Friday, September 5th

"Literature is like a hallucinogen" ~Dr. Sexson

• Dane Cook on being a movie critic WARNING!! EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.
• all rhetoric is performative

"We can get a whole liberal education simply by picking up one conventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature. An avowedly conventional poem like Lycidas urgently demands the kind of criticism that will absorb it into the study of literature as a whole, and this activity is expected to begin at once, with the first cultivated reader. Here we have a situation in literature more like that of mathematics or science, where the work of genius is assimilated to the whole subject so quickly that one hardly notices the difference between creative and critical activity." ~N. Frye, pg 100

• It has been said that critics are parasites of literature or frustrated artists

"Are you good men and true?" Dogberry from Much Ado About Nothing

• gauntlet: an armored glove thrown down to challenge someone to a fight
• tropes: to turn, a figure of speech
• criticism: it isn't simply being negative, but an activity in its self that is important ~Frye
• "not and archetype, but ecstatic: bliss, euphoria 'ec'= out, 'stas'= stand, to stand outside yourself ~ Frye

Dante's 4 levels of criticism:

1. literal
2. analogical
3. moral
4. anagogical

3 things VERY important to class:

1. Wallace Steven's poem
2. Northrop Frye
3. Cervantes