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:...
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 sui...
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 co...
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 ...
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 s...
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....
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 read...
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.
