Friday, September 12

"The Tragic Vegetable?" ~ Dr. Sexson

4 essays:

1. theory of modes: historical


2. theory of symbols: ethical


3. theory of myths: archetypal


4. theory of genres: rhetorical


5. why Quixote?

• all light bulbs should be put into writing


• what do I yearn for? I want to be like Peter Pan, eternally young.

Ages:

1. Golden


2. Silver


3. Bronze


4. Iron

20 questions

• the metals become progressively inferior


• the world started out perfect, but then got progressively worse


• intentional fallacy

'cut to the chase' metaphor. What does it mean?

• the best part of the movie is the chase scene


• the climax is when they race through the town knocking over the vegetable stands, hence the tragic vegetable


• myth and ritual are VERY important to Frye


• "patterns of imagery are... direct references to time" N. Frye


• Frye is intelligent, but confusing


• pompous Frye:
  

alazon: impostor in 2 forms:

1. soldier who brags


2. professor who is pedant

like the presidential election: McCain- soldier, Obama- professor

Scapegoat

• oral stories to 'high brow lit' to 'low brow lit' are all literature


• allegorical children's rhymes like 'hey diddle diddle'


• as adults we can't help ourselves, we read into EVERYTHING


• Don Quixote


• myth


• ritual
  
• quest: the center of literature (concerning myth) is the quest


• Cliff'sNotes: you get the frosting but not the cake


• vico: Finnegan's Wake is base upon this philosopher/ historian. He wrote not literary history, but poetic history

"The entire human race is in a stage of decline since the beginning"

1. gods- hieroglyphic language


2. heroes- sophisticated literature


3. men/people- commerce, practical utilitarianism, mercantile, economic


4. chaos- not intelligible, gibberish: 1) like, 2) dude, 3) awesome, 4) cool

Shakespeare's sonnet 18:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

this poem will make an ordinary day extraordinary, simply because of its beauty

"The Internet is a series of tubes"

imagination: the ability to form mental images, or the ability to spontaneously generate images within one's own mind.

W. Stevens