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" and more Mandeville.
Mandeville on the advantages of self-dealing and selfishness. Discussion of morality of plane flight, since that's all the rage these days, from a Kantian and from a game-theoretical point of view. Free riding and problems of collective action. Mandeville compared and to some extent contrasted with Rand.
We discuss Blake's mythology in general, then his America, fairly briefly, and then some of The Book of Urizen, in particular the coming into separate being of Urizen, the coming into being of Los as the allegory of Urizen's separation from him, and the binding of Orc with the chains of jealousy.
More on gift-giving and its manifest and latent content. Obligation and acceptance of obligation. The gift as pure use value -- at least manifestly. A bit more on The Merchant of Venice.
We try to sort out some preliminary confusions about who's who in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I try -- stumblingly -- to give an account of the Romantic idea that loss is (as Harold Bloom puts it) "shadowed gain."
Given the sheepish coughing you'll hear, by people acknowledging they weren't keeping up with the reading, this turned into an exposition mainly of Marcel Mauss's great work The Gift, along with some mention of Joel Waldfogel's notorious article "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas."
Mainly the Merchant of Venice, with discussion of its Biblical source: Jacob as trickster; Laban as trickster; Shylock as trickster; Portia as trickster; much about Jacob, Esau, Isaac, and the man Jacob wrestles with; the meaning of the turquois ring and the pound of flesh.
NB: this coming week is vacation so no updates till the week of Feb 25.
A last class on Blake's Book of Thel, with much attention given to the Clod of Clay's line: "I ponder and I cannot ponder."
NB: February vacation next week, so no new episodes till the week after.
A class mainly about interest, usury, compounding of interest vs. Malthusian limits to biological growth -- the interesting fact that if Judas had invested his 40 pieces of silver at prevailing rates of compound interest, he'd own an amount of silver more greater than the entire volume of the earth (so that Christ's redemption, compounded over two millennia, would indeed more than repurchase the entire world).
With a quotation from Blake's description of his (lost) painting "A Vision of the Last Judgment":
I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No part of Me. What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.
(February 11, actually, but I think if I change the title I may change the link.) We start with Earle Stanley Gardner on writing by the word -- then on to Kawabata and the spookiness of the story. Then The Merchant of Venice, and the significance of the rings and their value. The reason Shylock is a stranger, and that all the Jews in Venice are: because Deuteronomy permits lending at interest to a stranger, so the Christians wanted to be strangers to the Jews so made the Jews strangers to them. The stranger in Simmel mentioned: "The wanderer [the merchant] is he who comes today and goes tomorrow; the stranger is he who comes today and stays tomorrow." At least I am sure it may be so in Venice.
In particular "The Garden of Love" and "London," "To the Evening Star," and a touch of The Book of Thel
Buying and selling based on predictions of what others will buy and sell: Keynesian Beauty Contests (cf. "Family Feud") and what they have to do with narrative interaction. An in class demonstration in which a student wins a dollar! Some discussion of other manipulative games.
NB that previous episode was mistitled as Monday's: It was actually Wednesday's....
Functions of money. Ripping a bill in half. A little more on the etymological background of interest as breeding. Usura Canto in Pound, with youtube audio of him reading it. Kinds of wealth in The Merchant of Venice, following James Buchan.
Some discussion of "There is no Natural Religion" and then some Songs of Experience: "The Chimney Sweeper," the two versions of "Holy Thursday," "The Clod and the Pebble," and -- a Song of Innocence -- "The Little Black Boy."
Some discussion of the Super Bowl, and of game theory at the end of the game. Then a return to Aristotle on the three functions of money, and on interest -- and the Greek word's etymology as breeding or procreation (from the word τόκος , ὁ, [tokos] = childbirth from (τίκτω [titko]) meaning to give birth, whence also τεχνη, craft, i.e. the art of producing objects, which word Aristotle uses elsewhere in discussing the unmoved mover).
A class where we end up going into the labor theory of value -- average abstract labor time being what produces equilibria among different commodities. We were going to talk about Kawabata, and about interest, but that's TK. We did talk about Aristotle -- and therefore a bit about Adam Smith -- on the functions of actual money: medium of exchange, bookkeeping measure, store of value, and also a bit on how these can be confused with each other.
This was going to be on "The Songs of Experience" (watch this space), but in order to discuss what Blake meant by the word "experience" we took a look at his 1788 tract "All Religions Are One" (printed just before "The Songs of Innocence"), which led to a long discussion of the dialectic between Plato and Locke and a counter-dialectic in Blake against both Plato and Locke.
A class that spiraled outwards from a consideration of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale to Maugham's parable of the appointment in Samara to parables in general, including the strange parable of the talents in Matthew. The ontology of things in the world and death as not a thing in the world (in Chaucer, in Maugham). How treasure or gold is like death -- a catalyst, a vector, something not itself (a marker for a return to Aristotle tomorrow).
Much on "The Lamb" (and a little on "The Tyger"), "A Cradle Song," "Infant Joy" and the Innocence version of "The Chimney Sweeper." Innocence as privative (like "infant" and "innocuous")-- a contrast to the world as we know it.
A class mainly on Mammon -- in Milton and in Spenser -- though we don't get that far, because we pause for an explanation of The Faerie Queene and of allegory in general -- e.g. Edward Gorey's Innocence, on the Bicycle of Propriety, Carrying the Urn of Reputation Safely over the Abyss of Indiscretion. Hence some talk about the harmony of the virtues in Aristotle -- chastity vs. temperance. Matthew 6:24 quoted -- you cannot serve both God and Mammon.
Aristotle on Midas, and then Ovid on Midas (Golding's translation), which is the just-so story of how the river Pactolus came to run with gold (or actually electrum), leading to the first coining of money under Croesus, with a little fumbling in class about what it was that Archimedes found bathing (that objects submerged in water displace their own volume).
More on the two versions of the Nurses Song, with some subtle narrative theory applied -- who is or are the real narrators of the two songs? Then back to Paradise Lost: a little history, a little consideration of how it champions the proto-Romantic centrality of human judgment to our sense of the world and of morality. (Luther on Pharaoh type of thing....)
More Aristotle, on the origin of actual money -- coin of the realm as Gutman will say in The Maltese Falcon (TK) -- and the meaning of the word "tender" in the phrase "legal tender." Polonius's dumb pun on the word. Aristotle, very briefly, on infinity (the unbounded) and its relation to goods and money. Meatloaf's song "Paradise by the dashboard light" naturally comes up, as it most in most classes on Aristotle....
Discussion of a couple of Exeter riddles (you can find them on the original handout) and how they connect money to various other social interactions, prostitution in particular. Then we broach Aristotle's Politics.
Second class: mainly an intro to Paradise Lost, followed by a return to the two versions of Blake's "Nurses Song." Blake's illustrations here.
A class mainly on Kay Ryan's poem "Money is a kind of poetry," a riff on Wallace Stevens' line (in his Adagia): "Poetry is a kind of money." The class, of course, is about both. Link to handouts (including this poem) available in previous episode or here.
This is the first class of a new course called "Imagining Money." You can find a draft syllabus -- an aspirational one, since we'll never get through it all -- here. There are handouts for the first three days: the short passage from Beckett we discuss first, a miscellany of poems and riddles about money, and a selection of passages from Milton, Ovid, and Ambrose Bierce. The syllabus gives you the lines to read from Milton's Paradise Lost, viz. Book 1, ll. 674-751, and Book 8, ll. 1-178. And here is the Kawabata story.
An introductory class for a course on the early Romantics. Today we talked about the oxymoronic title of Lyrical Ballads, more about ballads than about lyrics; about Milton; about Blake's describing him as being of the devil's party without knowing it. Syllabus TK -- watch this space.
Last class of the semester, on Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. Compared and contrasted with Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which unlike the play is about the clash of cultures, and what happens when European culture arrives and destroys the cultures it is ignorant of; and with Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which makes African culture a backdrop to European reckoning with its own tragic ontology. Death and the King's Horseman as treating British colonial culture as a catalyst and otherwise a (ridiculous) backdrop to its own concerns, concerns as archaic, as fundamental, and essential as anything to be found in Aeschylus or Shakespeare. By way of long discussions of how we think of the audience as narratee, not as reader; and how we think of plays as having the same kind of hidden narrators as we think of novels as having hidden narratees. Who is the audience, or who are its members, its narratees, who do we think they are, in Death and the King's Horseman?
The one film in the class. "Print the legend," as a commentary on the kinds of movies Ford makes. Flashback and truth in fiction. Showing vs. telling. Who did shoot Liberty? The two scenes of his death. Flashback within flashback. Woody Strode (Pompey). What is he doing in the second scene? Why does it matter?
What we didn't get to: the way Vera Miles seems to have learned the story as we do. We assume she now knows what we now know, though of course she (presumably) didn't know it before whereas now she (presumably) did know it before. Still we read it as though she's learned it as we have, during the present time of the movie. The alteration of the back story as the story is told.
What this strange book is about, at least in part. Macguffins: baptism and murder. And Free Indirect Discourse, natch. The Protestant vs. the Catholic bible. O'Connor quoting from Douay-Rheims. The relevant passage in Matthew:
[7]And when they went their way, Jesus began to say to the multitudes concerning John: What went you out into the desert to see? a reed shaken with the wind? [8] But what went you out to see? a man clothed in soft garments? Behold they that are clothed in soft garments, are in the houses of kings. [9] But what went you out to see? a prophet? yea I tell you, and more than a prophet. [10] For this is he of whom it is written: Behold I send my angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee. [11] Amen I say to you, there hath not risen among them that are born of women a greater than John the Baptist: yet he that is the lesser in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. [12] And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away. [13] For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John: [14] And if you will receive it, he is Elias that is to come. [15] He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. [16] But whereunto shall I esteem this generation to be like? It is like to children sitting in the market place. [17] Who crying to their companions say: We have piped to you, and you have not danced: we have lamented, and you have not mourned. [18] For John came neither eating nor drinking; and they say: He hath a devil. [19] The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say: Behold a man that is a glutton and a wine drinker, a friend of publicans and sinners. And wisdom is justified by her children. [20] Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein were done the most of his miracles, for that they had not done penance.
Matthew, 11: 7-20, in the Douay Rheims Bible
Seeing it as a residue of real drama. Paradramatic elements: what we can know by knowing elements of the script that we wouldn't know on stage. Who is Godot? Who are we meant to think he is? Really an introduction to the play, to how the play makes you think about what it's doing.
Invisible Man and Whitman. What does the last sentence mean? MacGuffins in the novel. Du Bois on the education of Black Men. 1943 riot in Harlem and the end if Invisible Man. William Henry Johnson's "Moon Over Harlem." Moral of Invisible Man: don't use people. Doing so turns them into the kind of people who use people. (Even the Invisible Man does: uses Sibyl for example.)
An exhortation to take seriously the passion of Invisible Man, not only its purpose or the perception it comes to; a claim that being able to do this will give a hint at least of similar passions in works whose political contexts are now historical, that is no longer as live to us as #BlackLivesMatter, for example, makes Invisible Man, followed by quick but consecutive readings of Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West" and the rest of Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."
First real class on Ellison's Invisible Man; some background, Liberty Paints, electroshock, Norton's interest in Jim Trueblood.
A brief peroration on Invisible Man, then on to the beginning of Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" via syllables in Dickinson ("syllable from sound") and Stevens ("clickering syllables") and the Whitman entry in Pinsky's My Favorite Poem project.
A quick tour through several Dickinson poems, including "I started early," to which we'll return briefly. Some noting (and a lot of not-noting) of echoes and congruences with Emerson's vocabulary: "Austere," e.g. and attitudes towards snow. Next class we'll return to "The Brain is wider than the sky" as a way into Whitman and by way of contrast to Stevens' Comedian.
A quick catchup on major issues we couldn't or didn't really consider in The Aspern Papers, Mrs. Dalloway, and "The Dead." Death and parties. Then onwards to Dickinson, in particular to "The brain is wider than the sky" (dashes suppressed) as a way into Emerson and the Divinity School Address, TK.
A class that was supposed to be about "The Dead" but wasn't really: more about truth in fiction, the difference, gulf, and interface between the fictional world and our world. First person narratives and the little they guarantee. The difference and interface between narrating narrator and narrated narrator, and its parallel in the third person narrator of FID and the point of view narrated. The first sentence of "The Dead."
Some context in Byron and Shelley. Claire Claremont (Miss Juliana) as a survival from another world. Things we don't know: narrator's name; content of the papers. A little bit about things that don't exist at all: his assumed name, or (it would be better to say, though I didn't) the difference between his false and real name. I didn't get nearly as far as I would have wanted to here.
Jane Eyre and the way narrative works. Truth in fiction. Breaking the fourth wall in so many different ways in this paragraph, the first of chapter XI:
A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large figured papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints, including a portrait of George the Third, and another of the Prince of Wales, and a representation of the death of Wolfe. All this is visible to you by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my cloak and bonnet; my muff and umbrella lie on the table, and I am warming away the numbness and chill contracted by sixteen hours’ exposure to the rawness of an October day: I left Lowton at four o’clock a.m., and the Millcote town clock is now just striking eight.
Why fictional narrators always tell the truth. What sympathy or agreement truthful (if frequently unreliable) narrators expect of their audiences. How this feeds into the psychological acuity of Brontë's depiction of Jane. Jane like Cordelia again: the false sense, central to first person narrative that "tout comprendre est tout pardonner." Why Jane Eyre ends with the fate of St. John Rivers, far away and disappearing. (I think this is the best class so far.)
The first of two classes on Jane Eyre. Relation of Rochester (and of Heathcliff) to Milton's Satan. Relation of Jane to Cordelia: how she's not like Cordelia. Transparency and first person narration (to be picked up in next class). Jane Eyre as feminist novel.
