Wednesday, September 17

"Oedipus does something very bad" ~Dr. Sexson

Emerson Eye

Mariners- Richie Sexson

Umbrage dialectical process

Pharmakos

"There is certainly no evidence that baseball has descended from ritual of human sacrifice, but the umpire is quite as much of a pharmakos as if it had: he is an abandoned scoundrel, a greater robber than Barabbas; he has the evil eye; the supporters of the losing team scream for his death. At play, mob emotions are boiled in an open pot, so to speak; in the lynching mob they are in a sealed furnace of what Blake would call moral virtue" N. Frye pg 46

fallacy of misrepresented concretement

William Blake: visionary poet that inspired Frye

Bill Bruckner "Good thing we do baseball, or we would literally kill the umpires" ~Frye

catharsis- feelings of pity and fear
mob-crowd violence: lynching 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

Vladimir Nabokov on Quixote:

"We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called “real life” in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would not be real. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader."

'Man of La Mancha' -Impossible Dream

Quixote: idealist vs the realist
Plato criticized literature and Aristotle defended it
Violent works of literature:

• Oedipus: is the most violent of all novels because he "does something very bad" ~Dr. Sexson
• Procne, Tereus and Philomela
• Titus Andronicus
• King Lear

These stories are what my mother calls 'ugly,' anything displeasing to her is termed as such and she refuses to watch them or to understand what I love them so much.

If you are depressed because of a novel, movie, etc there is either something wrong with you or the book, said Frye. There are only 3 emotions that you should feel- illumination, delight and joy.

'If you read 'King Lear' and aren't joyful when Cordelia dies, there is something wrong with you because it is an excellent piece of literature." ~Dr. Sexson on Frye

Aristotle can be explained in a nutshell using Goldilocks and the 3 Bears:

1. too long, too short, perfect
2. too hot, too cold, perfect
3. too hard, too soft, perfect

Some like it hot: quintessential comedy

1. methos- story
2. ethos- emotion
3. dianoya- theme

"the experience of the work of art is more important than the art"

"buckle your seat belts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride"

1. ancient world: elements of 'the world', what's it about? mimetic: imitation of the world
2. neoclassical: audience is important, pragmatic
3. Romantics: artist focused, expression
4. modern: the work is most important 'text', objective