amimetobios

The Fall of Hyperion and To Autumn

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

Keats and Hyperion: the young poet

What Keats was trying to do in Hyperion.  The background of the story. Miltonic comparisons.  The young Apollo.  Mnemosyne.  More on synesthesia.

LR. First Class on Keats: Eve of St. Agnes

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."

Last class on Prometheus Unbound

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).

Resistance and knuckling under

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.

More on Mont Blanc and Prometheus Unbound

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", Mont Blanc and an Introduction to Prometheus Unbound

"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.

Seeing souls in Frankenstein

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.

Frankenstein, again, Prometheus, and Satan

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?

10. Frankenstein via Byron and The Witch of Atlas

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: Phosphor reading by her own light

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.")

Don Juan, Canto 5

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!

LR 7: Don Juan Cantos 3-4

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.

LR 6: Don Juan Canto 2: Juan and the Narrator

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.

Later Romantix 5: First Class on Don Juan

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.

4 How to talk about the Byronic Hero

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.

Shelley and Byron on Byron

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.

Later Romantics 2: Wordsworth and Milton

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.

1. The Later Romantics: Introduction on Shelley and Wordsworth

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.

Infinity 24: Last class: review and final explication of Zeno

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)

Diagon Alley

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.

Infinity 22: Newcomb's problem; Shelley

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.

Infinity 21: Klee, Kant, Shelley

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.

Infinity 20: Kant on Perception and Free Will

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.

Infinity 19: Hume on induction, Kant on space and time, especially space

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.