We look at "Rousseau" (= Wordsworth) in The Triumph of Life describing the disappearance of the shape all light, fading like Venus into the light of common day. Then on to Mont Blanc as a poem about the struggle between the mind and the world as to which is to be master, and the jiu jitsu by which the mind wins by letting the world (= Mont Blanc) utterly overwhelm it. Relation to the sublime.
And its relation to the Invocation to Book 3 of Paradise Lost. Loss of intensity converted to the intensity of loss.
A bit more on "A Slumber did my spirit seal." An urgent conjuration that they should like the Intimations Ode. Followed by a bit of literary theory - the theory of axiology or value. Dworkin's view of literary interpretation: interpret so as to make a literary work the best work it can possibly be. Derived from his view of the Constitution. Some strictly amateur talk about the Constitution and the right to privacy as found in Griswold vs. Connecticut. The ordering of two works attributed to Solomon: Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. Which ordering do we prefer? The end of Lear; do we prefer he die happy or in despair, and why? (Most people who wrote about the issue wanted to claim he died happy.) Do we prefer "trees" to be the hopeful alternative to "rocks and stones" or the grim failure even of something living to be more than rocks and stones are in earth's diurnal course. Intimations Ode itself Monday?
A first class on Wordsworth, which is really a class on ballads, from "The Twa Corbies" and "Lord Randall" to Beddoes's "Ghost's Moonshine" (as it is called) from Death's Jest Book. The idea of the anonymous eerie third person otherness of the ballad, a spooky point of view on how we all become part of the spooky point go view. Scott's "Proud Masie." That balladic spookiness combined with the first person expressiveness of the lyric in the anonymous (in 1798) Lyrical Ballads. Payoff = a reading of "A Slumber did my spirit seal."
General comment about paper writing, because we were handing back papers. What I regard as very basic techniques for writing sentences that will almost automatically lead to clearer writing. Then on to one more Blake poem: the "Chimney Sweeper" Song of Innocence, with some notice of technique similar to what I had urged at the opening of the class. Next up: Wordsworth!
A bit more about Pope, and the amazing cleverness of Rape of the Lock. Then on to Blake, the meaning of calling something a "Song of Innocence," some pairings between the songs of innocence and of experience, and a line by line reading of one Song of Innocence: "The Little Black Boy." The way the poem criticizes the normativity of whiteness that the little boy has almost been induced to buy into.
Since apparently most people didn't get a chance to read the poem, this became more about the way heroic couplets work, as opposed to Miltonic and Shakespearean blank verse. Basic idea: the severe constraints of the couplet require extreme push back from the poet in terms of balance, variation, surprise. We talk about rhyming and look in some detail at one four line sequence from the start:
Say what strange Motive, Goddess! cou'd compel
A well-bred Lord t'assault a gentle Belle?
Oh say what stranger Cause, yet unexplor'd,
Cou'd make a gentle Belle reject a Lord?
Abandoning Paradise Lost today, with some more consideration of our love for the unreal -- fictional characters in comedy and tragedy, and how the very fact that they're fictional contributes to their effect. We don't need to worry about what happens after "happily ever after" ("that is called Fiction" --Oscar Wilde), we can feel sadder about their losses, which are more total. Adam's commitment to marriage. The fall in PL is not the fall into sex, because they already have sex, but the fall into marriage, into the limits of love and sex. That's what's tragic. Partly that it doesn't end with the fall (into sex, into death), but keeps going on, into the real unreality of our lives. Eve's greatness after the fall. Adam's running to meet her. Their expulsion.
The return to earth, the right place for love (as Frost will say). One fall or two: that's another way of asking the question of how to think of God. Calliope can't defend Orpheus because she is an empty dream. Orpheus's turn to Eurydice as a turn to the fact of mortality: all mortals are empty dreams. Fall of Eve, and of Adam: "And me with thee hath ruined" = first silent thought.
Following sections and a snow day, we try to catch up, which means (it turns out) looking at more similarities between God and Satan: their derision for their enemies, their invocation of "necessity / The Tyrant's plea." How the Son manages the Father's douche-bag-splaining ("death for death" --> "life for life"). This is a further idea of justification: making God just. Satan's reaction to the innocent Adam and Eve ("whom my thoughts pursue with wonder / And could love." His pity for them though he is unpitied) contrasted with God's ("ingrate!"). Satan's dream temptation of Eve and how much Raphael echoes it in his Great Chain of Being speech.
The rebel angels vs. God on free will (does God have it?). Parallels between them. The word "dispose" as a word about narrative ordering in Milton, and therefore of the narrator's own story and experience; suzet and fabula; Satan's hatred of light and his voice, vs. Milton's vs. the Muse's, vs. God's ("woe to the inhabitants of earth"). How the mind is its own place, bot for Satan and for the narrator/Milton. There's new stuff here, not in previous Milton classes....
On to Book 3 of Paradise Lost: Shelley on God's viciousness; God's jokes about Satan; similarities between the Son and Satan (via their courage) and God and Satan (via their gaming for humanity). Question of justifying the ways of God to men: do we judge whether he's just? How? Euthyphro dilemma. Luther on God's apparently unjust ways (can't be justified independently to us). Poetry in hell; philosophy in hell.
Back to Satan in Books 1 and 2, via Burke's chapter on "How words influence the Passions," where he quotes "Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, / A universe of death" from Book 2. The sublime in Burke and Kant (and Nietzsche, and a little Longinus) as the inner response to outer disorder, in contrast to the beautiful. Delight vs. pleasure. Magnificence of Satan. "Yet faithful how they stood, / Their glory withered."
Really a class about the sublime, and Satan as the sublime in Blake and Shelley, that is Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost, via Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and his allusion to the same line from the Gospel of John that Wittgenstein loved so much ("It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you"), and Shelley's preface to Prometheus Unbound. To be continued.
A last class on King Lear focusing on the question "Why does tragedy give pleasure?" Why do we like Johnson's shock at the death of Cordelia so much? Why do we want depth? (...is the question though I didn't put it quite that way.) Answer: friendship among mortals (which I almost put that way). The only friend to a mortal is a mortal (again, almosting it). Lear is about mortals: Freud on "making friends with the necessity of dying" echoes Gloucester: "My son came then into my mind, and yet my mind was then scarce friends with him." Mortality in King Lear is endless, but it's shared. That's one reason the Fool has to be mortal: a fairy tale spirit who turns out to be the spirit of mortality (as I wish I had quite said).
More on fairy tale testing in Scene 1. Fairy tales as the world outside our world, which is the world of mortality Lear gets us into. If you've heard the Shakespeare podcasts on Lear, the fairy tale testing approach is new, i.e. a more recent insight. After that, the rest of the class is a quick version of the longer exposition in the Shakespeare classes: parallels and stereoscopic near parallels (i.e. parallax) between and among characters: "nothing will come of nothing," repeated with the Fool beginning the recuperation of Lear after his terrible first appearance; the rivalry between Kent and the Fool; Lear as the Fool's only friend.
First real day on King Lear. Window characters who are there at the end as well as the beginning. How Prufrock thinks of himself. But how Shakespeare braids them together, so that windows become mains. Conflict within scenes and between the groups who constitute the members of separate scenes. Fairy Tale beginning of King Lear. Lear sets a test for Cordelia, and she fails in his eyes, but wins in France's, which makes France (and Cordelia) win in ours.
More on the bucket of poems from the first class, mainly about the personification of love. Love and shipwreck, In Plato, in Herbert, Love is personified as the god who personifies. The burning child as personification of love: Southwell, Freud, Bishop. The shipwreck is the proof of love, too.
This is a course on a lot of different topics, genres, periods, and authors in English Language Literature, and on a few theoretical or critical texts that are relevant. Like all introductory courses, we attempt to dive deep very, very quickly. This is the first time I'm teaching it, which I hope will be a plus as well. Some of the works we'll cover I've done in other podcasts (King Lear, Paradise Lost, but those are always different in different contexts and classes. And context, or the suppression of context, turns out from the first class to be partly what the course is about. In this first class you get to hear me recite "Jabberwocky" from memory, which I wasn't expecting to do, and then we discuss a wonderful song of Ben Jonson's and Yeats's "Circus Animal's Desertion."
Here is the syllabus, plus the "bunch of poems" that we are starting out with:
English 1a: Introduction to Literary Studies
W Jan 13 Introduction via a bunch of poems
Th Jan 15 Introduction con’t; opening of Shakespeare’s King Lear
M Jan 18: NO CLASS
W Jan 20 King Lear
Th Jan 21 King Lear
M Jan 25 King Lear, Aristotle: Poetics,
Dr. Johnson, Freud: “The theme
of the three caskets”
W Jan 27 Milton: Paradise Lost
Th Jan 28 Milton: Paradise Lost
M Feb 1 Milton: Paradise Lost
W Feb 3 Milton: Paradise Lost
Th Feb 4 Milton: Paradise Lost
M Feb 8 Milton: Paradise Lost
W Feb 10 Milton: Paradise Lost
Th Feb 11 Milton: Paradise Lost
Feb 15-19: NO CLASS
M Feb 22 Milton: Paradise Lost First paper due
W Feb 24 Pope: “Rape of the Lock”
Th Feb 25 English Romanticism (Blake, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats);
Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads
M Feb 29 English Romanticism
W Mar 2 English Romanticism
Th Mar 3 English Romanticism
M Mar 7 English Romanticism
W Mar 9 Brontë: Jane Eyre
Th Mar 10 Brontë: Jane Eyre
M Mar 14 Brontë: Jane Eyre
W Mar 16 James: The Aspern Papers
Th Mar 17 James: The Aspern Papers
M Mar 21 Joyce: “The Dead” L
W Mar 23 Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway L
Th Mar 24 Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
M Mar 28 NO CLASS
W Mar 30 American romanticism (Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson) Second paper due
Th Mar 31 American romanticism
M Apr 4 Ellison: Invisible Man , DuBois: “On the Training of Black Men” L
W Apr 6 Ellison: Invisible Man
Th Apr 7 Ellison: Invisible Man
M Apr 11 Beckett: Waiting for Godot
W Apr 13 Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Th Apr 14 O’Connor: The Violent Bear it Away
M Apr 18 OConnor: The Violent Bear it Away
W Apr 20 Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance L
Th Apr 21 NO CLASS
Apr. 25-29 NO CLASS
M May 2 Soyinka: Death and The King’s Horseman Final paper due
[So beauty on the waters stood]
Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
So beauty on the waters stood,
When love had sever’d earth from flood!
So when he parted air from fire,
He did with concord all inspire!
And them a motion he them taught,
That elder than himself was thought.
Which thought was, yet, the child of earth,
For Love is elder than his birth.
The Circus Animals’ Desertion
By William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
I
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
II
What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.
And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.
III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
[They flee from me]
By Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
Complaint Of The Absence Of Her Lover
Being Upon The Sea
By Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17-1547)
O HAPPY dames that may embrace
The fruit of your delight ;
Help to bewail the woful case,
And eke the heavy plight,
Of me, that wonted to rejoice
The fortune of my pleasant choice :
Good ladies ! help to fill my mourning voice.
In ship freight with rememberance
Of thoughts and pleasures past,
He sails that hath in governance
My life while it will last ;
With scalding sighs, for lack of gale,
Furthering his hope, that is his sail,
Toward me, the sweet port of his avail.
Alas ! how oft in dreams I see
Those eyes that were my food ;
Which sometime so delighted me,
That yet they do me good :
Wherewith I wake with his return,
Whose absent flame did make me burn :
But when I find the lack, Lord ! how I mourn.
When other lovers in arms across,
Rejoice their chief delight ;
Drowned in tears, to mourn my loss,
I stand the bitter night
In my window, where I may see
Before the winds how the clouds flee :
Lo ! what a mariner love hath made me.
And in green waves when the salt flood
Doth rise by rage of wind ;
A thousand fancies in that mood
Assail my restless mind.
Alas ! now drencheth1 my sweet foe,
That with the spoil of my heart did go,
And left me ; but, alas ! why did he so ?
And when the seas wax calm again,
To chase from me annoy,
My doubtful hope doth cause me plain ;
So dread cuts off my joy.
Thus is my wealth mingled with woe :
And of each thought a doubt doth grow ;
Now he comes ! will he come ? alas ! no, no!
The Burning Babe
By Robert Southwell, SJ (c. 1561-1595)
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.
Love (III)
By George Herbert (1593–1633)
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
Casabianca
By Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835)
THE boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but him had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.
Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though childlike form.
The flames rolled on -- he would not go
Without his father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.
He called aloud -- "Say, father, say,
If yet my task is done?"
He knew not that the chieftain lay
Unconscious of his son.
"Speak, father!" once again he cried,
"If I may yet be gone!"
And but the booming shots replied,
And fast the flames rolled on.
Upon his brow he felt their breath,
And in his waving hair,
And looked from that lone post of death
In still, yet brave despair.
And shouted but once more aloud,
"My father! must I stay?"
While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud,
The wreathing fires made way.
They wrapt the ship in splendor wild,
They caught the flag on high,
And streamed above the gallant child,
Like banners in the sky.
There came a burst of thunder sound--
The boy -- oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
With fragments strewed the sea!--
With mast, and helm, and pennon fair
That well had borne their part--
But the noblest thing that perished there
Was that young, faithful heart.
Casabianca
By Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite "The boy stood on
the burning deck." Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.
Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy.
Last class of the semester, with a brief summary of the first books of Paradise Lost, with special attention to the similarities, intersections, and overlaps between Satan and God.
Last film class of the semester, on Peeping Tom and some of the ideas of scopophilia behind it, especially from Freud and Fenichel. What is the MacGuffin in Peeping Tom? In a way (though I run out of time to say it this way): it's a meta-MacGuffin: we are trying to figure out which of many possible things the MacGuffin is going to turn out to be. That's what we're looking to discover.
Ideas of freedom in Milton -- mind vs. world analogized to independence or dependence of idea of justice. In a nutshell: if justice is independent of God's will, the mind is its own place, as Satan says.
