1/18 & 1/20 - Class Notes

Homework

Readings:

• A Midsummer Night's Dream

Blog:

• Read everyone's blog
• Responses on the School of Night
• Sonnet in the next 10 days or so

Notes
- 4 areas of foundation for literature:

1. The Bible - While it is not of literary excellence, the Bible has remained an important and sacred text over thousands of years.
2. Shakespeare
3. Classic Mythology - not Roman, but Greek
4. Everything else - Secular scripture or popular literature. Basically anything that isn't the Bible.

- The School of Night

• Moving from the middle ages to the brave new world of science.
• Alchemy/Pseudosciences: Neoplatonism, kabbalah, tarot cards, hermetic mysticism
• Shakespeare reference pg. 233 - "King: Oh paradox! Black is the badge of hell, the hue of dungeons, and the school of night, and beauty's crest becomes the heavens well."

-John Keats: Negative Capability

-Consuming Myths

• Shakespeare - Venus and Adonis
• T.S. Elliot - St. Sebastian
• Michelangelo - Pieta

-  We've read sections of:

• Cymbeline - the successful seducer (pg. 657)
• Antony and Cleopatra - dead lover, "You lie up to the hearing of the gods." (pg. 1697)
• Love's Labor's Lost - the true academic project: The meaning of life is not read in books, but in the eyes of women (pg. 235)

-Images of the boar appearing throughout Shakespeare

-Who was Shakespeare?

• Borges' "Everything and Nothing"

-  We are unconscious of the degree of Shakespeare's influence

• Wallace Stevens - A Postcard From The Volcano

"Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill; 

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt 

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls, 

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white, 
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun."