FINAL NOTES RE 233
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The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche emphasized the creative power in the tension between attitudes, values and qualities, associated with which two Greek gods? - Apollo and Dionysus
In the temptation story in Genisis, the serpent tells the truth when he informs the two that should they eat of the apple, they will not die. - TRUE
Literary critics distinguish romance literature from the novel on the basis of what distinction?
Wonder vs. realism
As described by Rudolf Otto, the term "numinous" refers to: - a non rational. Non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the shelf
Which of the following terms is relevant to a discussion of strategies used by Shirley Jackson in her story,
The lottery? - complicit reader
In the context of the story of Cain and Abel. Stories about farmers and shepherds are common in the ancient near east. Which of the following statements is true?: Usually in these ancient near eastern myths, the farmer bests the shepherd. This is untrue of Ancient Greece: The Greek polis (city-state) was mostly secular, and rejected religion
The stories read in the course were chosen because they are part of the western canon, part of the heritage and tradition of religious. literature. Who wrote these words? "The idea of heritage... is one of the more appropriate expressions for the efficacy of the past [and] can be interpreted as the fusion of the ideas of a debt and a tradition? Paul Ricouer
Part of what it means to say that Don Quixote is the first novel is that: it is the product of an authorial and receptive consciousness that one is involved in a fiction, but a fiction that represents reality
The Book of Job employs a legalistic metaphor One reason the Grimm tales took root in European Culture is that: they stepped in to fill a spiritual void created by the erosion of religious faith and practice in the modern era Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare was a catholic Most true of Homer's illiad - Brevity of life is no objection to the world, but all the more reason to live life to the fullest, which in the Homeric world, meant dying gloriously in battle. Historically speaking, the Christian Gospels emerged in a cultural climate of: - religious syncretism and violent upheaval Some interpreters suggest that the author of the Book of Job was:
break the connection between traditional notions that viewed God as both all powerful and completely just
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the period in history during which tragedy emerged a
the “axial age”
In The Bacchae, who speaks these lines: "Trust me, Pentheus. Don't be too confident a soverei seems right to you, but vour mind's diseased, don't think that's wisdom. So welcome
this god into y then celebrate these Bacchic rites with garlands on your head.": Tiresias
Based strictly on the text of Genesis, why does god create humankind?: - because he desired an “image” of himself
When Laertes, at Opehlia's graveside asks. 'What ceremony else, he was expressing a widespread societal concern over:
• changes to funeral rites that accompanied Protestant reforms.
true about Dostoevsky:
he was opposed to all forms of social Utopianism, which he understood in terms of the limitations placed on human freedom
A literary classic of the ancient near east is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which contains a flood story similar to that found in Genesis.
• In the Genesis flood, we are given a reason for the destruction of the world: moral corruption, great evil in the hearts of men.
In ancient Athens there was practiced an annual rite of cleansing or puritication in which two
individuals of lowly status, known as pharmoki were humillated and expelled from the city.
The Brother's Karamazov (Omitri., Ivan and Alyosha) In Dostoevsky's great novel represent various values and woridviews. Which of tr following is a correct description of the brothers?
Aloysha is a believer and Ivan is a skeptical atheist.
1. According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus' last audible words from the cross were "Elo, eloi, lema sabachthani7 which mear
1.
What does it profit persons to gain the whole world and lose their own soul?
2.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (*)
4. Why do you call me Lord. Lord," and do not what I teach?:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Shakespeare's sense of death was harsh and unremitting His attitude towards death generates a moral sense of:
• Perseverance
Which of the following statements best describes refigion in ancient Greece, as exemplified in the /fiad.:
Religion Involved a mix of rational and abstract Olypianism with chontic, fertility and earth-based spirituality.
Who wrote the following. in their reflections on the aesthetics of the sublime? "The sublime: it comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros. Whenever strength is only useful, and employed for our
benefit or our pleasure, then it is never sublime: for nothing can act agreeably to us, that does not act in conformity to our will; but to act agreeably to our will. it must be subject to us, and therefore can never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception?:
Edmund Burke
Which of the following symbols in Sula poin ts most directly to the presence of the sacred?: -
four
Aeschylus, one of the great three Greek tragedians, referred to his own work as but slices from the great banquet of Homer."
• True
the story of the Grand Inquisitor. Jesus returns to earth in what place and time
~ 160 century Spain
Which story employs the metaphor of love?
• Sula
Which of the Gods is Zeus speaking of in the following lines?
You hypocrite, don't sit there whining at me. Among the gods who live on Mount Olympus, you're the one I hate the most. For you love war, constant strife and battle."
ares
According to Stephen Greenblatt the mood of the play Hamlet: - derives from cultural uncertainty over changes to death rites
Which of the following is not a quality typically associated with the god Dionysus?
rationality
In chapter 20 of Don Quiaxte:
struggle through the darkness, hungry and thirsty, and tempted by the sound of water.
An overarching theme of Don Quixote is that: - Quixote thinks he is living in an age of decline.
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The style of the language of Genesis is: highly stylized, yet simple The origins and formations of the Hebrew bible was influenced by which two great national disasters? : the Babylonian conquests and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the romans. In the context of the story Cain and Abel, stories about farmers and shepherds are common in the ancient near east. Which of the following statements is true?: Usually, in these ancient near eastern myths, the farmer bests the shepherd. The Book of Job employs a legalistic metaphor.
Job's friends suggest to him that: since God is just, Job must somehow deserve his suffering.
In the temptation story in Genesis, from a literal perspective, the serpent tells the truth when he informs the two that should they eat of the apple, they will not die: True
Based strictly on the text of Genesis, why does God create humankind? Because he desired an "image" of himself. Thucydides wrote a history of: the Peloponnesian War.
In the first two chapters of Genesis, there are two distinct names used to refer to "God." These names are: 'elohim and yahweh 'elohim
"Nephilim" is a Hebrew word meaning "the adversary", and refers to archaic judicial ideas about justice: FALSE
Which of the following is not typically associated with Greek tragedy?: Its capacity to bind individuals into a community. In The Bacchae, the chorus tells us that Pentheus violated which "law"?: The need to show reverence for the gods.
According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus' last words from the cross were “ Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani?” Which means: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Of all the messianic expectations circulating in Jesus's time, the one characteristic not associated with the messiah is that the messiah would uffer and wind up tortured to death through crucifixion.: TRUE
Which of the following is not a quality typically associated with the god Dionysus?: rationality
Death in the Iliad: is similar to attitudes towards death found in the Hebrew Bible.
The Homeric gods are: the embodiment of timeless forces.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche emphasized the creative power in the tension between attitudes, values, and qualities associated with which two Greek gods?: Apollo and Dionysus
The Iliad: aspires to transport the reader away from the earthly realm to the realm of the gods.
The genre of romance popular in the era of Cervantes had been the dominant literature in Spain for several centuries.: True Which of the following is included in Ovid's poetry: all of the above The main vehicle for transmitting the memory of Jesus in the earliest Christian communities was through
the written gospels.: FALSE
Which of the following statements is false?: The term "Christ" derives from the Latin word for "crucifixion." Which of the following is not one of the common types of literary material found in the Gospel of Mark?: Cosmology In the discussion between A.M. Homes and Debora Triesman on Jackson's The Lottery, Triesman: favours the experience of reading over interpretation. In his interview of Christ, the Grand Inquisitor of Ivan’s story accuses him of not providing people with security. Which of the following securities is not of apparent concern to the Grand Inquisitor?: Spiritual
At the end of Journey to the East, H.H. finds himself in a: vast archive Which of the following terms is relevant to a discussion of strategies used by Shirley Jackson' in her story, The Lottery?: complicit reader The First World War or Great War caused: Great cultural and religious change HOMER’S THE ILIAD Dorian Invasion -
In the second millennium BCE, successive waves of Greek speaking Indo-Europeans invaded the territory
now known as Greece, the lands around the Aegean and Ionian seas. They brought with them a heroic, patriarchal pantheon of gods and
"Doren invasresided over by the great sky god Zeus. Scholars refer to this period of conquest and settlement as the
During the Dorian invasion, the existing gods and goddesses of earth and fertility were replaced by or integrated into the Olympian pantheon.
Epic -
The form or genre represented by the lliad and Odyssey is the epic.
a. Epic - for the Greeks, this meant a long poem, written in a specific poetic meter.
b. The Iliad (about war) and Odyssey (about a journey) were so influential in the ancient world that they became the paradigmatic examples of the epic genre.
c. The classical Greeks distinguished between lyric or poetic works (where the narrator speaks in first person, often with his back to the audience), epic (where the narrator speaks in his own voice but allows
others to speak in theirs, and drama, (where the characters do all the talking).
d. In time, the term epic came to denote any lengthy treatment of thematic material having to do with adventure, war, conquest, journeys
e. For readers, genres are sets of conventions and expectations. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is epic because of its scope (a quest) and length.
Homeric values -
honour and glory seen as super important, all people created equal? Yet we seek excellence and whatnot. Hellenic vs heroic values. Immortality vs death and resurrection. Live life to the fullest - hellenic says die in glorious battle. Elevating traditional values. Pride was important, be ready to defend it.
Moria -
An important aspect of Homeric thought is the notion of moira - the Greek word for fate; it refers to the sense that, in hindsight, certain outcomes were inevitable. When something happens-if someone dies, for example-their death at the moment becomes part of their fate. God-talk in Homer creates a sense of
patterned fate at work.
Homer's Gods -
The gods seem at times to be all too human - petty, quarreling, shallow, vindictive; we can at times easily imagine ourselves
above them.
a. Ancient philosophers and moralists often condemned the gods in such stories. Some would argue that
these gods could not be the real gods (or God) because of their poor moral behavior. But such a dualistic
view is foreign to Homer.
The Homeric gods are not:
a. Consistently good, merciful or just.
b. They are not omniscient. They know a lot, the have a sense of outcomes, but they don't know all.
c. They are not omnipotent, though they are very powerful. The gods too are somewhat subject to moira.
d. They are not transcendent; they did not create the world, and stand outside of it; rather, they exist within the world, as powers, forces, factors shaping nature and human life; there is no natural-
supernatural dualism in Homer.
e. The human-divine relationship is not based on mutual respect or love, although sometimes the gods have their favorites; rather, gods and human are entangled in each other's lives.
What the gods are:
a. Personified forces of nature and society: Aphrodite is sexual passion; Ares is war; Dionysus is ecstasy, Zeus is authority, and so on.
b. Homer embodies a mythological sensibility, which we can describe as the tendency to interpret the world in terms of timeless, archetypal principles. This tendency is characteristic of Greek thought and culture.
c. Beneath the flux of concrete, daily life, are timeless, universal forces, variously described in Homer as gods and in later Greek philosophic culture, archetypes, Ideas, or Forms.
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Book 24 - Priam / hermes ask for the body of a son. 2 men cry together, emotional connection that wins over achilles - epic about war and battle and end abouts tears and emotion. Shows the shift in achilles / return to humanity not bound by rage. Achilles embodies the awareness of human mortality. GENESIS Historical context - emerges in context and in response to the great political powers on either side of ancient Israel in egypt. Genesis seeks to provide the origin of Israel as a nation and trace the ‘history’ of humans. Genesis ch1-2 creation - View on god as almighty, majestic creator - God as certain, no doubt, powerful Genesis ch2-3 temptation - Its “the lord” not “God” in this story - That is, in cursing the serpent, "the Lord" is triggering a kind of conversation with himself. When he learns of the transgression, he explodes with fury and might that is shocking. What do the Lord's words reveal to us about the nature of this god Yahweh? Genesis ch4 the first murder - In Mesopotamian mythology, human kind is created to be a kind of slave for the gods — especially a tiller of the soil. The ziggurats did not lead one up to heaven, but were a conduit for the gods to descend to the earthly plane. - “The Lord” in this story, watching over the humans after their punishment of being kicked out of garden, he reacts to what they're doing, after the murder he steps in and takes action - God and the humans are learning from each other in this scene and it can be said neither and whole and complete Genesis ch5 generation of adam - Prominent lists and introduces enoch who walked with God Genesis ch 6-9 the flood - God proves himself a destroyer and creator - ‘The lord’ regrets having made the evil humans - God doesn't seem angry - References to the epic of gilgamesh - Ends with the nakedness of noah and his sons, however its interpreted shows that evil and humans did not learn Genesis ch11 Babel - Tower of babel concludes the primeval histories of the bible - ‘The lord’ is concerned for human cultural unity, they're all made in god's image and yet so different and against each other, why tho? - ‘The lord’ stops their aspirations to be godlike and the presence of a celestial court is mentioned and hinted again. THE BOOK OF JOB Summary - Satan bets God ‘I can get job to curse you’, God says ‘no chance bud’ - Job
loses everything, does not curse God, Satan makes suffering even worse - Job's friends try to explain his suffering, Job says no - His friends say God is just, therefore he deserves it all, Job says no - Job never questions God, eventually rages at him demanding an answer - God delivers a reply that silences Job - Job has restored to him some of what he lost - The speeches are what really deliver power and summary
doesn’t do it justice Theodicy and Theism 1. Why is there the suffering we know? Answers to this question are often grouped under the rubric of theodicy, literally, god's justice. There are least three ways to answer this question: 1. Everything in the universe is the result of chance. But the question, "Why do I suffer?" asks for a purpose, not a mere cause. Pointing to the presence of a virus in your body, or to the inequities of capitalism is not sufficient;
we want more than a cause, we want a narrative or a picture of the world in which suffering makes sense.
2. A second way of answering the question is to suppose that the universe is subject to iron laws but not to any purpose. 3. Lastly, even if we assume the world is governed by a purpose, this purpose doesn't seem especially intent on preventing suffering; it perhaps even enjoys it, since there is so much of it. 2. These three answers to the matter of suffering are roughly the position of three great world religions: 1. Taoism and Confucianism approximate the first solution — things just happen. 2. The second solution is that of Hinduism and Buddhism, through the notion of karma, a version of reaping what one sows, with reward and punishment being distributed as we migrate our way from life to life. There isn't really any purpose to the transmigration of souls, and the round of reincarnation, it is just how thing are. 3. A third solution is found in polytheistic religions and indigenous traditions — There is evil in the world; or more than one god; or more than one force or power — and they fight it out. 4. In each case, there is a world picture in which suffering has a place — it is accounted for. 3. The problem of suffering only truly becomes a problem when coupled with certain notions about God or the sacred, what we might call the God of popular theism: 1. Theism means, simply, discourse about God (theos, in Greek). 2. Popular theism supposes that: God is all knowing (omniscient), all powerful (omnipotent), and completely good (just); these three assumptions produce a logical knot that can't be undone. Unless one of God's perfection, justice, or goodness is abandoned, there are only pseudo-
solutions to the problem of suffering. Job's friends, for example, seeing the suffering of Job, can only assume that he has done something to deserve it, since God, in their mind, is just. 3. Job basically agrees
with this monotheistic view of God: God, the source of all, is the source of good and evil. What Job refuses is to grant God the quality of just judgment. 1. There are a few pseudo solutions to the problem of suffering. One invokes the notion of immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the dead: at some point in the future, long after one's death, there will be a final judgment in which the righteous will be granted their just desserts, and the wicked punished. Leading a moral life, if it doesn't pay off in this world, will pay off later, in another world. A second solution is to proposes a dualism: God is good, but there is an almost equally powerful oppositional force in the world (Satan, the devil) that creates havoc. 2. Early in the history of ancient Israel, these kinds of views, which were readily found in the religion of Egypt, for example, were steadfastly refused. In the period of exile, however, these notions creep into the culture of ancient Israel, and would later be developed by Christianity. 3. Job refuses such solutions. God is God, it is just that he isn't just—at least, according to human conceptions of justice. 4. The last word on the book of Job will never be written, but Job challenges popular notions of God's justice, mercy, love, as well as our ideas about sin, suffering, guilt, punishment. Job's indictment of the injustice of the world is, in my view, surely right. Job personifies the absolute weirdness of the world, the uncanny, inscrutable, merciless qualities of a god who is all powerful, but not very caring. 5. Job was no atheist; he retained a faith in God. What is at stake, perhaps, is not belief or unbelief, piety or impiety, but an experience of the world, a view of the world, that never moves too far away from keeping the sufferings of our fellow humans at hand. We can't write these sufferings off as deserved. The piety of Job, in contrast to that of his friends, is a piety born of a suffering so powerful (an awareness of the suffering of others) that one is moved to scream at God, to arguing with God rather than about him. 6. In the words of Walter Kaufmann in The Faith of the Heretic, the book of Job suggests a notion of the sacred that engenders a certain attitude toward life. "In the form of an anthropomorphic faith, these words [of Job] express one of the most admirable attitudes possible... to be able to give up what life takes away, without being unable to enjoy what life gives us in the first place; to remember that we came naked from the womb and shall return naked; to accept what life gives us as if it were God's own gift, full of wonders beyond price; and to be able to part with everything" (169). 7. Such an attitude can properly be called "religious."
The Sublime 1. The term 'sublime' derives from the ancient Greek, where it referred to the effect of rhetorically overpowering language. 2. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the notion of the sublime became
a central part of European aesthetics. 3. An influential literary critic, Edmund Burke, developed his ideas about the sublime in a famous essay titled Philosophical Enquiry concerning the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke makes reference to the book of Job in developing his ideas. The sublime, argues Burke, is a quality
of immense power, overwhelming power. The sublime is ravishing and perilous, shattering and enthralling, boundless and uplifting. Like many romantic inspired aesthetic concepts, it is a secularized version of the sacred, of God. 4. In reading Job, the reader may have an experience of the sublime. Job's speech in Chapter 7, for example, not to mention the later speeches of God, can evoke a sense of both pity and pleasure; we pity Job's suffering, but are also awe-stuck by his pain and willingness to call God down to earth for an accounting. There is something awesome about both God and Job. 5. Job, in short, is terrorized by powers beyond his control; for the reader, these terrors carry the sublime. For Job, they are just terrors. Burke knew that "when danger and pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible." What the Job writer is able to accomplish is an aesthetic transfiguring of life's pain through the character of Job. 6. The reader, like Job, encounters the sublime as a kind of negativity; against God's speeches we measure-up in a fairly paltry way; God's power and grandeur hollows us out to the point of nothingness — but is precisely here that we may tip over into an
answer about suffering that is beyond representation but nevertheless tangible. Death, in the end, is a mystery that we cannot comprehend. It shatters our desire to master the world; but such a shattering experience of suffering or death puts us on more intimate terms with it, allowing us, in a sense, to know it. 7. Burke writes: 1. "The sublime; it comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros. Whenever strength is only useful, and employed for our benefit or our pleasure, then it is never sublime: for nothing can act agreeably to us, that does not act in conformity to our will; but to act agreeably to our will, it must be subject to us, and therefore can never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception." 2. "I am sensible that this idea [of the sublime] has met with opposition, and is likely still to be rejected by several. But let it be considered, that hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea. There is a passage in the book of Job amazingly sublime, and this sublimity is principally due to the terrible uncertainty of the thing described:
"In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice, - Shall mortal man be more just than God?" We are first prepared with the utmost solemnity for the vision; we are first terrified, before we are let even into the obscure cause of our emotion; but when this grand cause of terror makes it appearance, what is it? Is it not wrapt up in
the shades of its own incomprehensible darkness, more awful, more striking, more terrible, than the liveliest description, than the clearest painting, could possibly represent it? Historical Context 1. It is difficult to date the book of Job, though the fifth century B.C.E. is likely; part of the book, the speeches of Elihu (Chapter 32), is most certainly a later addition to the main text. Job is not an Israelite, but from the "land of Uz," a region in southeastern Palestine. 2. An interesting feature of the work is that there is no mention of the Lord's action in Israel's history; it is a dramatic, morally
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insightful and aesthetically powerful story detached from the national kind of narrative and interests prevalent in much of the Hebrew Bible. 3. Certainly, whoever wrote the story had a critical edge to their thought. Job is a meditation on the meaning of suffering, and very likely, it was written as a rejection of status-quo religion and morality. William Safire, a political commentator, published a book titled The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today's Politics (1992), arguing that in Job we have the archetype of defiance in the face of unjust power and authority. 1. The labels we use for religions tend to suggest unified traditions. We speak, for example of Judaism or Islam, and the singular nature of these nouns suggest singular traditions. But religious traditions have a great deal of internal debate and even discord.
The Job writer was writing with a critical stance towards the piety of his day. 2. The book did, however, become part of the canon of Jewish sacred literature, a fact that demonstrates both the acceptability of critique with Judaism and the popularity of the story. 3. Historically, the book of Job is a response to what we might term status-quo morality. In fact, the "friends" of Job are the embodiment of religious and moral positions EURIPIDES’ THE BACCHAE Historical Context - After the athenian tragedy - Euripides (author) greek, moved to macedonian for liberation - The war was crazy, this draws on war and the regret of war, compared to impact of ww2 and 911 - Dionysus (Bacchus) - God and central character - Dionysus the loosener, god of wetness - Ties to nietzsche and his old work talking of greek culture - Lots more in lesson notes Aesthetic Dimensions - A greek tragedy - Dionysian cult - guy loves rites and chores - New performative genre in early rise of greek drama and theatre - The cult held yearly spring festivals in athens - Tragedy developed as the main theatre genre after this - Tragedy develops and becomes a kind of embodied performance - Tragedy, Plot, Theme - definitions *Activity at the bottom of the lesson notes, revisit this* Religious Dimensions - The bacchae is an incredibly violent play - The holy and divine are not sweet but vengeful - Dionysus embodies the contradiction of blessed and cursed - The bacchae is
about recognizing the value of some kinds of transgressive behaviour Pentheus the fundamentalist (podcast) - fundamentalism ; the fear of ambiguity and access, fundamentalist requires perfect clarity through clear beliefs, goals and so on - Pentheus fears fundamentalist in himself and his city - Gets killed because of that - He gets done in by his own intolerance - He was ripped apart because he couldn't see his own position and that he was not being reasonable and could not change his views on dionysus and his religion THE GOSPEL OF MARK 3 important cultural and political features 1. Religious syncretism - Culture was very mixed at the time - Interest and belief in immortality of the soul and eternal life - Interest in matters of salvation - Notion of an apocalyptic struggle between forces of good and evil 2. Violent Upheaval - Suffering and political collapse due to the roman and jewish war - Lots of details in lesson notes about the war - The gospels were a literary response to the destruction of jewish temples 3. God - God as someone who would raise a hand against israel’s enemies - Israel's defeats were punishment for sins, god didn't help in battle - Example of this from passage in lesson notes Key features of Mark - Authorship - John Mark wrote, secretary to Peter. Written decades after by educated gentile. - Gospel - The good news translates to gospel - Wrote of the good news as jesus gave it to people - The Christ - Opening sentence described jesus as the christ, son of god - Surprising claim, christ in greek means messiah, thought he would come as a grand leader of the divine during battle, not someone like him who died in the way of a criminal - Marks book meant to show messiah was to bring about god’s kingdom - Beginnings - Shows his ways through patterns - More notes on the things he does in lesson notes - Who is He - God blesses his baptism - The theme of not knowing is important even though the reader knows - Info about family before he became well known - Middle - The information about the middle of the gospel -
He is the one who must suffer and die - Jesus predicts his end in this narrative, accepts his fate, does not
overthrow - Climax - No one understand who jesus truly is until these moments - Look at lesson notes - Identity Confirmed - He is confirmed as the son of god at the end of the story when he rises again OVID'S METAMORPHOSES Story big on the notion of narcissism - term applied to those who are in vain, conceited, self-centred. But the story has deeper meaning that just narcissism Ovid's work was big on greek mythology, declined in popularity as chirstianity grew The central theme of the book is metamorphosis or transformation, "bodies changed into other forms," as Ovid puts it. The stories recounted and developed by Ovid deal with a range of themes desire, sexual passion, love (licit and illicit), the seeking of wisdom, and employ comedy, parody, irony, metaphor, symbol—a diverse set of stories and literary techniques wed together around the central theme of transformation, a powerful religious theme. Tales of transformation in Ovid’s day were well known stories of humans or deities changed into plants or animals or different beings. Underlying perspective is that the world is constantly undergoing change, and the underlying philosophic or religious question is whether there is continuity in the midst of change. Additionally, themes of reflection, imaging, self-knowledge, the gaze,
identity are all prominent in religious, philosophic, and ethical traditions. Ovid’s metamorphoses, and the story of Narcissus especially is a touchstone for questions of self - reflection and knowledge. The story was slightly confusing about who was who. It was good, heavy themes of self love and reflection. Quite literally a reflecting pool. Nymphs son, Narcissus - Sees prophet / seer, says he can live unless he knows himself - His beauty kept people away from touch
him - Echo sees him, echo was the nymph who cursed to only mimic voices - Echo become infatuated with narcissus, but was sad she could not talk unless he spoke first - Narcissus went to see echo, but he ran away and didn’t want her to touch him - Echo’s beauty disappeared, leaving her voice and bones - Narcissus mocked one of his lovers, “let him love and suffer” - he wanted him to know that he needed to
suffer helplessly, (narcissus to love someone he could not possibly get, like his lovers. And die like echo, hopeless) - Narcissus sees himself in the perfect pool of water, and falls in love with his own image - He couldn’t leave the pool - He called to the forest, was there a love as futureless as mine, “my love is untouchable” - He finally understands its his own reflection, although he knows it’s too late - He cries into the pool, he disappeared from his own eyes eventually - Echo watched all the misery, her anger and
pity collided - Echo cried as he cried - His last words, ‘Farewell you incomparable boy. I have loved you in
vain.’ - Echo replied ‘I loved you in vain’ - Death closed Narcissus eyes - In the land of the dead he couldn’t help but look into the river stix - Echo sang on the hillside - When people went to find the corpse there was nothing but a tall flower, unbroken, bowed, white petals surrounding a yellow middle. Historical Context - Broad theme of the the Metamorphoses is the transformation of bodies from one form to another - Ovid eventually exiled from rome, odds are because he mixed gods and erotic material, went against the conservative emperor - He wrote some pieces about political critique and was
quite a radical - All of this made him a central figure in italian renaissance - The book is an epic, it passed
down a lot of greek myths that were preserved - Right at the time released european transitioned away from helonism to chirstianity - Talk of the wave of gods and influence in change away from gods in lesson notes Echo and Narcissus
- Echo – a nymph who is favorite of the goddess Artemis (whose haunts are woods and wilderness); Hera, the wife of Zeus, takes a malicious interest in her. Hera curses her: Echo will always have the last word, but never be able to speak first. - Narcissus – son of the nymph Liriope; the seer Tiresias predicts he will have a long, happy life, unless he comes to know himself. Narcissus is beauty incarnate, but he is aloof, full of himself, and vain. - He rebuffs Echo’s advances, who then retreats to a cave, where she
wastes away to a shadow, with only her echoing voice remaining. - Narcissus, unknowingly contemplating his reflection in the pool, falls in love with himself and, in an effort to possess his image, drowns. - The scorned nymphs try to find the body in order to give a proper burial, but all they find is a flower growing at the spot where he died – a Narcissus. Moral of the story - Avoid excess, beware of appearance, do not shun others out of pride - Story not about his self love but of self awareness, longing, and our relationship to the world around us Depths of Echo and Narcissus - Very ambiguous story with lots if interpretative possibilities - The story’s key themes—desire, self-knowledge, pride, prophecy—and the cluster of powerful images of reflection—the
echoing voice, the mirror-like pond, the doubling of desire, the reflecting on oneself—give the story enormous interpretive range. Doubling and Dualities - Important feature of the story, its number of dualities / doublings - A doubling in a story is when one character has qualities often considered opposites or contraries or when 2 characters bring together opposite qualities (fire and water) - Tiresias,
we learn, was both man and woman. Narcissus has a mixed background, both human and divine. Narcissus is born of water; Echo of air. Narcissus is first “deceived” or “seduced” by the reflection/echoing of the voice; later, by the reflection of his image. And so on. “To know oneself” - Starts with narcissus and his visit to the seer - Narcissus does come to know himself but not clearly. Humans didn’t always have such a heavy self - awareness as they do now - Example, readers know narcissus is falling in love with himself, but he does not - Talks of mirror stage ; when a baby first discovers they are themself through recognition of their own face in a mirror Mirror Stage - In the mirror stage, information of oneself is blurred - We can be so enraptured with our own image that a false identification takes place - Narcissus does eventually have a moment where he realizes it might be his own image Mirror - Water as the first mirror
- Lesson notes deep dive into narcissus and his interpretation of the complexion and reflection of the water Echo - Curse of speech is harsh, as it is one's power to self definition and awareness - Echo cannot
express herself, doomed to depend on others - Ovid handles her sensitively and suggestively, shows proper listening - An echo suggest we need to listen back, it rings true if we listen, narcissus does not listen - Echos are essential to the formation of self awareness and knowledge HAMLET An old tale made new - Old tale, interpreted and re-performed so many times - There were several stage version and shakespeare transformed them into greatness - It draws on a few things mentioned next Hamnet - Shakespeare's son Hamnet - He turned to this story after his son’s death (died at 11, never met him) - He did not directly write anything about his death expect just after the funeral he
wrote the play King John where one scene has a mother driven to thoughts of suicide over the death of a son - His son's death must have been in his mind when composing Hamlet - Hamlet is by far Shakespeare's longest and most complex play, as if he devoted a major amount of time and effort to it. -
Great diversity in characters, settings and content - Character of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most compelling
character, and very complex - Hamlet's broad theme of death, especially in relation to religious change that characterized Shakespeare’s era. - 16th century England was full of political and religious upheaval -
After Ophelia’s funeral her brother Laertes’ says “what ceremony else”, this question resonates with society at the time because the religious practices and understand of death had been changing so much and so often - Notion of purgatory was huge at this time - The play captures an interrogative mood, as if a shifting in time, the onset of modern age - Questions of death, memory, and identity ripple through the play as they did in England The Ghost - Shakespeare made the ghost into a presence able to evoke a numinous fear and attraction in the audience. - Hamlet takes up the tension between reason and the hypothetical supernatural - Shakespeare’s handling of the ghost is meant to evoke its reality, power and presence - Lesson notes
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take of the ghosts first encounter in detail, like a lot of detail Death - Hamlet is a lot about death, Lewis didn’t mean mean that people die, but that the play itself is a reflection on death - Most tragedies, death is the limit or end or outcome of the play. Death may signify redemption or deliverance or justice. - Hamlet ponders “what happens after death” - The play is a meditation on death - The central question
of Hamlet is also the central question for the character Hamlet. Hamlet is groping in the dark for an answer to specific questions. The continued search for answers is linked to a sense of doubt caused by a disruption in the structure that helped people deal with loss. (change in religion) - Shakespeare’s comments and information on the changing culture that are shared with the entire society is not prayers
but his deepest expression: the play itself - By making the ghost come alive theatrically, Shakespeare gave back the connection to the dead. - There is a lot missing in my notes, it is very detailed and seems mostly unimportant to the theme as a total Podcast - Hamlet is a play about death, coming to terms with the fact of death is certainly central to religious and philosophical traditions. - While we can’t know
exactly what Shakespeare was saying, there are such powerful and important passages that must evoke some of what he thought. - Hamlet's famous ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy shows the absence of knowledge truly had by Hamlet and others in regards to death - Shakespeare had similar thoughts: Death is a fact, but death is unknowable—a mystery that haunts life, coloring it with a certain mood. - “As you like it” - Life has stages, we develop and change, but ultimately, we die. And what happens when we die? “Oblivion.” No teeth, eyes, taste—everything gone. Shakespeare sounds here somewhat like a Buddhist: all is impermanent. - “Tempest” - Indeed, like the “great globe itself,” we dissolve, fade and leave nothing behind. Impermanence, decay, change, death—again, there are parallels with Buddhism here. - Difficult to reason the radical sense of our coming ‘oblivion’ - Shakespeare generally a “heavy disposition” - And one reason for this melancholy mood is Hamlet’s intimate, persistent questioning of death. In a sense, Hamlet is a modern Job, disillusioned with the inevitable strife, pain, and, ultimately, death that awaits us all, and looking for some answer to it. - What Shakespeare thought about death is harsh and unremitting. But for all that, Shakespeare was active, productive, creative—indeed, there may
be a connection between his prodigious creativity and the starkness of his vision. - Hamlet’s delays and doubts spurred by the ‘nothing matters’ ideology seems honest DON QUIXOTE An old tale made new - Old tale, interpreted and re-performed so many times - There were several stage version and shakespeare transformed them into greatness - It draws on a few things mentioned next Hamnet - Shakespeare's son Hamnet - He turned to this story after his son’s death (died at 11, never met him) - He did not directly write anything about his death expect just after the funeral he
wrote the play King John where one scene has a mother driven to thoughts of suicide over the death of a son - His son's death must have been in his mind when composing Hamlet - Hamlet is by far Shakespeare's longest and most complex play, as if he devoted a major amount of time and effort to it. -
Great diversity in characters, settings and content - Character of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most compelling
character, and very complex - Hamlet's broad theme of death, especially in relation to religious change that characterized Shakespeare’s era. - 16th century England was full of political and religious upheaval -
After Ophelia’s funeral her brother Laertes’ says “what ceremony else”, this question resonates with society at the time because the religious practices and understand of death had been changing so much and so often - Notion of purgatory was huge at this time - The play captures an interrogative mood, as if a shifting in time, the onset of modern age - Questions of death, memory, and identity ripple through the play as they did in England