I spend more time maybe than ever before on the opening of Paradise Lost and the idea of invoking the Muse. This naturally involves a long excursus on psychoanalytic technique and its relation to prayer. Naturally.
The film assigned was Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), but mainly we discussed Freud on pleasure vs. unpleasure, instincts, their vicissitudes, what we want and what we don't, with just a very little attention to scopophilia itself, to which we'll return in the last class Tuesday April 29th.
Brief considerations of the historical, political and personal background of "Upon Appleton House," and then the rest of the class on "The Unfortunate Lover." Worst love poem ever written? Or amazing and strange outlier. Hint: the latter. Some talk of vexillogy, in particular of heraldic blazons, for those who get excited by that sort of thing.
We start by viewing one of the film projects that a student did for his midterm: blinking eyes. This will be more or less silent in the podcast, for a minute or two. Then a discussion of blinking, partly Erwin Goffman style. And then on to Vertigo, another movie about repetition: one's own; the world's; the other's. Comparison to Groundhog Day and Source Code. Opening considerations on Freudian repetition, as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, via an account of the relation of pleasure to instinct or drive (the incentive that a drive aims at or the incentive to reduce unpleasure that drives the drive), and the the beginning of a discussion on repetition compulsion among shell-shocked veterans of the Great War.
A class sort of entirely on Marvell's Garden: sort of because we have occasion to talk about synecdoche vs. non-synecdochal metonymy, which naturally gets us talking about W.V. Quine, and therefore his nephew Robert Quine (guitarist who recorded the Velvets and worked with Lou Reed), and then Anthony and the Johnsons, because of course.
First class on Marvell: Introduction mainly about what we (what I) don't know, but with some historical context. (There's a new biography, which I haven't read, which apparently has lots of new information.) Empsonian explanation of pastoral. Eliot on minor vs major, good vs great poetry. "The Mower Against Gardens," and being rich in hay. Figuration in "The Garden." A lot of this course is about the fascinating subtleties of figuration in our poets, and this is something we'll concentrate on in "The Garden," both this class and next.
Final class on Source Code and Groundhog Day. Acting. Repetition. Subject and object. Death and other minds. Why Groundhog Day is a more radical movie than Source Code (in case you need to know). Counterparts. Would you transport yourself to another world where you'd switch places with your counterpart in order to be with the surviving counterpart of your dead love here? Would that be enough?
Never got to "Love" (III). We go through "The Forerunners" again and the relationship of the soul to language and expression in that poem, and Herbert's addresses to his own language; then on to "The Pulley" and the interplay of wealth and poverty there (as in "Redemption").
Herbert's view of poetic subject. "Jordan" (I); "Easter Wings" and its prosody. "The Flower," and a start to "The Forerunners."
The plausibility of Source Code. Possible worlds in Lewis. Truth-makers. ("If a sentence is true, there's something that makes it true." --Donald Davidson) Some vague, but licensed BS about quantum theory and the many worlds interpretation, and how that fits in with Source Code. Differences between Source Code and Groundhog Day,
A class on repetition in Groundhog Day; a little bit of discussion of Kierkegaard and the idea that repetition is always a step behind. How this plays out in the movie: what comes first before it's repeated. How much is left to elision. How philosophical issues in the movie overlap with technical and narrative demands of film making. Groundhog Day compared to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, and to the Mr. Magoo version of A Christmas Carol.
His relation to his vocation as priest and as person. His ministry. Typology - prefiguration and correlative types. Being an Aaron: "Aaron Dressing," "Denial," and "The Collar."
A class on the difference between external world skepticism and other mind skepticism: their conceptual independence. Parmenides and Zeno on why to be skeptical of the external world. Filming Achilles and the tortoise: what you'd see. Egerton. Berkeley's solution to Zeno's paradoxes.
The wonderful Robert Herrick, and a few of his poems: his relation to Jonson; his erotic lyrics. Just a class on Herrick, really.
Last class on Ben Jonson: a little time on his Weston-Stuart Epithalamion, and then most of the case on the Cary-Morrison Ode, with special attention, in both poems, to Jonson's stunning formal brilliance.
Mainly a discussion of La Captive and the question of other minds, and of what the male lead (Simon) wants from his captive (Ariane): what kind of thing wanting more from her or something different from what she gives him could possibly be. Discussion therefore about replicants, zombies, and other minds. The sheer fascination of looking in La Captive. Some discussion of Jeanne Dielman, but without the spoilers that would indicate how Jeanne turns out (to herself even) to have a mind -- an other mind.
A class mainly on Blade Runner, and how it is practically the same movie as Chantal Akerman's La Captive: both Cartesian explorations of the reality of others, and of other minds. Tyrell as the evil genius in Descartes. Seeing souls in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emerson, and Blade Runner. The ontology of voiceover.
A little bit about Jonson's urbanity, and his different voices, then a reading mainly of "The Hourglass," and a comparison with Herbert's "Church Monuments." The hourglass as symbol of vanity, but the dust also the literal remains of the dead, so that it's both the sign of time and its result (like the skull). And then a brief look at "Inviting a Friend to Supper" (and some discussion of the nature of rhyme), and "To Penshurst."
Mainly a close reading of the unutterably subtle effects of the Song to Celia "Drink to me only with thine eyes."
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
What makes it a song? What makes it a story? What's their relation? A look at "So Beauty on the water stood," in this context:
So beauty on the waters stood,
When love had sever’d earth from flood.
So when he parted air from fire,
He did with concord all inspire.
And then a motion he them taught,
That elder than himself was thought,
Which thought was yet the child of earth,
For Love is elder than his birth.
And then a brief return to "On my first son":
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scap'd world's and flesh's rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
Then another class that I thought went pretty well (two decent classes in one day!) on Beckett's Film. To put in the form of a paradoxical tweet: the title refers to Buster Keaton's irreducible and insoluble condition, existing in a film of perception, not to the fact that it's a film. But what I was glad to have articulated was the distinction opposing what I was calling the Descartes/Kant/Emersonian view that the difference between the perceived (empirical) self and the perceiving self redounded to the absolute, transcendental priority of the perceiving self's noetic vector towards freedom to the Beckett/Berkeley view that the perceived self is what actually exists (esse is percipi) and therefore our own feeble, foible-filled, failing, febrile facticity is what we actually are and what we can't escape. Beckett's Berkeley prevents (paradoxically, again) any sublimation towards idealism, and keeps us as the inescapable sum of our accidents, always covered by, always in fact identical to, a sticky film of the local, limited, particularized being that I am. (What Philip Roth, in The Counterlife, was parodying when Zuckerman meets a guy who plans to be cryonically frozen in order to achieve immortality when the science catches up with death. Zuckerman shakes his head at the idea of the guy -- Barry Shuskin -- looking forward to "a billion more years of being himself.... Forever Shuskin.") "Alas for characteristics," as James Merrill put it.
I thought this class went pretty well: first a discussion of the Trinity based on a really fine letter to the TLS by someone named Neville Martin Gwynne (hello! if you're Googling yourself: that was a great letter!). Then a brief intro to Jonson and a close reading of Jonson's beautiful epigram/epitaph "On My First Daughter," here: Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth,Mary, the daughter of their youth;Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due,It makes the father less to rue.At six months’ end she parted henceWith safety of her innocence;Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears,In comfort of her mother’s tears,Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:Where, while that severed doth remain,This grave partakes the fleshly birth;Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
We finish discussing the Trinity, and then go through the seven La Corona sonnets, where the interesting question of their temporality -- of the eternal vs. the sempiternal, of endless time vs. being outside of time -- comes up in the very question of how or where the sequence may be said to begin, since the first sonnet sums up the fact that the sequence is the crown which seems to spring out of that very first sonnet,
A quick exposition of Berkeley's idea that to be is to be perceived, followed by a viewing of Beckett's Film, starring Buster Keaton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqh6uwCkZno
I finally discuss, somewhat clumsily, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, after a brief introduction to Berkeley. A short class because the second half was given over to a viewing of Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr.
We conclude Satire 3, and talk about the difference between an aesthetics of difficulty (Donne's) and of effortlessness (e.g. Herrick and the Cavaliers). Satire 3 as promoting difficulty as promoting thought. Then on to "Batter My Heart..." and "Father, part of his double interest..." Some discussion of the NIcene Ring.
A line by line exposition of most of Satire 3 (TBC). More discussion on metonymic relations among a series of metaphors.
A class where we mainly discuss Dark City (1998, Alex Proyas). Question of memory, personal identity, love, and of course space and time. Some of the same issues as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Me, I felt that the class didn't cohere, but the students seemed to like the more extensive conversation.
A full class on the poem, and on teasing out the metonymic interaction of its metaphors. The interesting sexual switch at the very end. A discussion mid-class about whether people liked Donne passionately or not: are his wit and strangeness a bug or a feature. Is his poetry poetry you want to quote?
More on the different speakers in Donne's "Songs and Sonnets." The idea of the most capacious intelligence: the one who gets most others. How this plays out in kinds of narrative, especially fantasy fiction. Who gets whom better: Aslan or the White Witch? Voldemort or Dumbledore? Sauron or Gandalf? Yoda or Palpatine? The surprise when we're surprised that the good guys get the evil guys being a staple of narrative interest, because more generally being able to understand others' limitations is central to our assessment of literary characters. Then on to the two poems: "To his Mistress" and a beginning of "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning."
...which is an overgrand way of saying that I try to give a quick view of Heidegger on the worldhood of the world, its relation to the image, and the sorts of ontological discussions that ontologists have. A quick summary of the periods of Platonic dialogue, and a little of the Parmenides. Achilles and the tortoise. The relation of object to image, in Cavell and Blanchot. A start....
A class devoted entirely to puzzling out the figurative language in "Love's Alchemy," and the way it's partly about puzzling out figurative language. The punctuational crux of the last lines. The idea that Donne's "Songs and Sonnets" have multiple speakers and that they address each other.
More on Donne's "Ecstasy." The strange proto-modernism of Donne's addressees. Their consciously dramatic quality -- that is we're supposed to be conscious that their speaker is being dramatic, and that the drama is for us. As in "The Sun Rising," with its female speaker. Why a female speaker? Then we begin on "Love's Alchemy."
Some open considerations of Bazin. Long excursus on lumping vs. splitting. A spiel I liked about truth-makers (as in Armstrong, and Davidson, just to give a couple of references. Davidson's Tarski-style idea: if a sentence is true, there is something that makes it true). All claims that A=B, if not tautological, are not strictly speaking true. They need to be made true. What makes something true if you lump: A and B are the same. What makes something true if you split: A isn't really A. Lumping: A is something else that is not A. Splitting: A is not A. Application to Film vs. Theater vs. verbal narrative vs.... TV. Rear Window as emblematizing TV-watching. Bazin on identification and resistance to identification in film and theater respectively. Subjective camera in Rear Window.
Giving up on going through all of Out of the Past, class is confined to two more scenes and some discussion of the plot. Then on to La Jetée and the way its fixed images work: as memory, as estrangement. Some remarks on making lemonade, i.e. great art out of the foul rag and bone shop of various technical, economic, social, manufacturing constraints.
The puzzling -- even mysterious last lines of "Go and Catch a Falling Star." How not to read them. Their relation to "The Ecstasy" and the questions of bodies and minds, thus absence and presence. And the odd presence in Donne of a third person there, in so many poems.
We turn to the secular Donne, in Songs and Sonnets, and look at his views of fidelity and his arguments against it. "Woman's Constancy," "The Indifferent," "The Flea." His way of story-telling: the backstory he expects his readers are sophisticated enough to pick up in his dramatic monologues or implicit dialogues. Hilarity and subtlety combined.
Some remarks on Walter Benjamin's view of aura, and its disappearance in the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Its return thematized in the maguffin. Maguffin defined, with examples, from Pulp Fiction, Kiss Me Deadly, MI: 3, etc. Women as maguffins, in La Jetée and a host of other films. Then a close viewing of the first third of Out of the Past. Continuities and discontinuities. (NB: Marsellus, not Marcus, as I misspoke.)
Mainly a bare-bones exposition of salvation through faith (Protestant doctrine) vs. through works (Catholic): with the role that (double) pre-destination and the bondage of the will plays in the distinction, and the spirals of inwardness that arise for the Protestant poets, in particular Donne and Herbert. Excursus on Luther's reading of the Lord's hardening Pharaoh's heart in Exodus. Herbert's REDEMPTION
HAVING been tenant long to a rich Lord, Not thriving, I resolved to be bold, And make a suit unto him, to afford A new small-rented lease, and cancell th’ old. In heaven at his manour I him sought : They told me there, that he was lately gone About some land, which he had dearly bought Long since on earth, to take possession. I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth, Sought him accordingly in great resorts ; In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts : At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth Of theeves and murderers : there I him espied, Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died. Excursus on the plurality of the heavenly powers, and the E and J writers of the first four books of Moses.
Pretty much a close reading of that poem, and its paradoxes, partly via Donne's paradox V that "All things kill themseluses." We raised and thought about the question what makes death an appropriate punishment for sin. What is it that Donne is "mourning for a space"? I thought this was a pretty good discussion.
The idea of continuity -- of space, time, memory, self. We were supposed to get to continuity of narrative, but didn't, because the class was a bit of a technical disaster: no sound to go with the video. We watched a little of Marclay's The Clock -- from this clip starting at 10:15 (p.m., most likely, as will be seen), and talked about cultural cues for the time of day. Without sound we noticed the video more, but noticed less the interesting difficulty of seeing it as fragmented. Interesting conversation about it, though, so perhaps worth the listening.
[URL of clip, if you need it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cOhWtyXGXQ]
Intro to the course: philosophical issues of representation, therefore of space and time, thence of will, and therefore of self. Viewing and discussion of Christian Marclay's Telephones (1995) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH5HTPjPvyE).
