amimetobios

We finish discussing the Trinity, and then go through the seven La Corona sonnets, where the interesting question of their temporality -- of the eternal vs. the sempiternal, of endless time vs. being outside of time -- comes up in the very question of how or where the sequence may be said to begin, since the first sonnet sums up the fact that the sequence is the crown which seems to spring out of that very first sonnet,

A quick exposition of Berkeley's idea that to be is to be perceived, followed by a viewing of Beckett's Film, starring Buster Keaton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqh6uwCkZno

I finally discuss, somewhat clumsily, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, after a brief introduction to Berkeley.  A short class because the second half was given over to a viewing of Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr.

We conclude Satire 3, and talk about the difference between an aesthetics of difficulty (Donne's) and of effortlessness (e.g. Herrick and the Cavaliers).  Satire 3 as promoting difficulty as promoting thought.  Then on to "Batter My Heart..." and "Father, part of his double interest..." Some discussion of the NIcene Ring.

A line by line exposition of most of Satire 3 (TBC).  More discussion on metonymic relations among a series of metaphors.

A class where we mainly discuss Dark City (1998, Alex Proyas).  Question of memory, personal identity, love, and of course space and time. Some of the same issues as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Me, I felt that the class didn't cohere, but the students seemed to like the more extensive conversation.

A full class on the poem, and on teasing out the metonymic interaction of its metaphors.  The interesting sexual switch at the very end.  A discussion mid-class about whether people liked Donne passionately or not: are his wit and strangeness a bug or a feature. Is his poetry poetry you want to quote?

More on the different speakers in Donne's "Songs and Sonnets."  The idea of the most capacious intelligence: the one who gets most others.  How this plays out in kinds of narrative, especially fantasy fiction.  Who gets whom better: Aslan or the White Witch? Voldemort or Dumbledore? Sauron or Gandalf?  Yoda or Palpatine?  The surprise when we're surprised that the good guys get the evil guys being a staple of narrative interest, because more generally being able to understand others' limitations is central to our assessment of literary characters.  Then on to the two poems: "To his Mistress" and a beginning of "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning."

...which is an overgrand way of saying that I try to give a quick view of Heidegger on the worldhood of the world, its relation to the image, and the sorts of ontological discussions that ontologists have.  A quick summary of the periods of Platonic dialogue, and a little of the Parmenides.  Achilles and the tortoise.  The relation of object to image, in Cavell and Blanchot.  A start....

A class devoted entirely to puzzling out the figurative language in "Love's Alchemy," and the way it's partly about puzzling out figurative language. The punctuational crux of the last lines. The idea that Donne's "Songs and Sonnets" have multiple speakers and that they address each other.

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: A is something else that is not A.  Splitting: A is not A.  Application to Film vs. Theater vs. verbal narrative vs.... TV.  Rear Window as emblematizing TV-watching.  Bazin on identification and resistance to identification in film and theater respectively.  Subjective camera in Rear Window.

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 suit unto him, to afford 

A new small-rented lease, and cancell th’ old. 

In heaven at his manour I him sought : 

            They told me there, that he was lately gone 

            About some land, which he had dearly bought 

Long since on earth, to take possession. 

I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth, 

            Sought him accordingly in great resorts ; 

            In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts : 

At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth 

            Of theeves and murderers :  there I him espied, 

            Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

Excursus on the plurality of the heavenly powers, and the E and J writers of the first four books of Moses.

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 conversation about it, though, so perhaps worth the listening.

[URL of clip, if you need it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cOhWtyXGXQ]

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 the Bay of Lerici, with which we conclude.

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.