The Ghost - Shakespeare made the ghost into a presence able to evoke a numinous fear and attraction in the audience. - Hamlet takes up the tension between reason and the hypothetical supernatural - Shakespeare’s handling of the ghost is meant to evoke its reality, power and presence - Lesson notes take of the ghosts first encounter in detail, like a lot of detail
Death - Hamlet is a lot about death, Lewis didn’t mean mean that people die, but that the play itself is a reflection on death - Most tragedies, death is the limit or end or outcome of the play. Death may signify redemption or deliverance or justice. - Hamlet ponders “what happens after death” - The play is a meditation on death - The central question of Hamlet is also the central question for the character Hamlet. Hamlet is groping in the dark for an answer to specific questions. The continued search for answers is linked to a sense of doubt caused by a disruption in the structure that helped people deal with loss. (change in religion) - Shakespeare’s comments and information on the changing culture that are shared with the entire society is not prayers but his deepest expression: the play itself - By making the ghost come alive theatrically, Shakespeare gave back the connection to the dead. - There is a lot missing in my notes, it is very detailed and seems mostly unimportant to the theme as a total Podcast - Hamlet is a play about death, coming to terms with the fact of death is certainly central to religious and philosophical traditions. - While we can’t know exactly what Shakespeare was saying, there are such powerful and important passages that must evoke some of what he thought. - Hamlet's famous ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy shows the absence of knowledge truly had by Hamlet and others in regards to death - Shakespeare had similar thoughts: Death is a fact, but death is unknowable—a mystery that haunts life, coloring it with a certain mood. - “As you like it” - Life has stages, we develop and change, but ultimately, we die. And what happens when we die? “Oblivion.” No teeth, eyes, taste—
everything gone. Shakespeare sounds here somewhat like a Buddhist: all is impermanent. - “Tempest” - Indeed, like the “great globe itself,” we dissolve, fade and leave nothing behind. Impermanence, decay,
change, death—again, there are parallels with Buddhism here. - Difficult to reason the radical sense of our coming ‘oblivion’ - Shakespeare generally a “heavy disposition” - And one reason for this melancholy mood is Hamlet’s intimate, persistent questioning of death. In a sense, Hamlet is a modern Job, disillusioned with the inevitable strife, pain, and, ultimately, death that awaits us all, and looking for
some answer to it. - What Shakespeare thought about death is harsh and unremitting. But for all that, Shakespeare was active, productive, creative—indeed, there may be a connection between his prodigious creativity and the starkness of his vision. - Hamlet’s delays and doubts spurred by the ‘nothing matters’ ideology seems honest HANSEL AND GRETEL Fairy tale is a story that happens in past tense and not tied to any specifics. - “Beginning of time” is a myth - Story about “real” person is a legend - Fairy tales are sometimes spiritual but never religious Initial impressions Key features - Woods are a living thing not a location Motifs - Food - White / pure - Day and night Images - ? “Moral to the story” - Be nice to kids? Reflecting the status quo? - Wife as ‘boss’ - Controlling mom - Person being selfish (wife) Patriarchy culture Annotations add insane depth and further knowledge / theories Historical Context - Jacob and Grimm lived in Germany at a decisive moment in cultural and political history - This was the renaissance movement known as the romantic movement - During this period there was a general revival to studying religious and other ancient texts. If you understand people's foundational texts you understand
the people. - Scholars collected and translated then studied canonical texts - Grimms realized ‘low’ culture - what we call popular culture was just as constitutive of people's beliefs and values as ‘high’ culture. - There was political factor to collecting texts and stories as well - Europe and America used tradition in unison with new society to form a basis for new beliefs that emanate in new nations - Popular culture study emerged in Europe and contributed to the formation of the modern nation states - germany , language and collective stories played a role in the shift from a loose collection of princely territories to a unified culture centric nation states - Grimms advocated the preservation of the people’s stories. They went out and recorded tales from people that they would later publish - Long list, some
well known include hansel and gretel, rapunzel, cinderella, snow white, etc - Folktales are stories of the people, now committed to paper and electronic media, these stories were passed on orally, and no doubt changed in each telling by the story teller - Folktales were apt to change, and some have dozens of versions, adapted to a particular environment or telling - The grimms argued that folktales form the roots of all literature Some Features of the Grimm tales - The originals are not what we known now, many have changed, endings are odd, and morals aren't as clear in the originals - Tales often evoke a sense of numinous, which means “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the shelf” - Stories critiqued as being patriarchal, which they are, only showing women’s power within household or domestic setting - Mistake to think these stories teach children moral codes - They suggest narratives with sophistication and interpretation - They speak to basic emotion, relationships, fears and hopes - Folktales are a vehicle for education, entertaining, emphasizing virtues, dramatize life as lived, open readers to mystery and wonder - Setting - Grimm tales located in familiar and strange places, In the woods, at a cottage, by a river, but also temporally speaking, in a land “once upon a time” - Characters - Usually simple / flat, straightforward motivation, driven by a single overriding desire - Very
stereotypical characters, jealous sibling, wicked stepmother - There is a hero or heroine cast into a wide open world and aided or hindered by supernatural forces - Plot and Style - Journeys are common, action is suspenseful - Repetition patterns: 12 tasks, 3 wishes, 4 tests, etc - Endings are typically happy, things work out, inspiring hope for their audience - Themes and Motifs - Simple but powerful - Enchantment is common, dark forest, magic spells, wise old man, helpful animals, magical objects like golden egg, beanstalk, wands - Violence is ever present, reason for violence in folktales: keeping us wary of the violence of real life, the realities of life in the country the story comes from (fairly harsh living at the times) - Women - Another kind of violence, stories filled with negative female stereotypes - Young girl in need of good man, women mostly helpless, dependent on men whom they must attract with appearance or ability (cinderella and dancing) - German culture in particular, men were the earliest collectors or folk tales and male gender bias is evident in the tales they chose The Sacred - Grimm tales contain a mix of chirstian, paigan, and ancient motifs and narratives, fairy tales are rarely perceived as religious stories in the 20th century - Typical way in which scholarship and artistic treatment connect fairy tales with the sacred has been through the notion of “time out of time” - JRR said fairy tales “have now a mythical effect, they open a door on other times, and if you pass through only for a moment, we stand outside our own time. - Sense of being displaced in time is a factor in some people’s encounter with fairy tales. ‘Once upon a time’ motif does not refer to a time in the past but an eternal sense of time - One reason grimm tales took root in european culture is that they stepped in to fill a spiritual void
created by the erosion of religious faith and practice in the modern era - Rudolf Otto referred to ‘the holy’ in terms of ‘numinous’ experience, an experience of something strange, other than human and powerful. - Elizabeth Brown makes the argument that it is through the tales that children and adults encounter a sense of numinousness. - Today film has taken over the fairy tale function of creating mystery. - Fairy tales can be interpreted and critiqued using ideas and methods of feminist and other critical theory. Fairy tales can serve ideological purposes and bear on our moral lives. For example, santa and the list of naughty children, good behaviour should not be induced through reward and punishment. Jack Zipes on Fairy Tales and Wonder Tales - Some scholars refer to the tales collected by brothers grimm as ‘wonder tales’ - Jack Zipes is one of the foremost scholars working in the field of folk and fairy tales. - Zipes writes - Scribes wrote down tales that reflect on rituals, history, customs, beliefs, etc - Recording was important because writers preserve oral tradition for future generations - Literary fairy
