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 Geo...
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 Solo...
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...
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 stra...
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 int...
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 th...
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 mi...
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...
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 supp...
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.