First class in a course called (not by me) "Exploring the Self in 17th Century Poetry." But since that's pretty much what all my courses are (though I don't like the word "exploring" there: sounds a bit new-agey), it's an accurate enough name for the course. Here we discuss general principles and a couple of Donne's Holy Sonnets (VII and XIX). Correction to a mistake: when I said Dryden I meant (as many people do) Pope, who was of course the "versifier" of the Satires of Dr. Donne.
Last class of the term, on Keats. Voyeurism in the Ode to Psyche. The latest gods. The faded Olympians like the faded Titans in the Hyperion poems. The temple in the mind is for Psyche; the temple is the psyche. Like the young Apollo, the new poet displaces the old tradition - the figure of youth as poet, as in Stevens. Casements and other worlds in both poems.
We conclude our read through of The Triumph of Life, considering its relation to Dante and the pessimism of its view of human freedom as always perverting itself into the freedom to oppress ("signs of thought's empire over thought"). The beauty of the rhymes and the evocations. Rousseau as Wordsworth again, and the terza rima version of the Intimations Ode. A quick consideration then of "Music when soft voices die," as a poem about the residue of experiences, as an intro to the Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici, with which we conclude.
We go through about another 250 lines or so, discussing Rousseau's relation to Wordsworth and Vergil, and Shelley's to Dante; we consider what "Triumph" means, and who those nailed to the car are, starting with Napoleon and ending with Alexander the Great.
Adonais and elegy. The structure it shares with Lycidas: the world is "empty and poor" now. The dead person's absence makes the world into a world of absence. But this is not a world suitable to that person. So he's in a better place. But I am born darkly, fearfully afar. Echoes of The Eve of St. Agnes at the end of Adonais. Neoplatonism. Dante. And so to The Triumph of Life. Terza rima. The question of how Triumph would have ended. Abrams's distortions. The opening of the poem.
Relation of The Fall of Hyperion to Hyperion. Keats's narrator. "When I have fears that I may cease to be." His paralysis: overload. Overload in "To Autumn." Freedom into spareness and motion
What Keats was trying to do in Hyperion. The background of the story. Miltonic comparisons. The young Apollo. Mnemosyne. More on synesthesia.
Keats's characteristic style. His synesthesia. Related to his scopophilia. Difference between Keats's looking and Shelley's. Shelley always visionary in his looking; Keats always sensual. Loading every rift with ore. Sensuality of "The Eve of St. Agnes." Brief look at "As Hermes Once."
The politics of the poem: intense subjectivity as what can be shared or communicated to others as well. Demogorgon and the difference between "Almighty God' and Jupiter. The poet as a masterpiece of nature, adding thereby to the perceptive experience and potential freedom of the later poet. Shelley's hardheadedness (Plato, not Aeschylus).
More on Act I of Prometheus Unbound. Mercury's regret at his task. Knuckling and buckling under power. Power as corruption. The dead and their language. Earth as a character. How she appears in "On hearing of the death of Napoleon." The shade of Jupiter.
The first speech of Prometheus Unbound. Relation of exposition to imminence in Greek tragedy and in Shelley. Prometheus's asking for exposition is the beginning of the action that will unthrone Jupiter. Some background on the relation of Christian mythology to the mythology of classical antiquity. Prometheus as Satan and Christ. Landscape and subjectivity. Return to Mont Blanc and a quick exposition (for more detailed expositions see older podcasts, especially from the close reading course).
"The Two Spirits: An Allegory" as an intro to Prometheus Unbound and Mont Blanc. Prometheus Unbound as a "Lyrical Drama." Relation to Goethe, and to the idea of Lyrical Ballads. Lyrical vs. the public. Then on to the beginning of reading Mont Blanc once again.
Last class on Frankenstein, with general consideration of relation of subjectivity to the outside world, and to other minds. Satan's subjectivity: "We know no time when we were not as now." The fact that the world is what subjectivity sees in it. Making vs. finding. The sublime. The other as an object of thought, but also as another subject. Shared scenes. Bodies without heads. Alastor, Frankenstein, Witch of Atlas, Mont Blanc, Childe Harold, Excersion, Intimations Ode. The monster's superior sense of subjectivity and of other minds as compared with Victor Frankenstein.
Why "The Modern Prometheus"? Satan and Prometheus. Electricity and galvanism. Ben Franklin. Autobiographical excursus. Clumsy elements of the novel. Should Victor Frankenstein have known what "I will be with you on your wedding night" meant? Should we have?
First class on Frankenstein, but mainly via Byron (creating another being whom we endow with our own feelings' dearth) and The Witch of Atlas (Percy's creation of a visionary artificial person). The preface to Frankenstein: writing about experiences that as of yet found no true echo in your heart. (This is like Wordsworth in "Resolution and Independence" - the gladness of youth makes it possible to write well and deeply of despondency, because you're not destroyed by your own experience of it. But I don't quote Wordsworth in the class.) What it means that the moster has yellow eyes.
The Witch of Atlas as a visionary rhyme. How Percy Shelley's ottava rima differs from Byron's (we go to this late poem in his career in order to make the comparison). Some attempt to understand the politics of the poem. The sleepers. The unimportance of reality when compared to vision. What's Shelleyan about this. What Empson calls the self-involved simile: moving in the light of its own loveliness; concealing only their scorn of all concealment; lying in her own shadow. (Stevens: "Phosphor reading by his own light.")
Last class on Byron. His letter to Kinnaird. Serious story of the commandant's assassination. "Here we are / And there we go." Napoleon of rhyme. Keats. Onwards to Shelley's Ottava Rima!
Special bonus: I improvise an ottava rima stanza! (Consolation prize would be I improvise two of them.) Cantos 3 and 4 of Don Juan, with some attention to poetic form and mainly reading with some commentary, which Don Juan really begs for.
The grotesqueries and the delights of Canto 2. The narrator as delightful, inconsistent placeholder. Juan as delightful, inconsistent placeholder. The non-accretion of the past for both of them, as what makes the flexibility and radical openness of the poem possible.
Dry Bob Southey; funniness of Don Juan; hudibrastic rhymes; brief discussion of the ottava rima stanza form; mercurial range of tone; Julia's struggle not to consent with herself, not with Juan; his Byronic passiveness.
The Byronic hero; what others can say about him; what he can say about himself. The coherence of writing poetry when your lacerated breast is no longer capable of feeling pleasure or pain, hope or fear. Who should narrate the Byronic hero? Milton's narrator? Julian?Lockwood? The importance of seeing Byron's range, as given by Shelley in Julian and Maddalo (that unutterably wonderful poem), and by Byron in his own letters -- all this as the beginning of an introduction to Don Juan. The perfection of the change of tone in the canceled stanza on the MS of Canto I: "I would to heaven I were so much clay," &c.
Some discussion of what made Byron "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Letters to Lady Melbourne and to Thomas Moore. Byron's sexuality. His dog Boatswain. ("His dog was dead" -- Julian and Maddalo) Opening of Childe Harold III. Allegra. Ada Lovelace. Julian and Julian the Apostate. Shelley's characterization of Byron in Julian and Maddalo.
A comparison of the Invocation to Book 3 of Paradise Lost and The Intimations Ode, which we complete reading. Celestial light vs. the light of common day. The mirror image similarities Wordsworth explores: he (now) sees only those things visible to mortal sight, in contrast to Milton. Loss as gain and the fall from heaven in both poets.
First class on Shelley's relation to Wordsworth. An introduction about Romanticism and Milton. The two Romantic generations. Shelley's critical sonnet "To Wordsworth" and its relation to Wordsworth's Intimations Ode.
Last class: a review of the irrationality of the square root of 2; and of Cantor's diagonalization proof. How the difference between infinity by addition and by division corresponds to the difference between the infinity of natural numbers (which are all under the rubric of infinity by addition) and the reals between 0 and 1, all of which may be ranged under the rubric of infinity by division. What makes one set "larger" than another. The idea of a list as involving the concept of "next." The non-denumerability of the reals means that the concept of next doesn't apply to them. Zeno's paradoxes rely on the idea of the next: the next point on space, the next time slice. The larger order of infinity that comprises the reals means that Achilles passes the tortoise at a point between two rationals, which are the only points Zeno considered, in considering the next rational point the tortoise gets to, while Achilles is still at a previous rational point. A similar intuition applies to trying to come up with a commensurate scale for measuring hypotenuse and leg of an isosceles right triangle. Whatever units you divide one line segment up into, there'll never be a point which is the exact passing point, so to speak, as you go from fewer of those units than you need to measure the other line segment to more of those units than you need that you'll have exactly the right number -- no point, you could say, where one line segment is passing another at a rationally measurable distance from its other endpoint. And so farewell to this class. (I'm actually not sure why there are 24 and not 25 classes. I may have miscounted somewhere)
Some discussion of the nature of proof; listing rationals between 0 and 1; function vs. algorithm; question whether any list of irrationals is possible; Cantor's diagonalization proof that it isn't; discussion about 1-many correspondence between rationals and reals; approach to the idea that the power set of an infinite set is a higher order of infinity because you could do the diagonalization proof on binary expansions between 0 and 1, leading to the construction 2^n numbers not in the original set. I am interested in what computer scientists make of the discussion we (Kenneth Foner and I in particular) had (and which I am not pretty but not fully confident about) concerning the difference between a function that picks out all primes (which would allow you to use the Sieve of Eratosthenes efficiently, in, um polynomial time [right?], and which we can't [right?]) and an algorithm which ultimately has to do it through a somewhat stream-lined brute force procedure.
Paper assignment,* which requires a lengthy exposition of the set-up for Newcomb's problem; segue via Descartes and an exposition of the difference between romanticism and Cartesian skepticism, with Kant as a pivot, to Shelley's Mont Blanc. A word more about that difference: Descartes was trying to prove that it wasn't all in the mind; the Romantics were trying to prove that it more ore less was. But they are similar (via Kant) in believing that the external world was empirical trash, that this gave them access to, or at least desire for, a supersensible externality: magnitude itself (say) and not the pseudo-magnitude of the empirical world. End of Shelley's Mont Blanc.
*Here is the paper assignment as posted to the class site: If you weren't in class yesterday, you'll probably want to listen to the podcast, where we discussed the second paper topic at some length. This is the short version:
An extremely acute reader of human character gives you a box whose contents are either $1,000,000 or nothing. She also offers you $10,000, which you are free to take or leave. If she thinks you'll take the $10,000, she won't have put anything in the box she's given you; when you open it it will be empty. If she thinks you won't take it, but will be satisfied with the mystery-box, she'll have put $1,000,000 in it, which you will find when you open it. But you can't open the box until you either take or reject the $10,000.
She's done this hundreds of thousands of times before, and has never been wrong in her predictions as to what people would do - take the $10,000 (everyone who did got nothing in the mystery box), or leave it (everyone who did got $1,000,000 in the mystery box). She can't see the future, though, and she has no magical powers to decide what will be in the box after you make your choice. She's put something in the box, or hasn't, depending only on her ability to dope out your character or personality, to figure out what you will do in the situation in question. What will you do and why?
Make your answer vivid; make the argument one about what you would do and why, not necessarily what you think a perfectly rational agent would do. Write it, if you like, as a short story, or in whatever way you can make your own thinking most compelling, most about how you would think this out if it were really happening. (After all, she's predicted what you would do when it really happens.)
You can, and should, think about using any of the ideas we've covered this semester: I could see a way in which practically any of them could be relevant.
Don't do any outside reading on this problem. Don't talk to your friends about it, don't look it up on Wikipedia (as some of you did for the Pascal paper). Think this through in your own way.
Paul Klee on space and time -- a line taken out for a walk. Back to Kant and a tedious brief exposition of the third critique. The beautiful as the harmonious, showing the mind as tuned or tuned up, with the willing that organizes perception or the structure of appearance coming from elsewhere, viz. the beautiful object. (This is what Kant calls the reflective rather than regulative use of reason, and is the reason the analytic of the beautiful in the Third Critique is so important: it shows the harmony of the mind apart from its own willfulness.) The mathematical sublime as the will engaged under the rubric of the understanding: apprehension and its relation to comprehension. The dynamic sublime as the will engaged under the rubric of the will. Illustration via Shelley's Mont Blanc, which we begin reading.
Trying to get to Shelley's Mont Blanc, we spend another whole class on Kant, and on the structure of appearance. How this leads to a Kantian idea of the will. Relation of Kant to Pascal: in Kant you don't just decide to believe in God, because of the incentive to do so: you believe in the freedom of your will because of your duty to do so, a duty which presumes that freedom because it is a duty to presume that freedom. Next: The Sublime.
We discuss Kant and causality via Hume's skepticism with respect to cause. Kant's defense of causality as how to distinguish space from time. Simstim in Neuromancer as an example of the necessity of causality as an essential component of any perception: does the inevitable flux come from me or the world? A very short introduction to the Critical Project.
What began looking like an interminable introduction to the Halting Problem. Things ellipses can mean in an infinite decimal expansion. More on one to one correspondence: its unrecoverable priority to counting like oral language's priority to written; Turing tests; Descartes on self-knowledge; the Dixie Flatline and his saying that it feels like he's sentient; the fact that Case is also a flatline, at least when jacked in. (Last podcast before Thanksgiving.)
Descartes everywhere, and in particular in the theory of aether; excursus on the statue of Ether in the Public Garden; excursus on Rick Deckard; aether as extended substance; how waves work; how waves work in empty space; aetherial mechanics and dynamics; the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica; Borges; the nature of space, in Kant and in William Gibson; the irrationality of the square root of 2
A class on Prisoner's Dilemma, via game shows based on it. Making it vivid through fixing the stakes (Nazi reprisals instead of time in jail, for example). Five game show versions. Evidential decision theory and how to influence good readers of personality: by changing your beliefs about what you'll do, and therefore your commitments as well. Just as in Pascal's wager.