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tales developed as an appropriation of a particular oral storytelling that gave birth to magic tales and marvelous tales - As wonder tales became more popular they began constituting the genre of literary fairy tale and motifs, themes and characters from oral tradition developed - The wonder tales were always considered somewhat suspect by the ruling and educated class - Zipes emphasizes structure and themes of those tales were such as to evoke as their name suggest wonder in the reader - Characters, setting, motifs, are combined and varied according to specific functions to induce wonder and hope for change in the audience who are to marvel at the magical changes that occur in the course of events - A sense of wonder distinguished fairy tales from moral stories, novella, etc - Wonder causes astonishment and it is often regarded as a supernatural occurrence and can be an omen or portent. It gives rise to admiration, fear, awe. - In oral tales we are to marvel at the workings of the universe where anything can happen at any time and events are never to be explained - Characters are opportunistic and do not demand explanation - The tales seek to awaken our regard for the miraculous condition of life and to ecoke profound feelings or awe and respect for life as a miraculous process, which can be altered to compensate for humans lack of power. - In wonder tales those who are naive and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted and can recognize the wondrous signs. They retain belief in the miraculous. - Villains are those who use words and power intentionally to exploit, control, transfix, incarcerate and destroy - They have no respect or consideration for nature and other human beings, they seek to abuse magic for their own interest - Protagonists want to keep the process of natural change flowing and indicate possibilities for overcoming the obstacles that prevent other characters or creatures from living in a peaceful world. - The focus on the marvelous and hope for change in the oral folktale does not mean that all all wonder tales, and later the literary fairy tales, served and serve a radical transformation purpose - The nature and meaning of folk tales depends on the stage of development of a tribe, community, or society. - Oral tales mean to stabilize, conserve, and challenge the common beliefs, laws, values, and norms of a group - The sense of miraculous in the tale and intended emotion sought by the narrator in ideology. - Since these wonder tales have been with use for thousands of years and have undergone so many different changes in the oral tradition, it is difficult to determine the ideological intention of the narrator and when we disregard the narrators intentions, it is difficult to reconstruct the ideological meaning of a tale - In the last analysis however, even if we cannot establish whether a wonder tale is ideological conservative, radical, sexist, progressive, etc. It is the celebration of miraculous or fabulous transformation in the name of hope that account its major appeal - People have always wanted to improve and or change their personal status or have sought magical intervention on their behalf. The emergence of the literary fairy tale during the latter part of the medieval period bears witness to the persistent human quest for an existence without oppression and constraints. - It is a utopian quest that we continue to mark down or record through the metaphors of the fairy tale. FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY’S “THE GRAND INQUISITOR” FROM BROTHERS KARAMAZOV Intro - The story of the grand inquisitor is part of the novel by Dostoevsky - Story told by ivan to his brother alyosha - Grand
inquisitor is one chapter - Story mixes ethics, philosophy, and religion, and centers on relationship between freedom and human nature - It is a narrative elaboration of the moral and philosophical dimensions inherent in the temptation stories in the gospels Dostoevsky, Some Background - Born moscow 1821, died 1881 - Father was army doctor, wanted to turn son away from literature to be army engineer - Fyodor did become engineer, but resigned when encountered socialist movement - He was an exact contemporary of Karl marx and adopted social views which he developed in his short stories and novels
- Lived as a revolutionary, was a vocal critic of the czarist govt and state, he was arrested many times, narrowly escaped execution and spent years in siberian work camps - Upon his release in 1854, Dostoevsky became a supporter of the monarchy, and an ardent supporter of the russian orthodox church, He disavowed his early socialist views to become a russian nationalist - Between 1864 - 1880 he wrote his greatest works: notes from underground, crime and punishment, and the brother karamazov - Dostoevsky was fiercely anti-catholic, and his depiction of the grand inquisitor reflects these views The Brothers Karamazov - Powerful novel about the Karamazovs, father is Fyodor - old drunk who chases women, he has no religious sensibilities, he is a pig - Father passes his vices to eldest son, Dmitri, who resembles his father but has a bit more of a conscience and capacity to reflect - 2nd son Ivan, focus of the novel, is a well educated skeptic. He has adopted enlightenment philosophy and embodies and advocated a largely atheistic, rationalistic, and nihilistic view of the world - Youngest son, Aloysha is religious, practicing as a movic monastic, he witnesses the death of orders elder, his mentor, When he died Aloysha struggles with questions of faith and purpose - The brothers represent a spectrum of choices and value/belief orientations to the modern world: sensuality, enlightenment, spirituality - Ivan feeds Aloysha’s doubts - The story of the grand inquisitor is told to Aloysha by Ivan, in order to impress upon him the ways in which religious institutions constrain human freedom and autonomy. The parable of the Grand Inquisitor (a summary) - Ivan's story takes direction from the second coming of Christ, his return to earth - Place he returns is to 16th c Spain where the inquisition was peaking and heretics were being burned at the stake by the Grand Inquisitor’ - Inquisition founded in 1481 to hunt out non Catholics, mostly Muslims and Jews - More than 2k people burned publicly - Christ arrives, people seek him out, Grand Inquisitor sends troops to arrest him - Story echoes arrest and trial with pilate - GI comes
before Christ and delivers a long monologue, in an attempt to justify his actions. His speech deals with the temptations of christ, in a nutshell, HI argues Christ messed up bad - Economics security - bread. The
masses, says GI, demand security not freedom. Christ should have given people bread. “Make us your slaves, but feed us - Psychological security, GI says people can’t stand freedom. Christ wants people to choose him freely. - Political conquest and security - people desire being a cog in a wheel, christ failed by not taking political power - Christ responds to the GI diatribe with silence, and a kiss - The Inquisitor sends Christ away, telling him to never return. “The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea” Thinking About The Story - The author and his characters - Dostoevsky's views are not Ivans; nor does Ivan share views espoused by the GI, and certainly Dostoevsky’s not inline with GI - What makes D remarkable is he allows his characters to develop and speak their views forceful and articulately. D is a master of forcing readers to wrestle with characters and ideas that we might otherwise view with disdain or contempt - One of the fascinating aspects of D’s story is its compelling ambiguity, a quality that drives the discussion of Alyosha and Ivan Thinking about the Story - Dostoevsky’s critique of Utopianism - Dostoevsky’s story is written under an ironic mood, opposed as he was to all forms of social utopianism, which he understood in terms of the limitations placed on human freedom. Utopians make people cogs. - Utopian projects, suggests D, are dystopian. D is a forerunner in dystopian literature and film. Dystopian social order is totalitarian, limits are placed on freedom(s) - Dystopian societies are thus the negative image of utopians. D was suspicious of utopian efforts, seeing them in the
tendency to become that which they aim to overcome - GI offers a form of authoritarian utopianism, one in which people live peacefully. - Reaches back to plato's republic - He develops a view of human power not all that different from GI’s - Social harmony result of creating a society based on the fact of inherent inequalities in human nature: people can be ordered and ranked - There are those with gold, silver or bronze souls, rulers rule, soldiers guard, workers work, this works because everyone performs their social function - Story has a long history from Plato's republic to Augustine's city of god to D’s GI to Aldous Huxley's brave new world. In the hands of Orwell and Huxley the theme is subverted and casts an
ironic mood. Drawing on the legacy of D these authors developed the dystopian narrative and plot. - Of late, dystopian films like the Matrix, have been popular. People in the matrix live peaceful lives but they are robbed of freedom to achieve a peaceful unconscious state. - What is unclear is whether such films are themselves part of the control techniques of a dystopian society of whether they aid in overcoming repressive forms of social control Dostoevsky and Catholicism (D and C) - D sees C utopia of GI in dystopian terms - For D the church's efforts to create and regulate belief and social order through the use of the inquisition, was an early form of general impulse or direction in western culture - Somewhat strangely, perhaps, D equated revolutionary socialist movements of the 19th c with Catholicism, seeing them both as western heresies, the embodiment of the Anti-Christ - In his book, the idiot (1868), D would have his Prince Myshkin argue about roman catholicism very similarly to the of D’s dairy - D was likely mistaken in his analysis, his views chapped by anti catholic bias derived from his commitment to the russian orthodox church - Critique of catholicism that we find in GI is part of a wider sense of disdain (usually from within) Chirstianity supported status quo values and beliefs, and had lost all sense of its radical origins and its critique of political power. Each of these thinkers was, in their own way, trying to save Christianity from itself. - For D the crucifiction of Christ pointed to a truth that progressive thinkers, philosophers, etc, rejected. D’s form of C was far more pessimistic than the liberal humanism that was taking root in European culture. - D’s view on the matter: love was being displaced by rationalized utopian “programs” and the deeply revolutionary quality inherent in the crucifixion has been overtaken by a more facile sense of reform and progress. - In hindsight - D’s tale is typically read in connection with the rise of fascist, totalitarian govt’s in 20c europe, with their machinery of propaganda and barbaric intolerance of any and all sense of difference - Writers like Huxley and Orwell see the relevance of The Grand Inquisitor story for western societies as a whole, the Matrix is not some other or historical society, but our society. Freedom - Issue above all for D is the central overriding question of human freedom - “everyman is offered the alternative to GI or Jesus and must accept one of the others, for there is no third choice; what appears to be other solutions are only passing phases. - 2 universal principles, then confront one another - freedom and compulsion
....
