[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
[renaissance poetry] More about Satan, his commitment to freedom, and his sublimity.
[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 myst...
[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.