Discussion about Pascal on the infinite. Excursus on Einstein and the constancy of the speed of light. Cost-benefits and how to think about Pascal's wager.
I meant to get us to game theory today, to talk about it with respect to the idea of other minds. So, based on the 70% contest from the previous class (the winning number would have been 20.8) we started discussing polls and Keynesian Beauty Contests. My theory that people thought their candidate would lose was exploded (at least in the classroom). Discussion of eternity in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then of the meaning of its title.
A discussion about elementary ways of thinking about probability (which is always counterintuitive), as a way to start thinking about game theory, and the ways in game theory that we have to consider others considering what we'll do when we consider what they do, etc. Pascal as founder of science of probability. Peirce on cutting a deck once for the fate of the universe. More discussion than anything else.
A class first on what it means to argue against the best version of an argument, including Darwin's approval of Plato's idea of pre-existence (as monkeys), then on to Pascal which leads to a discussion of the anthropic principle and of the sublime, in Kant but mainly in Burke: grasping in thought what could annihilate you in fact.
We consider the difference between infinity by addition and by division, in Aristotle and Cantor; the way the rationals are denumerable; Macbeth on the present moment vs. ownership of the future; Macbeth's syllables and Dickinson; the difference again between syllable and sound; and (naturally enough) iambic pentameter.
Augustine on meaning and understanding a sentence as instantaneous. His reading of the beginning of the Gospel of John. Ontology and its relation to language. Berkeley. Occam's razor. Ptolmey, The Sheffer stroke. Thought as the criterion for Occam's razor. Sentences and time.
Beckett. Who he was. His interest in Augustine. Hilarity and depth of his work. Augustine. Back to Poincarré on math induction. What we can see here and now. Difference between induction and deduction. Wittgenstein's point, from Poincarré, that proof by induction doesn't yield one QED, one string of symbols as the end-point of a mechanical process but two. It's only in the mind that the two can be combined into a single insight: this is a synthetic activity. We may make claims about an infinite number of examples but we have to synthesize those claims. Turing machines (and who Turing was). Relation to formal manipulation of symbols. States and soda machines.
[Fixed: was missing audio file before] Why read Augustine if you're not religious? What philosophical questions are like. Motives to ask them: to prove that you're right, or to wonder. How they questions are better than the arguments they're for: Zeno thought he was proving there was no motion, but in fact he raised very subtle questions about motion. Why philosophy matters to people. Kinds of questions that Augustine wonders about. Math induction.
A couple of paragraphs from Aristotle - his thinking about Zeno. Relation between motion, mind, and time. Motion without time. Time slices, four dimensional stasis. The moment of transition. Is space real? Is nothingness spatial?
Axioms and self-evidence. Euclid's fifth postulate. Non-Euclidean geometry and the difference between infinite and unbounded space. Anaximander and Parmenides, and the principle of sufficient reason.
More on the difference between extension and intension. Intension as similar to the category of the interesting, and paradoxes of interestingness. Interestingness of 6210001000 and 1729. Zeno's paradoxes. Galileo's paradox.
Mainly about the idea of one-to-one correspondence, after some review of the infinity of primes, and then of some controversies in set theory, especially over whether intensional or extensional ways of referring to sets are more basic. Counting as coming after one-to-one correspondence. One-to-one correspondence and infinite sets.
How it could be that we could think of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere (to use the formula Borges is so fond of). A little bit about infinite sets. Seeing the Aleph (or another Aleph) in the Aleph. The relation of such sight to the Library of Babel: could there be an accurate (multi-volume) catalogue in the Library of Babel which listed every catalogue that didn't list itself? Leonardo on focal points and their relation to the Aleph. By occasion, mention of the Kabbalistic idea of the Aleph uttered only once in history, by God at Mt. Sinai.
We mainly discuss Borges's "Library of Babel" and its implications, but this leads us a little to discussions of black holes, the sphericality of the universe, the nature of codes, meaning, OuLiPo, Quine, and infinitesimals.
THINKING ABOUT INFINITY
“The definitive clarification of the nature of the infinite, instead of pertaining just to the sphere of specialized scientific interests, is needed for the dignity of the human intellect itself.” –David Hilbert
Syllabus:
W 5 Sept Introduction: Dickinson
M 10 Sept Borges: “Library of Babel" “The Aleph"
Leonardo da Vinci (in class distribution)
W 12 Sept Hilbert: “On the Infinite,” (Latte) Borges, Early Greek Philosophers [EGP], Chapter 3
M 17 Sept NO CLASS (Rosh Hashanah) W 19 Sept Russell: “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy” (Latte) EGP, 9-11 Th 20 Sept EGP, 9-11 (Brandeis Monday)
M 24 Sept Aristotle (Latte), Poincaré: “On the Nature of Mathematical Reasoning” (Latte) W 26 Sept NO CLASS (Yom Kippur)
M 1 Oct NO CLASS (Sukkot) W 3 Oct Aristotle, Augustine, Confessions Books: 1-4
M 8 Oct NO CLASS (Shmini Atzeret) T 9 Oct Augustine, Confessions, Book: 11 W 10 Oct Shakespeare: Macbeth
M 15 Oct Macbeth, Tennyson: “Tithonus” W 17 Oct Pascal: Pensées, nos. 47, 68, 113, 131, 147-66, 198-201, 220, 271, 373, 418, 420, 427, 564, 597-99, 653, 682, 688, 721-23, 919
M 22 Oct Pascal W 24 Oct Tucker: “Prisoner’s Dilemma” (Latte) FIRST PAPER DUE
M 29 Oct Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man W 31 Oct Portrait
M 5 Nov Descartes: Meditations W 7 Nov Descartes, Lem “Non Serviam” (Latte)
M 12 Nov William Gibson: Neuromancer W 14 Nov Gibson
M 19 Nov Kant on space and time W 21 Nov NO CLASS (Thanksgiving) Th 22 Nov NO CLASS
M 26 Nov Kant W 28 Nov Shelley: Mt. Blanc
M 3 Dec Shelley W 5 Dec EGP 5-6, Smolin “Atoms of Space and Time”
M 10 Dec Aaronson: “Who Can Name the Bigger Number?” W 12 Dec Review of Cantor SECOND PAPER DUE
The Brain -- is wider than the Sky -- For -- put them side by side -- The one the other will contain With ease -- and You -- beside
The Brain is deeper than the sea -- For -- hold them -- Blue to Blue -- The one the other will absorb -- As Sponges -- Buckets -- do --
The Brain is just the weight of God -- For -- Heft them -- Pound for Pound -- And they will differ -- if they do -- As Syllable from Sound --
--Emily Dickinson
[Renaissance poetry: last class] Two sonnets of Milton's: Milton's dream compared with Adam's; Adam before the fall; Eve after the fall.
[close reading] Last class: a last class, on Merrill's Book of Ephraim; La Tempesta, on the surface nothing less than earthly life in all its mystery; holding still, being held still; photography; burning the box (Children while you can...).
[renaissance poetry] Last official class, a short one, on Marvell and his self-involved imagery: the flowers that stand under their own colors in "Upon Appleton House," the drop of dew that looks like its own tear, the self-sustaining images of "The Garden," and "Damon the Mower."
[close reading] We continue the Book of Ephraim; the furnace, the lives of animals from Miranda to Maisie to the cats and dogs that keep on raining. What it means for God and the Unconscious to be one. Water imagery. Strato.
[renaissance poetry] A last or almost last class on Paradise Lost. God's evil sense of humor. Similarities between God and Satan. Adam and the son's superiority to them. The point - not quite made in the class - is the way the narrator slowly comes to see this.
[close reading] Merrill continued: keeping the bumpkin seers down on the farm. Erzulie's heart emblem. Miranda and the "Happy Sign."
[close reading] We continue, with Ephraim's long prose discourse, from section Q, and then with Maya's dream, and Erzulie's heart emblem.
[close reading] Some discussion of Colm Toibin's reading, and how good it was, and how much The Master is about English, American, and Irish issues. We continue mainly with Ephraim section I and discussion of Tom's asking JM to "spell it out": what does that turn out to mean. Some discussion of Maya Deren. Here's Youtube of her "Ritual in Transfigured Time" which is the dream she has in the city in section M: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctFPrLtSWg8&feature=colike
[close reading] Attention mainly to section I, but with some interpretation of what it would mean to break the (genetic) code to smithereens: mutagenic agents, that would be, including the radiation after Hiroshima ("smashed atoms of the dead, my dears"). Some snarkiness about Colm Toibin's novel about Henry James since he read later that day: his reading was grand and I regret the snarkiness, as I say in the next class, TK.
[renaissance poetry] Paradise Lost: its characters, its ambitions. Meaning vs. name, including the meaning of the muse Urania. Falling onto earth in Homer and in Milton.
[close reading] More on who or what Ephraim might be. A set of quasi-grammatical constructions, like poems. Did they even have a telephone? They had Ephraim: fruitful out of affliction.
[close reading] A second class on Ephraim: what it would mean to believe or disbelieve in Ephraim. How the Ouija board works: the desire both to make it say what you want it to say and to disbelieve that you're doing that. Writing as interpretation; interpretation as writing. Quotation from Middlemarch on the candle picking out a perfect circle in the mirror: mirrors in Ephraim, thought, wish fulfillment.
[renaissance poetry] Cowley's elegy on Crashaw, Crashaw's metaphysical intensity, Suckling as a change of pace.
[closer reading] An introduction to Merrill's Book of Ephraim through a consideration of the formal games of OuLiPo. How the language given to you becomes what you put together.
[renaissance poetry] The convergence of prayer with the earnestness of passionate utterance that makes that utterance seem to be self-ratifying. "Redemption" and its weird temporality explained (at least in part) by "Affliction (III)" "The Flower"
[close reading] Last clase on Turn of the Screw. Importance of the use/mention distinction. Who figures whom out first? Why Miles had do die.
[close reading] Turn of the Screw, again, with some excursus on rhyme and orthography and literacy and the rhythms of processing speed. With a return to Turn of the Screw and the question "what we had done to Flora."
[renaissance poetry] A second class on George Herbert, focusing on "Hope" and "Denial." What it means to address poems of these sort to the figure supposed to answer the prayer just by hearing or listening to it.
[close reading] Working out more of what we know happened. How did Miss Jessel and Peter Quint die?
[renaissance poetry] First (of two) classes on George Herbert. His subtlety. The importance of his formal thinking. His conversational style. "The Pulley," "Church Monuments," "The Collar," and "Redemption."
[close reading] Ambiguity and meta-ambiguity in Turn of the Screw. Back to Dworkin: what does it mean to say a work should be the best that it could be? Does that mean that it should give us our preferred outcome? Cases of King Lear and Great Expectations considered. The idea of changing your taste, or learning what would make it best. Then back to thinking about Turn of the Screw.
[close reading] The overdetermination of all phenomena in Turn of the Screw. Such overdetermination as an aesthetic parameter. Examples from the book. Spookiness of the fact that it isn't finished until Henry James dies: as with a will, his death is what completes the work.
[Renaissance poetry] A class on Herrick, including"The Hock Cart" and "Corinna's gone amaying." Reversal of standard carpe diem theme. Cavalier poetry. His poems about jonson.
[close reading] The governess. Her character. Compared to Blake's Nurse. Different possibilities of the relation between the characters and what they know the others know.
[renaissance poetry] A class on Ben Jonson: his lyrics, his country house poem "To Penshurst," his songs.
[close reading] Part 1 of our reading of Henry James's Turn of the Screw, on the frame narrative. What is the narrator's relation to Douglas. What is the narrator's gender. Reasons for the frame.
[close reading] How to read: Ronald Dworkin's idea that we should read a work as the best work it could possibly be. What would make Roland as good as it could be? That he's the quester, and that he succeeds, and that the line he succeeds in reaching - hiding in plain sight - he reaches adequately, unlike those fairy tale goals that the hero gets to in the wrong way and must depart from in order to get to them in the magical way. Adequately here means that it's the best line it could be, as mysterious as in the original.
[close reading] Relation of poem to the Intimations Ode and Mont Blanc. Interesting referential confusion in student comment. Edgar's song. Its contextlessness. The fact that the title is in quotation marks: it is a quotation. Slughorns and slogans. The hoary cripple. The ominous tract which all agree hides the Dark Tower being the text ("tract") of Lear.
[Renaissance poetry] Who his speaker is. The woman in "Break of Day." Her grace. The allegedly variety-loving speaker of "The Indifferent." The Holy Sonnets, especially "O to vex me..." Their paradoxes. Truth in the third satire.
[Renaissance poetry] Some poems of Donne's: his salacious wit, and the difference between the speaker who'd really think this salaciousness was attractive, and the more sophisticated speaker Donne is actually presenting, who thinks the game of exaggerated salaciousness is fun and therefore flirtatious: a flirtatious flirting with flirtatiousness. And a different and more bitter Donne in "Love's Alchemy."
[close reading] Shelley's Mont Blanc concluded, and some reflections on the sublime and its relation to the human.
[close reading] The question of what the poem's about becomes mapped into the question of whether the poem subsumes the mountain or the mountain the poem. If the poem is about the mountain, it, the poem, is still master. But if the poem can't manage to capture and communicate the mountain, then it isn't: it's about its own defeat as the mountain pierces the infinite sky. Comparison, again, to DIckinson's "sky" in "The Brain is wider than the Sky." Quick mention of the difference, in that poem of syllable and sound. God would be just a sound, the natural world, but the difference the brain might make in turning sound into syllable is the difference that imputing meaning makes. If the mind imputes meaning, then the home of meaning is in the mind.