Divine love and humanitarian pity, Christ and Anit-Christ - Freedom, suggests D, is not a means to happiness, but a good in its own right. To choose to be free may not make you happy, but it will make you more fully human. - For D, to sacrifice freedom by join others as a cog in the grand plan of a progressive society is to strip us of our freedom - D is seen as a forerunner
of the philosophical movement known as existentialism, which places a great deal of emphasis on the centrality of human freedom in the leading of an authentic life The Argument - The argument from GI is fairly simple, people are weak, pitiful creatures who require submission to the rule of a system or institution that takes away the burden of freedom. We would rather have someone determine our fate for us than have to work it out for ourselves. We are reading and willing to give up our freedom. - In light of this, those in the know, like the GI, are in reality, simply making the best of a bad situation, giving people what they demand and need - More info on matrix and
this argument in lesson notes THE LOTTERY Introduction - One of the most widely read short stories in American Literature - After the
story appeared in New Yorker Magazine in 1948 the magazine was flooded with letters most of which from readers who were hostile, bewilders and scandalized - Jackson died of heart failure in 1965, at age 48 after suffering years of psychosomatic symptoms and long term addiction issues - The nature of the The Lottery is such that knowing too much before reading it diminished the story’s artistry and power The Complicit Reader
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- In the lottery, Jackson invites reader into a Norman Rockwell-like all American new england village, before pulling the rug out with an act of horrific violence - In the tale, villagers gather together in the central square of an unnamed village for an annual lottery. There is much excitement and interest surrounding the event, which we can call a rite, since it has ritual dimensions - it ends in a sacrifice - Discussion of everyday life is intermingled with a bit of history about the lottery, and tradition and modern versions are compared. - We learn about the particulars of this years lottery and finally the winning family is selected, from them a single member, Mrs Hutchinson, who is summarily stoned to death by the villagers, including her family - After publication of the story, Jackson publicly stated that the model of the village in the story was North Bennington, Vermont, where she and her husband had lived for many years. - Certainly she was not referring in any literal sense to an annual rite practiced by the village but she was suggesting a violence that underlay the foundations of her liberal, middle class world - The narrative though simple is masterful. It invites readers into the village for an act of identification, thus making the reader complicit in an act of scapegoating that eventuate in the stoning of Mrs Hutchinson - Many readers of the story actually wind up feeling manipulated. Did your reading provoke any such emotions? I mean yes - A.M Homes, and Debora Triesman, they spend time looking at the story's aesthetic features, the techniques used to draw reader in, which generates the sense of shock at the end The Scapegoat 1. James Frazer, in the “The Golden Bough” discussed how mythological narratives are often woven around the theme of a sacrificial killing of an animal or person, with this sacrifice connected
to cyclical, season renewal, the fertility of the land, and the maintenance of social order. 2. In writing “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson was drawing on both the long history of scholarship about rites and myths
of expulsion and sacrifice and on those literary traditions that expose the victimization inherent in these rites and myths. 3. The twist Jackson gives this topic however, is to suggest that her stable, middle class, liberal world is founded on a violence little different from the stability afforded the Greek city-states via their expulsion of the pharmakoi. We unconsciously continue to engage in scapegoating, and her story is
meant to reveal this ugly truth. Even little Davy Hutchinson is holding some stones in his hand. 4. The story suggests that people are easily and comfortably swayed by tradition and the status quo. One villager says, ““We have always had a lottery as far back as I can remember. I see no reason to end it.” Jackson seems to be pointing to a moral inertia in dominant society. The story is thus meant as a kind of shock treatment. 5. Taking the tendency to stick with the status quo an interpretive step further, the story reveals the power of mimetic violence inherent in group or mass psychology. There are a few who question the lottery, but they go along with it in the end. Rene Girard coined the term “mimetic violence.” The word “mimetic” comes from the Greek, mimesis, meaning imitation, copy, or representation. 6. People, argues Girard, are mimetic creatures—we learn through imitation, and we imitate not just behaviours and adopt common moral views—we also imitate each other’s desires, even the desire to do harm to another. The must-have Christmas toy, the newest version of an ipod, the television shows we collectively watch—all of these behaviours have mimetic qualities – we imitate what others do, and desire what others desire. A “contagion” is a rapid escalation of mimetic desire, one that typically ends in violence. The killing of the scapegoat placates murderous energies, for a time. 7. Jackson includes the notion that the lottery might die out. We learn that some parts of the rite have lapsed, and later in the story Steve Adams tells Old Man Warner “that over in the north village they're talking of giving up the lottery.” A moment later, Mrs. Adams says, “Some places have already quit lotteries.” What is the significance of this statement? Where are these places? What is required to end mimetic violence?
SULA Introduction - Written by toni morrison in 1973, sula centers on the sacred, mystery and ambiguity - Novel follows the title character through her early friendship with Nel Greene and her return
to the community after college as a kind of pariah for sleeping with white men - While sula is about race and death it provides an extraordinary cultural and moral commentary on contemporary American Society, the story about the black community that is known as the Bottom but exists…. - Up the hills, also concerns the inversion of things. Known for lucid prose and artful structures of her novel, Toni Morrison ultimately invites the reader to examine what she once identified as the “fierce”, sometimes “excessive”, love that makes life interesting, “gallant, gallant event (interview with bill moyers) Biographical Background - Early life: Toni
Morrison (1931 - 2019) was a black American novelist - Language and voice in her later narratives owe much, according to the author, to the rich storytelling culture of the women raised her - Career - Completing her education in the 1950s, Morrison became an editor at Random House in 1965 after several years of teaching. Then returned to schooling - Began publishing her own novels at 70, retired from princeton in 2006 - Wrote 11 novels, beloved (1987) which became a movie starring Oprah concerns the newspaper account of a runaway slave, Margaret Garner, who kills her own child in an attempt to prevent the slave catchers coming up the drive from recapturing her family. - Legacy - Received a nobel prize of literature in 1993 and US presidential medal of freedom from Barack Obama in
2012. - Admirer of NY times reflecting on her life, wrote, “black life is the canvas of Ms Morrison’s body of work. But I believe her subject is America, this place founded upon conflict and driven by the need to define one group against another” The Sacred Canon - Term canon originally referred in greek to a straight bar or rod for measuring - Also metaphorical reference to the standard rules of an art or trade - Both senses of the word drew on associations with traditions or standards - Word came to denote particular catalogue of books in the Hebrew bible, and in the Chirstian New Testament - Canon of Holy scripture refers to the combined books of the old testament and the new testament, both considered by
the church to be divinely inspired standard of chirstian faith - While the term originally points to measure or standard it became associated with the mark of authority The Literary Canon - The word canon was used later in a literary context to point to writings attributed to a particular author by critical consensus - Literary canon came to mean all of western or european literature - The literary canon catalogues the books that one should teach as the classics of a tradition - Literary or secular canon as it is sometimes called, has been less fixed by tradition than the biblical canon Understanding the “Master Narrative” - In ‘playing in the dark’ ™ argued the ideal of enslaved freedom was made possible only against the backdrop of an enslaved black people that were portrayed as the shadow side of the white slaveholders in american literature - ™ wanted to write a novel she wanted to read that would not be subject to ‘white gaze’ which she defines as ‘its white male life. The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everyone else. The master of fiction. History. It has a certain point of view.” - In summing up her view on race in writing in the interview with charlie rose in 1998, ™ maintains that is cannot be alright to ask a black writer like herself when she is going to write about white culture unless it is also possible to ask a white writer about white culture - The question posed only to the black writer would imply, according to ™, that to write about what matters, one must write stories from the perspective of a dominant, white culture, the stories she had grown weary of reading as a black American woman - Her first novel, the bluest eye, opens with the language of the dick and jane schoolhouse reader to make visible the white frame of american storytelling. - Sula begins with the ‘joke’ that whites pulled over the black community
in Medallion. The ‘joke’ concerns the ‘good white farmer’ who offers up freedom and a piece of fertile valley land to his slave in exchange for some hard labour. Farmer does not resent giving slave freedom but resents giving him good land. So instead he gives him a piece of land in the hills above the valley.