[Renaissance Poetry] Nashe's litany, brightness falls from the air. Excursus on the poetic purity of the out-of-context: Browning; Kenneth Koch's "Songs from the Plays." Daniel's La Corona anticipations, and his graceful bow to Sidney and Spenser in "Musophilus" [3/6/12]
[closer reading] Mont Blanc in earnest: the two possible meanings or subjects of the first stanza (adverting mind, commanding mountain): the struggle between the mountain and the mind to determine which will be the metaphor for which. (3/7/12)
[renaissance poetry] More on Astrophel and Stella, especially the fourth song; also some attention to Shakespearean sonnets.
[close reading class] How Wordsworth used Milton (with reminders about Harold Bloom): comparisons with Book 3 of Paradise Lost; "Methought I saw my late espoused saint" and "Surprised by Joy"; the first lines of Shelley's Mont Blanc.
[Close reading 3/1/12] Against all odds, we finish the Intimations Ode. On to Mont Blanc!
[Close reading, 2/29/12] We continue onwards with the Intimations Ode, and the consideration of the child as the best philosopher but also at strife with its own blessedness. Whence the joy that Wordsworth declares?
[Renaissance poetery 2/29/12] Sidney's sophistication. The sestina form. More of the events of Astrophel and Stella. To be concluded next week.
[Close reading class] A general discussion of how Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge each became a Tory at / last, and on freedom of the soul in general. Return to the Intimations Ode at the end of class.
[Note: a minute or two at the beginning and end are just crowd walla: couldn't get GarageBand to cut those snippets off.] A talk at UCLA during the February vacation. Mainly on Milton and the relation of justice and the justice of the fact that we can judge what is just to narrative and vindication in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, with some more general remarks on Kant and others.
[Close reading] After the dead end of his attempt to recover the Visionary Gleam, Wordsworth gives up the Intimations Ode for a couple of years. Then he reboots, imagining a different source for the clouds of glory that he saw in youth, since "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." We begin considering this new, Platonic perspective.
[Note: I am podcasting two classes this semester. The shorter podcasts are from the close reading course; the longer ones, e.g. this one, are from the Renaissaince lyric course]
We look at what makes Southwell's "Burning Babe" work, and what doesn't: students defend the poem; and we look at some particularly gorgeous passages from Marlowe's "Hero and Leander."
Last class before vacation.
[Note: I am podcasting two classes this semester. The shorter podcasts are from the close reading course, e.g. this one; the longer are from the Renaissaince lyric course]
We begin going through the Intimations Ode, after pausing (natch) to consider its motto from "My heart leaps up." Some consideration of the crisis lyric, following on from Frost's Birches.
Finally, a reading of Frost's Birches. Metaphor: tenor and vehicle. Relation to the Intimations Ode. The poem as a version of climbing birches and returning. The idea of the crisis lyric, of a poem as a way to think things through.
Some passages from The Faerie Queene, particularly Mutablitie and the Bower of Bliss. Question of relation of classical mythology to Christianity. Typology and the fourfold principle of interpretation discussed.
Bloom's ideas of poetic vocation. The Intimations Ode as everyone's vocation. Demonstration of the sense of poetic vocation through a consideration of Yeats's Circus Animal's Desertion. Wittgenstein on feelings.
Most people hadn't done the reading, so this is a desultory (root meaning: jumping around) class on Spenser, the aim being to give them some sense of what he's doing. We look briefly at the Epithalamion, at the Amoretti, and at the last two stanzas of the Mutabilitie Cantos.
Poetry's fictional addressee is the personification of Love. When Love leaves, Love is abandoned. A character only in literary space: a character who can only be fictional, which is what makes the personification so sad. That's what's going on in Bishop, Shelley's "When the Lamp is Shattered" and Yeats's "When you are old." NB: I think that I come close to being able to say what I mean here.
Love as the burning boy in Bishop's "Casabianca": metaphor and personification. Metaphor vs. simile. Pound's haiku like poem. The background in Southwell's high conceit in his "The Burning babe." Freud and the dream of the burning child. Love personified when all that's left of the desired other is the personified desire for the other: like her as another to who somehow is adequate to our passionate gried; like ourselves for the same reason, and neither of us, but rather the thing lost and returning to lament its loss. Yeats's "When you are old": her face, Love's face.
Two of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey's poems. Violation of Petrarchan convention in "The Soote Season." How its rhymes work. "Ye Happy Dames" and the poetry of absence.
Who organizes the voices organizing voices in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience? How does Bishop make us of Hemans's "Casabianca"? Digression on enjambment. Bishop's "Casabianca" as a love poem. Student reading of three wonderful "Songs of Experience" responses to Hemans.
Petrarch performed, and Wyatt and Surrey's translations. The nature of translation for Wyatt: the estrangement that he himself allegorizes and embraces under the name of Love. Digression on allegory, via Edward Gorey:
A quick retrospect of the play of voices in the Nurse's songs, then most of the class on the two versions of the Chimney Sweeper, with attention to the difference between Blake as presenter of these poems and their first person singer.
How the Nurse's Song differs in the Songs of Experience. Polyphanic voices. Who the real speakers are, in both versions.
Skelton on Phillip Sparrow, and on Chaucer. Potted history of English rhyme, and of rhyme in general. Rhyme and decorum: Cole Porter's listing songs. Wyatt's rhyming in the Petrarchan Sonnet "The long love that in my thought doth harbor." Quick reading of "Whoso list to hunt."
A discussion of lullabies in general, and the way that they aim at more than one audience: the child who shouldn't hear them, and us who do. A consideration, next, of the innocence version of Blake's Nurse's Song.
We rush through the rest of Auden's "Lullaby," with some attention to prosodic innovations and subtlety, but with every intention of moving on to other poems Wednesday.
We go over Wyatt's "The Flee From Me" again, and then do a close reading of Herbert's "Love" (III) as a descendant of Wyatt's poem. We pay special attention to the tenses of dialogue
Some more about the adjectives in Auden's "Lullaby." The transposition of the word "human" from her to him. A consideration of Yeats's "Cradle Song" as a sort of precursor.
Mainly on Wyatt's "The Flee from Me," as a poem of disillusion, wonder, and astonishing subtlety and depicting the psychology of love and disappointment. Here's the poem: They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild and do not remember That sometime they put themself in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise Twenty times better; but once in special, In thin array after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewithall sweetly did me kiss And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
It was no dream: I lay broad waking. But all is turned thorough my gentleness Into a strange fashion of forsaking; And I have leave to go of her goodness, And she also, to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served I would fain know what she hath deserved.
This is the first class of a course on the close reading of poetry. It will consist, at least for the first half, of intense reading of poems for as long as is necessary, with no time pressure. It's not a course designed to get you reading a lot; it's designed to get you thinking a lot. We start out with some lullabies, first with Auden's
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
A somewhat giddily desultory last class, mainly on Samson, though with some attention to Paradise Regained and much about patience and heroic martyrdom. What being patient means. Milton's amazing prosody in Sonnet 16: "They also serve who only stand and wait." Compared to Jesus standing in PR 4. Some biographical account of Milton's blindness. Milton and the Book of Job. Reading Samson instead of seeing it. What happens to the boy who guides him? Is Dalila morally reproachable? Is Samson ultimately a terrorist?
Considerations from Areopagitica for the understanding of Milton: knowing good only by means of evil. How you can only know one if you know the other. How then the double fall of Adam and Eve requires Adam to know evil (that Eve has fallen) before he's eaten the fruit because she has. After her fall, and before Adam's, humanity both has and hasn't eaten the fruit (they're one person as far as that goes), and so knows good and evil before knowing good and evil. Thus he is already ruined ("me with the hath ruined," even before he eats. He chooses with full knowledge, and (it seems to me) chooses rightly.
How it's only humans in the whole universe who thinks things through. And therefore who fall on behalf of those who think things through. They think silently, too, keep their thoughts from each other.
What kinds of judgments does God leave to us? Plot as typology: learning how to understand the climax. In Paradise Lost we learn to use our own judgment in deciding about God's. Faithfulness always a good. So when Adam judges that Eve is real and that he will stay with her, he is extending a test already given him by God, with respect to the creation of Eve. But this time God says he fails it. This lecture, alas, was cut off so the last ten minutes are missing (iPad fail). But this is essentially what it is about.
Dreams in Milton: the way dream figures are always for us and therefore allegorical, and not for themselves. But in Milton this isn't true: the point is to discover the extent to which we're dreams (like Orpheus and Calliope) and the way that beings with the ephemerality and fragility of dreams -- us -- can nevertheless suffer. All by way of reading the Invocation to Book 7.
More on the quasi-invocation to Book IV, and about Miltonic ambiguity: two different ways of coming to the same end. Here either he or God could have produced the saving voice: it doesn't matter. But neither of them does, despite the fact that John of Patmos hears a voice from the future. Invocation and prayer are similar: the request is self-granting. But not in Book IV. We then consider Satan's use of necessity, the tyrant's plea, and compare it to God's.
We look at the quasi-invocation to Book IV and compare it to Raphael's failure to have such a warning voice for Adam and Even in Books 5 ff. What are the limits of his affability? This is a continuation of the question: who judges? and its answer: only humans. We broach the question then: fallen or unfallen humans? in parallel to the question: fallen or unfallen angels?
We consider the question who can be an adequate judge of God's ways, starting with the Invocation to Book 1, and then looking at the pusillanimity of the loyal angels in Book 3. We notice the way the Son manages God, but also that none of the other angels do. So it's not only the case that the rebel angels aren't able to judge God; the loyal angels aren't either. To be continued in the next class....
We finish up with the Invocation to Book III, and discuss Protestantism's (and particularly Milton's) view of Catholicism. Worshipping anything in the external world is worshipping an idol. Imagining that anything in the external world is magic, including the fruit of the tree of knowledge is idolatry. This means that knowledge of good and evil really does come out of a recognition of the fact that one has freely eaten of the tree: freedom and guilt are correlated. This also means that there's something you might call the converse of allegory going in in Paradise Lost. The fruit isn't allegorical; it's literal. Eating it forces you to recognize yourself as allegorizing your own guilt. You eat the fruit and feel rightly guilty, so that your own action is an allegory of your sin. I thought that I explained this fairly decently, and am sorry to say that once again a technical problem cut the class off half way through. No doubt I'll repeat myself next class.
We continue our consideration of the mind as its own place: the continuity between the lady and Satan. The relative unimportance of the outside world, therefore. We begin considering the Invocation to Book 3.
We consider freedom and fate in Paradise Lost, and the question of God vs. Satan; and talk about some of Milton's heresies, including his anti-Trinitarianism. NB: this recording ends abruptly half way through, because of a software glitch.
Comus vs. the lady. The moral asymmetry of rape: seduction is better with respect to the victim but worse with respect to devotion to abstract moral principle, because rape (as the Lady says) does not touch her mind, whereas seduction would. And yet rape is clearly a far worse crime than seduction, because it enslaves and does violence to the victim as seduction doesn't. So the moral quality of Comus is ambiguous as long as he remains a seducer. When he becomes a would-be rapist, he is clearly evil but also clearly impotent in his wish to do evil, since nothing he can do to the lady discredits her.
We conclude our discussion of Lycidas, by considering the austerity of its ending: the image of a world of absence in which all the false surmise that precedes it is gone. Then on to Comus, the subject of this and the next class.
We take a detour through a general account of how debate works in Milton - the way he presents both sides and his essentially dramatic structure, derived as much from Plato as from Shakespeare, and the way he thinks about the moral status of a dramatic structure, where each side seeks to convert the other. The various speakers in Lycidas, the happy fall in Paradise Lost: all are about seeing different routes to morality, including exposure to evil argument (as in Aeropagitica). Comedy vs. tragedy - is the fall is fortunate then comedy can go through error to truth. If the fall is tragic, then there is no hope. Comedy would allow for recovery of truth through different points of view.
We begin discussing Milton by starting out on Lycidas, and the nature of pastoral and pastoral elegy, as a segue from Book VI of The Faerie Queene. Lycidas as a poem in which Milton demonstrates his own power.
Last and I think BEST class on the Faerie Queene: scopophilia and narraive. Colin Clout and the Graces are present to the hidden Calidore, as Amoret has been present to Britomart in the house of Busirane. Voyeurism: they're present to us but we're not present to them. Kleinian reading of this scenario. Paradoxes of fiction and fictional interest. They'll reappear in Milton as well. Tomorrow: Lycidas!
Book Vi as pastoral. Native courtesy. Class distinction. Courtesy innate, but if it's innate it seems to indicate high class origins. Paradoxes of courtesy. Calidore and Colin Clout.
We continue considering the relation of difference and variety to uniformity, under the aspects of both justice and courtesy in Books V and VI. How can variety coexist with courtesy. A card trick (and much embarrassed silence) shows how the random can sync with the coordinated: the lesson of the Mutabilitie Cantos too.
The relation of justice to courtesy. The openmindedness of the latter. Beheadings everywhere. Arthegall vs. the leveling gyant, part I.
Adjudication in Book 5: Retributive vs. distributive justice. Some background on English-Irish strife. Revenge as wild justice. Can justice come into play between nations?
Scudamor at the Temple of Venus. Jealousy and friendship. Love and hate. The relation of all to the idea of justice, broached in Book 5
The Aristotlean idea of friendship: the friend as second self. The nature of this combined subjectivity. Its relation to love, and jealousy. Siblings. Marriage. Weddings.
The spectrum of virtues from private to social. Similarities and differences between love and friendship. Their relation to jealousy.
The philosophical relation of matter to form in the Garden of Adonis. The strange reversal in Spenser, whereby matter is eternal, but forms decay. What this has to do with poetry. Time the troubled. Jealousy vs. chastity.
Living in the land of Faery, vs. living in reality, and vs. living in the world of Platonic forms. The proem to Book 6. The Garden of Adonis and what it was like to live there once -- the Wordsworthian strain in Spenser. Knowing what it was like "by tryall." Literary need: the creation and establishment of that kind of need.
Allegory for whom? Why the house of Busirane? Whom is it for? Britomart? Amoret? Scudamor? How does the House of Busirane work in each of these three cases?