When the slave objects he tells him the hills are really the bottom of heaven, that is, and as the story goes, the slave accepts the land in the hills. - The ‘joke’, on one level, functions as a myth shared by the black and white communities about the origins of the bottom, but it also signals Morrison;s inversion of the white story which enables her to begin narrating the world from the perspective of the black community at the bottom. - Master narrative of white, chirstian conceptions of the sacred of the book to portray the black community's nauced and complicated understanding to the divine Morrison as Poet - ™ known for beautiful prose, more in Sula than other novels - ™ prose rises to the level of poetry as she weaves a number of inter-related symbols together - A literary symbols is “a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in turn signifies something or has a rand of reference’ - The word rose, in a narrative signifies a flower, which in turn symbolizes love - Flag, denotes a banner, but in turn might symbolize a nation\ - Since a symbol points as a sign to something else, it differs from a
metaphor in which one thing is equated to another - Some symbols as in above examples might be thought of as cultural or conventional symbols, that is, they are largely understood through their cultural
references, and carry a predominantly public, rather than private, meaning. Religious symbols often function in this way - The word ‘three’ in Sula for example, denotes the number 3 as it quantifies something in the story but the number 3 in turn functions as cultural or conventional pointing to the holy trinity. The 3 united deweys for example, become a trinity with a plural name - References of other symbols are more specific to particular texts, and might be classed as personal or private symbols. These
symbols are best understood by examining the narrative structure, language and context of the specific work to identify meaningful patterns and connections. - Sula is particularly interesting for its symbolic structure by which ™ connects conventional religious symbols to more personal ones to complicate the religious narrative, for example; - 3 points traditionally to 3rd day and christ's resurrection, privately it points to the text to national suicide day instituted by Shadrack after his return from war. -⅘ are higher numbers, they expand on the christian conceptions of the divine to include the 4th face of God represented by Sula - While All the symbols in the novel highlight narrative moments of significance the number 4 is a central symbol that directs the reader's attention to the sacred. - The number appears in moments associated with death as well as the moral demands of love - “four fingers of each hand” connected with Shadrack’s trauma during the war (13) - “four Virgin Marys” at the home of Nel’s grandmother during the funeral (25) - “four flights of steps” which Eva descends at the time of Plum’s death (146) - “four leaf-locked trees” at the site of Chicken Little’s drowning (146) - “those four wooden planks” boarding up the window Eva jumps through to save her daughter (148) - “the four sickle-pear trees in the front yard” (31, 172) of the Peace residence where Hannah dies - The “four dead robins on the walk” (91) when Sula returns to Medallion - “four o’clock” when the black women on the train have to relieve themselves in the field because there is no washroom marked “Colored Women” at the station (23-4) and at the Sunnydale nursing home when Nel arrives to visit Eva (167) - “four blocks” of the Bottom (49) - “Four white boys” who are threatened by Sula (53) - In addition the number 4 can appear in the context of ‘circle number 5 (164)’ in which the fourth thing is ambiguous and may be the 4th or 5th depending on the perspective. It is therefore unclear whether 4 or 5 strange things precede Hannah’s death. - In circle 5 the ward of the nursing home Nel visits Eva, it becomes unclear whether Eva witnessed the drowning of chicken little years before - Circle number 5 points then to the moral ambiguity surrounding the sacred in the story - Similarly the birthmark over Sulas left eye signifies the mark of cain culturally, and the sin and guilt associated with the first murder - Thus sulas birthmark appears as a snake to most, and a copperhead to Jude whom she seduces. Just as Cain's mark also signifies God’s protection, however, there is a certain ambiguity to Sula’s birthmark that carries other private associations. Appearing at times as rose, especially to Nel, signifying love. - The
birthmark also looks like tadpole, an ambiguous organism with potential for fuller development. To
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Shadrack, who regards Sula as a friend - A few additional symbols in the novel point to the importance of signs and promises, as well as hope and fulfillment Foreshadowing: Prophecy and Fulfilment 1. Promises and signs are a theme in Sula. “There were signs,” for example, of “trouble” at the site of the tunnel where the new construction promised work in the Bottom (151). Shadrack, as prophet, rings his bell in warning every January 3rd, and when he rings it on the last National Suicide Day the tunnel collapses on many in the community. Among other signs, there are the “plague of robins (89)” signaling Sula’s return, “old promises nobody wanted kept (74),” and “the leaf-dead promise” after the accident at the tunnel (162). 2. A prophetic understanding of history has deep roots in the Christian tradition of typological or figural interpretation of the bible. Unlike allegorical interpretations of scripture, which relate a biblical event to a spiritual meaning through analogy, the typological relation is strictly a biblical one, by which an historical person/event in the Old Testament announces a second one in the New. An Old Testament type, like Adam, is taken to be a figure or shadow of the New Testament antitype in Christ, for example. “The Old Testament type or figure,” as M.H. Abrams describes, “is held to be a prophecy or promise of the higher truth that is ‘fulfilled’ in the New Testament;” or as St. Augustine summarized: “‘In the Old Testament the New Testament is concealed; in the New Testament the Old Testament is revealed, (Abrams, Glossary, 89-
90).” There is, in effect, a pointing forward, but also a pointing back in the typological relation. As St. Paul and biblical exegetes used typological interpretation to relate the Hebrew bible to the new revelation in the Christian gospels, they were also appropriating Jewish tradition as a shadow of what they considered to be the greater fulfillment in Christianity. Morrison uses the symbol of fire/smoke to point to this typological relation between promise and fulfillment in Sula. 3. In the chapter, “1921,” the narrator notes of Eva that “after 1910 she didn’t willingly set foot on the stairs but once and that was to light a fire, the smoke of which was in her hair for years (37).” In purely literary terms, this passage simply foreshadows both Plum’s death later in the chapter, when Eva comes down the stairs to pour kerosene over her sleeping son; and Hannah’s two years later, when the lawn fire consumes her even as Eva jumps out of the window to cover her burning daughter. The references to smoke and the passage of time, however, also foreshadow Sula’s later death, when she dreams of gagging on smoke while she lies dying alone in Eva’s old room (148). 4. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, as the saying goes. Beyond
the mere foreshadowing of future events, fire/smoke is also a symbol in Sula of prophecy or the typological relation. Just as smoke often reveals a fire after it’s started, the smoke that lingers in Eva’s hair sheds some light on the earlier tragedies. While the reference to Eva’s will as she descends the stairs seems to indicate the clear choice that she makes to help Plum escape his addiction, the reference
to the lingering smoke indicates that the truth about our moral choices is sometimes only revealed after the fact. Morrison is most interested then in the moment between the fire and the smoke, that is, the moment of moral imagination when one can turn with awareness to the signs, the moment into which she invites the reader to participate with the characters in their choices. 5. The moral demands of free choice are well illustrated in the chapter, “1923,” when Eva reviews the “four strange things” that occur just before Hannah’s death. Surprisingly, the chapter inverts the order of things to begin with, “The second strange thing,” which “was Hannah’s coming into her mother’s room with an empty bowl and a peck of Kentucky Wonders and saying, ‘Mama did you ever love us (67)?’” “But before the second strange thing,” we are told, “there had been the wind, which was the first (73).” The third strange thing turns out to be the dream Hannah recounts to her mother about “a red bridal gown.” Although the red dress clearly foreshadows Hannah’s burning body later in the chapter, Eva finds the red in the dream confusing (73-4). She cannot be sure whether the red in the dream is the third thing because Sula was also acting strangely at the time. Here the symbol four emerges again in the pattern of 3 +1 to point to the ambiguous and seemingly evil fourth face of God represented by Sula. The list of four becomes further complicated for Eva as she remembers that, “Before she trundled her wagon over to the dresser
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to get her comb, Eva looked out the window and saw Hannah bending to light the yard fire. And that was the fifth (or fourth, if you didn’t count Sula’s craziness) strange thing. She couldn’t find her comb (75).” Although the window is later boarded up with four planks, we are here in the ambiguous realm of Circle Number 5, left to decide with Eva whether Sula’s behaviour or her own decision to look for the comb should be added into the list of “four strange things.” Similarly, in the Circle Number 5 ward of the
Sunnydale nursing home, Eva asks Nel Greene to consider her role in the death of Chicken Little as he slips from Sula’s hands into the water. 6. By the end of the novel, the symbol green points not unambiguously to the new life that eventually arises as a fulfillment of the “leaf-dead promise” to the community (162). “Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of over-ripe green things (174),” as Nel realizes on her return from the nursing home, that it was her friend, Sula, she had always missed, and not her husband, Jude, whom Sula had once seduced. Love as a Metaphor - Simply speaking, a metaphor is a word or term which indicates a literal thing that is also equated with another object. A metaphor is not a comparison between the two like an analogy or a simile, technically speaking, and it does not point to a range of meanings like a symbol. When we speak of metaphor, we mean on some level that the two things are the same. - When Bill Moyers once asked Toni Morrison what metaphor she would apply to the inner city, she replied, “Love.” “The love you’re talking about,” Moyers recognized, “is the love inspired by moral imagination that takes us beyond blood”—to which Morrison responded, “Absolutely. Absolutely that (Pt. I, 1990).” Please listen to Moyers interview Morrison on love, the master narrative and New World women like Sula in the following clip: "Toni Morrison: Love is a Metaphor," Pt. I, 1990. - There are several important dialogues on love in Sula, especially on maternal love. When questioning Eva about Plum’s death, for instance, Hannah demands to know whether her mother ever loved her children (67), whereas Sula overhears Hannah, profess to love, but not to like, her daughter (57). The kind of love that Morrison describes in the interview is narrated then in complicated relationships in the novel, reflecting the kind of “fierce” or “thick” love that as Morrison notes, we don’t always recognize as “excessive,” “distorted even.” - Looking closely at the unique structure in each of Morrison’s recent works just as we have done in Sula, Jean Wyatt observes that “[l]ove comes in a new and surprising shape in each of the later novels,” noting the strong friendships between girls, for example. Relying on several critical approaches, including reader-response criticism, Wyatt suggests that “The narrative surprises and gaps require the reader to become an active participant in making meaning. And the texts’ complex narrative strategies draw out the reader’s convictions about love, about gender, about race—and then prompt the reader to
reexamine them, so that reading becomes an active ethical dialogue between text and reader (Abstract, Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels, 2017).” - Paul A. Kottman more generally argues that it is possible to see love through some philosophical and literary traditions, not so much as a natural or sentimental feeling, but as a transformative social practice that can change lives over time and extend our capacity for living fully free lives (Abstract, Love as Human Freedom, 2020). - As you prepare for the final assignment, consider the nature of love in the novel, and whether Sula has required
you to re-think some of your own assumptions. Is it possible that Nel experiences something of the potentially transformative power of love when she remembers Sula at the very end of the novel?
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