Allegory and human individuality. What it means to turn people into allegories. A version of road rage. Temporal fouls ups as Britomart wounds Marinell after she sees Florimel racing to aid the already-wounded Marinel. What Britomart's wound means. Her pleasure in her distress. Seeing and wounding. Adonis.
Plot vs. allegory in Britomart. Allegory in the service of plot. Allegories about the primacy of plot, of human character to symbolization.
Guyon vs. Britomart: why? How do chastity and temperance find difficulty harmonizing? Arthur and Guyon go chasing Florimel. What could that mean? Why is Timias the one figure who chases the Foster? Castle Joyous. Britomart's wound by Gardante. What is the meaning of that wound?
The Bower of Bliss. The lovely lay sung there. My discovery about its amazing formal properties, with gratifying cry of amazement from a student. How the Palmer and Guyon are able to ignore it. Preparation for Book III.
Guyon's self-temptation, as with Mammon. Why he does it -- his anorectic personality. Mirth as another who is not another. Guyon's view that everything is for him, contrasted with Red Crosse's view, or at least what he learns.
More on Guyon's priggishness; the relationship between temperance and self-certainty; why temperance is so stiff; a return to Despair in Book 1 and the beauty of his temptations; the tension between beauty and allegorical doctrine in Spenser.
More about Book I of the Faerie Queene, with some consideration of the relation of the externalization of allegory to the internal motives of character. Orgoglio, Arthur, Despair.
We continue talking about the relation of allegory to character, and also about the sin which most besets holiness -- pride -- and the context and ground for that sin: error. Why and how are those three things related? When and how should you read for the allegory, when for the plot?
(Note that the class scheduled for today, January 27, has been canceled due to snow. Next update next week.)
We start with the structure of the Spenserian stanza, with special attention to the middle line. Then on to the first four cantos of Book 1, with some plot summaries and some general remarks of what happens when an allegorical figure shows up. How does that figure relate to the mind of the person for-whom that figure is?
This is the first real class of the semester. We think a little bit about what allegory would mean, for Spenser and for Milton, by starting out with a reading of Milton's Sonnet 23 ("Methought I saw my late espouséd saint") -- the allegorical appearance of love, sweetness, goodness in her person. In Spenserian and Miltonic allegory, it's not that figures who are present represent abstractions: it's that abstraction becomes present as and in the other person. Sort of Levinasian, though I don't say so in the Podcast.
A last, make-up class, notionally on the Essay on Man. Reconsideration of the heroic couplet after Smart, Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Philosophical poetry and a return to the question of the sublime. Kantian idea of purposiveness without purpose in the well-ordered beautiful, and the contra-finality of the sublime: relation between the early and late eighteenth century as the sublime becomes of greater and greater interest. Some final observations about the brilliance of Pope's versification.
The beginning of Romanticism proper. The perceiving, half-creating consciousness in Coleridge and Wordsworth. Vicarious experience. Memory and memory of memory. Hartley and Dorothy to have different experiences. Loss and recompense. No recompense without loss. Meditative blank verse vs. the heroic couplet.
Paradise Lost concluded: Parallels and parodies: The Son, Sin, Eve as reflections of those they derive from. The great chain of being; angelic eating; angelic sex; requirements of justice according to God and according to Satan; Adam's self-sacrifice for Eve.
Freedom on conscience in Protestantism. How it plays out in Satan. His belief in his own conscience is what makes it possible for him to believe in his own guilt as well. The non-magical powers of the fruit. Milton's suggestion, in inviting us to judge him, that God is just because it's justice, not because he's God. The fiat preventing Adam and Eve from eating it considered in two possible lights: that God may dispose and bid what shall be right; or that it is right to show gratitude to God. The same situation in heaven when Satan rebels against what he regards as the arbitrary apotheosis of the Son. (A difference, not mooted, is that the Son is a person, so in fact more liable to being talked about in inherent terms and not just in the arbitrary terms that the fruit requires on any interpretation the poem considers of the couple's sin. But this may be clarified with respect to the difference between Adam's fall and Eve's. Eve falls for a fruit, Adam for a person.) Satan's nobility in hell.
Two Burns poems -- "A Poet's Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter; the first instance that entitled him to the venerable appellation of Father," and "To a Mouse, On turning her up in her Nest, with the Plogu, November, 1785." (This latter required some thought in class about what exactly was going on agriculturally. Feel free to comment on this [or anything] at amimetobios.com!) The shifts in Burns's language between Scots light and near-standard English. The distance therefore between speaker and poet. Comparison to Wordsworth's writing in the "natural language of natural men." Then Blake's "To the Evening Star" and a couple of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The title of "Songs of Innocence" considered as already impying duality. The two Chimney Sweep poems.
Antecedents in Homer and Virgil: who they're antedents of. The Muse, Satan. Satan's relation to God far deeper in meaning and mode than any classical hero's to the gods. This is because of the importance of free will in loving or not loving God. Free will and its connection to freedom of thought and therefore the possibilities of nobility in the rebels. Singing and philosophizing in hell. Freedom = depth of character and experience.
Professional opportunities for female poets in the second half of the 18th century. ProtoRomanticism of Baillie and Barbauld. Question of description of human emotion. Baillie's interest in the passions. Comparison with and difference from Wordsworth. Barbauld's poem to Coleridge. Getting from Pope to Coleridge in two lines: "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" (Pope) to "Dreamy twilight of the vacant mind" (Barbauld, on Coleridge). Barbauld's and Baillie's progressivism. Their interest in vicarious experience, especially their protoWordsworthian interest in the young. Coleridge a youth too, to Barbauld.
Goldsmith and Cowper. Topicality of "The Deserted Village." Enclosures. Goldsmith compared to Gray: Fields beloved in vain. Country Churchyard, and the speaker's exile from the world he describes. The evanescence of that world that seemed timeless. Cowper: Sapphics in the "Lines written during a period of insanity." "The Castaway." Like Goldsmith and Gray, about vicarious experience.
A last class on Paradiso: its hallucinatory, Miyazaki-like quality. Paulo and Francesco return as Poverty and Francis. Typology and the trinity. Free will. Segue to Paradise Lost
A long perspective on the history of science, astronomy in particular. The different spheres, and distance from the empyrean. Satan the unmoving center of a universe whose every expression of love is motion.
More on proto Romanticism, this time through Christopher Smart. His Jobean catalogues. His sense of the infinite variety of the world, and the matching variety of language. David and his turning melancholy into poetry. Smart's version of doing the same. Relation to the sublime: the rhetorical sublime where the soul takes a proud flight (Longinus) as though it has written what it has only heard or read: Smart's relation to David's psalms the same. Hence the meaning of "for" in Smart, in Jubilate Agno and in the "Song to David:" because of, and for the purpose of. Reversal of cause and effect, of final and efficient cause. Prefiguration: Typology and fulfillment in the antitype: the relation to the rhetorical sublime and to the reversal of cause and effect, when poetry responds to the sublime and inspires it (compare Shelley's Defence of Poetry). The amazing "For Adoration" sequence in the "Song to David." B1 and B2 of Jubilate Agno.
Young and Gray as examples of the proto-Romantic subjectivity we began discussing in Collins and Thomson. Ideas of the sublime. Burke on delight vs. pleasure. Young on the creative power of the senses: what they "half create" as NIght VII puts it. "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" compared to "Cooper's Hill" and to Steely Dan (though no one caught the allusion). Why the alumni office doesn't want this poem taught: "Fields beloved in vain."
Paradiso and how it differs from what comes before. Leibnizian theodicy. The theory of light in the canti of the moon. Gravity, love, memory: motivated by a motion always beyond the present -- a vector. The earthly Paradise -- Eliot and Shelley's Dantesque examples.
The Contrapasso in Inferno vs. corrective punishment in Purgatorio. The proud bent down, the envious blinded. Sapia's guess that Dante can see: but she's not envious of him for it. Virgil's exposition of love at the very center of the Divine Comedy in Purgatorio 17. T.S. Eliot's Dantesque imitation in Little Gidding.
Proto-Romanticism: Thomson compared to Wordsworth. The idea of landscape in Thomson; the adverting mind in Wordsworth, which you don't quite begin to find in Thomson, who wishes a Newtonian view from nowhere (hence the verses in memory of Newton). Collins is far more about the experience of the experience of being a poet. The Ode to Fear.
More on the Inferno, and on Ulysses and Ugolina; Dante's attitude towards the damned compared with God's and with Virgil's. The naming of Ugolino's sons in his song. The relation of the seven increasing sins in Inferno and their reverse-order decrease in Purgatorio. The likewise increasing uncertainty of Virgil in Purgatorio. Ulysses on the short vigil of the senses. Merwin and Heaney as translators of Dante into a genuinely poetic vernacular.
Our one class on Johnson -- Johnson as a proto-Romantic, that is to say the first poet we're doing who really describes (in his poetry and in his essays) the experience of human subjectivity tout court, without (as opposed to Dryden or Pope or Swift) referring to particularities of time, place, religion, politics, etc. Rather he is the most transparent of the writers we have read so far, and is doing the kind of writing that will be associated with Romanticism.
His signal accomplishments: the Dictionary and thus the alphabetical poem to Mrs. Thrale; his letter to Chesterfield ("Is not a patron, my lord..."); his definition of net; the dangerous prevalence of the imagination; the grimmest part of "The Vanity of Human Wishes."
The last class on Pope (except there'll be a makeup on the Essay on Man in December). The Dunciad and the reign of Dullness. Theobald as "hero" of first Dunciad, Cibber as hero of second. "Aristarchus" (i.e.: Pope) on the mock epic and its relation to the serious epic: how the parodic versions of wisdom, bravery, and love come to be vanity, impudence, and debauchery. Pope's debauchery in an anecdote in Cibber's letter to Pope: Cibber saves him from peril atop a large prostitute. Pope's cuttingness. (The rhyme of "K *" and "sing".) The fact that depth of soul goes with bitterness and despair, in both the Dunciad and in the amazing psychological acuity of Eloisa to Aberlard.
Some more on the Inferno: a descent into the world not only of history and of personal animus but also of the religious and most of all literary knowledge and background that form Dante. Eternal justice and its relation to God. The Euthyphro question in Dante and Milton: is something just because God says so, or is God just because in his goodness he will unwaveringly do what is just. What does Milton mean when he says that he intends to "justify the ways of God to men"? Dante has an easier way than Milton to solve the problem: he can make love the principle of the whole universe ("the love that moves the sun and other stars"), so that those in Hell are there by their own desire. They get what they want. Plato on love and desire and its mistaken objects. Complexity of desire and its relation to its consequences (propositional attitudes), but still all in hell are where they desired to be, even if they hadn't thought those consequences through.
Pope's style, speed, and compression. His dialogues with a friend in the Imitations of Horace. The psychological subtlety and beauty of his "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady"
Introductory class on Dante -- the poet is the one who goes to the underworld this time, not only the hero. Sybil:Aeneas::Virgil:Dante. Terza rima and the advent of rhyme. Modernism: epic in a modern language that aims at the power and prestige of ancient epic. The topography of hell. Dante as science fiction writer.
Our last class on Virgil -- how he reimagines Homer. The wrath of Turnus compared to that of Achilles. Aeneas is as merciless as Achilles will become (though we didn't really discuss this). The tension between public and private virtue in Virgil, Dante, and Milton: no such tension in Homer (no difference between them, or almost none) and as for Ovid, the private is what matters. (Plato a harder case.) Love in VIrgil, and other Platonic subjects. Gates of ivory and horn: Penelope's dream and Aeneas's compared to Adam's and Milton's. Exposition of Milton's Sonnet 23. Dr. Johnson's strictures on Virgil's imitation of Homer in the Rambler, and his preference for Ajax's silence to Dido's.
Pope's topicality, and its origins as recounted in the Horatian Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. How poets become enmeshed in the world. Pope writing within the form of that enmeshment. His travails with Theobald. Excursus on Bentley and Theobald. Return to the Rape of the Lock and the brilliance of the reported speech.
More on Virgil's relation to Homer and the Aeneid as a response to Homer. Virgil's sublimity: sunt lachrymae rerum and facile descensus Averni. Descents into the underworld in Homer, Virgil, and Dante. The treacherous Sinon in Virgil and in the Inferno. Self division ubiquitous and deep in Virgil, whereas only found in this mode in Achilles in Homer. Three scenes of supplication from Aeneas's point of view as the one supplicated.
10/21/10 Conclusion of analysis of Pope's pyrotechnical mimesis in the Essay on Criticism; exposition of the difference between rules (artificially formulated and imposed) and laws (discovered in nature and in the poets who discovered them in nature); consideration of the variety of his tones; analysis of the conclusion of Eloisa to Abelard with her describing how later people like Pope will write poems in her voice; beginning of an account of Rape of the Lock, including the relation of mock to serious epic as being in some ways like the relation between true criticism and poetry.
An introductory class on Pope, in particular the Essay on Criticism. Pope's poetic mode compared to Dryden's. Some account of Pope's effects in the essay. The difference between judgment and creation; and the similarities between them: how Virgil was a great critic of Homer and had to be in order to use Homer as the model for the Aeneid. Pope's own critical theories and his holism.
A mixed class, with some more attention to Ovid, especially the myth of Narcissus and its way of thinking through mirror image representations and parallelism; and then some examination of both the parallels and the differences between Homer and Virgil -- what it was that Virgil was attempting to refigure within Homer and how. Consideration of the way Virgil likes to give Homeric scenes a perspective from the other important figure in the scene, reversing subject and object.
First class on Ovid -- Milton's versions of Ovidian creation (from Chaos and pure matter, not ab nihilo) and of Proserpine gathering flowers. Ovid's mythic consistency compared to Plato's theory of the consistency or coherence of truth. Brief account of the parable of the cave in the Republic,
Swift in a more serious mode: his honesty about himself as well as others. The verses on the death of Dr. Swift. His view of himself at the end. His praise of Pope. La Rochefoucauld on human folly. Swift's version of this. His lovely realism with respect to Stella.
Philosophy vs. comedy: this world and the world of forms. The competition between them. Theories of truth: coherence vs. correspondence. Philosophy wants consistency, whereas comedy isn't interested in consistency but simply in correspondence. Aristophanes and Jon Stewart: political commentary.
Second class on Plato: the through line in Socrates being his ambivalence about poetry: in the Republic, in the Ion, for example. His penchant for quoting Homer despite this. Compared to Hamlet quoting Aeneas's Tale to Dido. What threat does poetry represent to philosophy? Both seek the same ground as discourses of everything. The idea of divine inspiration: the magnetic influence of poetry. More on forms. The form of mud in the Parmenides.
FIrst (of two) classes on Swift. Swift's vividness compared to Rochester's. His misanthropy and also his sense of human wrong: how it's the fact that humans do wrong that makes them hateful, but the wrong they do is to humans. Corinna and Celia as human and as holding it together when everything is falling apart. Swift's sense of how hard aesthetic surface or "varnish" is. Virgilian description of a city shower.
Rochester's range, the beauty of some of his poems, their psychological acuity. His account of fear and the self-sustaining paradoxes of mutual fear, including the fear of being thought fearful. Dr. Johnson's quotation of his bon mot: "All men would be cowards if they durst." Obscenity of "The Imperfect Enjoyment" but even there Rochester's surprising acknowledgment of women's experience. Definitely not safe for work!
One Homer but many Socrateses. Early, Middle, and Late Dialogues, plus Xenophon. Ordering of the dialogues, ordering of Socrates's life. Mention of the Parmenides, purported to have occurred about a century before Plato wrote it. Zeno's paradoxes. Galileo's. Diogenes the Cynic's refutation of Zeno. Quick exposition of the Forms or Ideas.
First class on Rochester: Range of his poetry, his songs, his satire against reason and mankind; reflections on libertinage and philosophy; reflections on the skills that make a poem great: line, transition; architectonic. Dryden great at all three; Rochester extremely good at the first two.
Last class on The Odyssey: address between husband and wife. Lattimore's translation of the exchanged address between Odysseus and Penelope as δαιμονίη as "You are so strange." Homer (though Lattimore doesn't indicate this), has Hektor and Andromache also address each other this way. Address as well to strangers -- range from an affectionate "Silly" to a more existential "daimon-haunted." The two greatest similes in the Odyssey. Penelope's trick. Life defeats death.
This is the first lecture on Absalom and Achitophel, given on September 7. I just managed to recover it. It's largely about the meaning of and the political views evidenced by Dryden's claim that history repeats itself -- first in Biblical days, then in the late seventeenth century. Some context for the poem is given. We spend a fair amount of time exploring the anti-perfectibilian implications of historical repetition.
I figured out how to recover the file containing the first part of the first class on the Odyssey. Really this is about funeral games and why they had 'em. This introduces the theme of gift-giving and the potlatch which is explored in the later Odyssey classes.
DIgressive lecture focusing on Dryden's digressions and divigations about Chaucer and his openness to all the mores he writes and translates from. His beautiful translations of Horace. Alexander's Feast, and then the Secular Masque, written in the last fortnight of his life: his personal and the political farewell.
Odysseus as a different kind of hero from Achilleus: the trickster is not "character isolated by a deed," but someone who's character is elusive. How can he be a hero in epic circumstances? Homer and Shakespeare take on this problem respectively in Odysseus and Hamlet. The Ουτιs / Odysseus pun -- as a trickster he is no man, the reverse of Achilleus. His meeting with Aias in hell, and Aias's silence; Odysseus's meeting with his mother, who sends him home knowing what he knows about the dead, to his wife: the three phantom embraces, recollecting Achilleus's dream of the dead Patroklos.
The subtlety of Dryden's verse, especially in forms other than the heroic couplet, particularly the Pindaric or irregular ode. His praise of Milton, his elegy on Anne Killegrew, his St. Cecilia's day poems. The novelty of the organ. Poetry and her subordinate sisters, viz. painting and music.
Difference between Iliad and Odyssey continued: the latter is about life and praises mortality; the former about death and laments it. Odysseus's preference for the mortal Penelope over Kalypso. Different views of hospitality as necessary, in the Iliad, and as life-affirming, in the Odyssey. Observations about the structure of oral verse, with respect to the research of Milman Parry. Formulae and multi-tasking. The connections they make possible: echoes and repetitions between different characters. Those connections compared to similes where characters are compared to their complements, not their parallels.
Conclusion of the classes on Absalom and Achitophel and Religio Laici. The difficulty of the middle way. Monarchy compared to Anglicanism. The idea of a center of perspective and understanding which comprehends all the different possibilities: how this belongs both to Anglicanism and monarchy, neither of which makes the part greater than the whole. Contrast with Lucretius, but acknowledgment of Dryden's appreciation of Lucretius, who is also part of the whole philosophical discourse.
The first part of this class was lost -- some glitch with the iPhone. But it was essentially an introduction to the issues continued in the part that starts here: the differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey in the kind of hero being depicted, and the goals of that hero, and especially how those differences are brought out in the various fates of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Menelaus and Helen, and finally Odysseus and Penelope. Female characters. Hospitality depicted with respect to the suitors and the travelers. The nested narratives of the Odyssey.
The psychology of anger: its expressive drive. Anger acknowledges that it is self-defeating, and wants that acknowledgment to be expressive. "The fact that I am angry, when I know that self-restraint and not anger will command the respect I am justly owed, shows how angry I am at the injustice of the disrespect my anger aggravates." Anger as a social mode, a communicative relationship between people: so Homer always represents it as occurring within societies: Achaian, Trojan, Olympian. So that Achilleus's anger at Hektor, his refusal to treat with him, is itself a modality of social interaction, disguised as the rejection of social interaction. Hence the acceptance of Priam's supplication, and Blanchot's "parole sublime": "Now you and I must remember our supper" (24.601).
Dryden as a strenuous advocate of the middle way. Relation of the interpretation of sacred texts to that of poetry. The expertise that thinking poetically, in particularly about poetic form, can claim on matters of politics, theology, and philosophy. Right and wrong ways of interpreting, and the extent to which interpretation is by its nature an appeal to the community norms that the interpreted works themselves have in view. The hermeneutic circle: how do you time flies? (The way you time arrows!)
Again a somewhat delayed attack on Books 6 and 9 of the Iliad. Syncretism and varieties of divine power considered. Foreshadowing of the deaths of Patroklos and Hektor. Beginning of discussion of Homeric epithets. Set-ups of the climactic scenes: Honor vs. spoliation of the dead. Hospitality to ambassadors.
An introduction to the background of Absalom and Achitophel; its preface and the uses of antithetical style in Dryden's prose and his poetry compared.
Discussion of Book 6 of the Iliad: the difference between the existential threats faced by the Trojans, who nevertheless have the comforts of home, vs. the troubles faced by the Achaian expeditionary force; Achilles's killing of Andromache's family; the cowardice of the archers; Hektor and Aias as mothers.
Some more restrictions imposed by the heroic couplet, and the possibilities they engender. Dryden on Oldham; the subtlety of his versification and the reality of his praise; Oldham's obscene poem against the author of Sodom (who may have been Rochester, whom Oldham had once admired).
A lecture focused on Homeric simile in the Iliad, but with excursuses to Paradise Lost, and to a consideration of how different traditions meld in Homer, in Roman mythology, and in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.
The first class in the Introduction to Restoration and Eighteenth Century Poetry. Considerations of poetic form: the intense restriction of poetic form demands a matching resourcefulness among its poets. The wit, poetry, obscenity, thoughtfulness of Restoration; it descends to things as they are. Rochester and Walpole. The beginning of Denham's "Cooper's Hill." Note: Apologies for lowish fi: will try to improve next time.
The Introductory class, Fall, 2010, of the course on Homer to Milton. Readings will include the Iliad, the Odyssey, some Plato, Aristophanes's Clouds, some Ovid, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost. The first class is about the attitude of Homer, Dante, and Milton to the visionary company of poet-prophets they seek to join.
Last lecture of the course, concluding with The Winter's Tale. Narrative memory and forgetting. Resurrection. Winter's Tale compared and contrasted with King Lear, specifically with respect to the Fool and Cordelia. Men of stone vs. stone coming to life in the last scene.
Introduction to The Winter's Tale: why is Leontes jealous? of whom? what does Mammilius remind him of? Doubling of Mammilius and Perdita. Time frames: 23 years, 16 years, 7 years. Things dying, things new born. Paulina. Hermione.
We conclude our study of Antony and Cleopatra, paying more attention to Cleopatra, and the two of them together: the'r love, their rages, their suicides. Cleopatra compared to both Ophelia and Gertrude. Female sexuality. Dido and Aeneas. Love, death, and immanence.
Mainly on Antony: Fulvia; his men's loyalty; the departure of Herucles, and of Enorbarbus; the quickness with which Eros sees what he'll want to do; the quickness with which Enobarbus sees he's done it; Dolabella as Enorbarbus's double; Cleopatra's dream; instances of "an Antony;" his preternatural generosity.
Antony and Cleopatra a new departure: not about public vs private but about two modes of publicity: present and future. O'erflowing the measure, again. Enobarbus as a new experiment in the series of window characters starting with Aumerle and including Horatio, Kent, the Fool, Edgar, and Banquo. Hamlet loves Horatio who is dispassionate in judgment; Kent is like Horatio but Edgar and the Fool go much farther in focusing on the window; Macbeth kills Banquo; Enobarbus betrays Antony.
Introduction to Antony and Cleopatra as a new kind of tragedy: one which doesn't seek the freedom of complete loss or amor fati. Contrasted with Macbeth, written simultaneously. Macbeth is about the maximum of loneliness in a tragic figure; Antony and Cleopatra is about what having a friend till the end offers by way of a relationship to time and loss. Lady Macbeth compared to Lear. Antony and Cleopatra compared to A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Talk on the anonymity of the narrator and narratee in Proust, and their relation to the losses that occur in the book but not in the narrative. Illustration of idea that Proust presents the converse of Cavell: uncountable external worlds but only one other mind. How narrator turns into his mother watching his mother turn into his grandmother. Roger Caillois and vision as mimesis. Discussion session (poorer audio) for all the papers.
Nicolas de Warren's talk on "Aspects of the Imagination in Proust," in the way faces are perceived and make one feel perceived; the recognition of the other; and their relation to love and to death.
Richard Moran's talk on four kinds of relationships between the voluntary and the involuntary in Proust, and their relation to eros and to aesthetic response.
April Vacation Bonus: Proust and Philosophy Conference at Wellesley College. Part 1: Short Intro (audio sketchy). Laura Quinney convenes seminar and everyone introduces her- or himself.
Second and concluding lecture on Macbeth before two-week break: the solitude of the present moment; the only relief to that is friendship; Banquo as window, like Bullingbrook, Horatio, Kent, the Fool, and Edgar; but Macbeth murders Banquo and must not look to have friends (Seyton is his last forlorn hope), and so is lost in time, like tears in rain, time's bank and shoal eroded into dust and ashes.
Somewhat fumbling and disappointingly inarticulate account of time and the specious present in Shakespeare, and its most intense presentation in Macbeth. The difference between the character (with his history and prospects) and the subject, existing in the present only which is all that exists, and experiencing his history and prospects as outside of himself. Tragedy, time, and pure subjectivity.
Edgar.
His relation to Gloucester, and to Edmund. The kindness of the gods. Jacob and Esau reunited. Exchanging charity. Love between mortals.
Embarrassing parents and what they know; what does Edmund want?; sibling competition and bonding; the fool and Cordelia
The oddness of writing a tragedy about a person whose life is already just about over; some flushing of the coverts of the microglot in order to consider the modes and methods of Shakespeare's delicate suggestiveness; the opening lines of the play; Edmund's embarrassing and embarrassed situation.
More on Hamlet's relation to representations of revenge; their relevance; the difficulty of distinguishing between crime and punishment; the failure of moral luck to provide a distinction; Hamlet compared to Vertigo; Horatio's dispassionate judgment; how Hamlet defeats Claudius as a matter of drama and theatrical dynamic and not the establishment of facts antecedent to the start of the play.
A continuation of the analysis of Hamlet, both character and play. What is the nature of Hamlet's interiority? What relation does it have to his being a character in a drama? How does he parallel, and how diverge, from Laertes? The possibility that Claudius is Hamlet's father is treated, with respect to what this would mean from the point of view of the ghost. The disappearance of the ghost in Act V is noted and considered. Preferences among preferences or second order desires are introduced.
Introduction to Hamlet; idea of revenge in law and in tragedy (revenge as representation of crime); characters of Horatio, Claudius, and Hamlet
Classes start up again February 22. In the meantime, here's a talk I gave at Wayne State on February 12, on biological game theory and narrative, with almost no Shakespeare in it, but lots of Golden Balls: I think it's pretty followable as a podcast, but you won't get the visuals of the YouTubes I show at the end. Comment if you want links to the videos.
We complete our analysis of the story arc of Midsummer Night's Dream, an arc formed out of a mosaic of characters, consider especially the relationship between our interest in the erotic life of others, and the experience of theater. We end by discussing the melancholy elements of the play which give its moments of happiness both depth and value.
We conclude our discussion of Richard II and segue elegantly into a discussion of A Midsummer Night's Dream
Discussion of Richard's last soliloquy, and other laments about nothingness, and subjectivity.
We continue our consideration of Richard II, and the deep and complex chess game, played both in private and in public, between Richard and Bullingbrook, with Mowbray and Gaunt as their pawns.
We begin considering Richard II and Shakespeare's work generally via Sonnet 73 ("That time of year"), which introduces us to Shakespeare's thinking about time.