lit crit blog: Wednesday, October 1

"Shakespeare created the most, next to God" ~ STC

helpful tips to memorizing poetry:

listen to it
break it down: stanza by stanza
repetition

Antony and Cleopatra and Frye: "The tonality of Antony and Cleopatra is high mimetic, the story of the fall of a great leader. But it is easy to look at Mark Antony ironically, as a man enslaved by passion; it is easy to recognize his common humanity with ourselves; it is easy to see in him a romantic adventurer of prodigious courage and endurance betrayed by a witch ; there are even hints of a superhuman being whose legs bestrid the ocean and whose downfall is a conspiracy of fate, explicable only to a soothsayer. To leave our any of these would oversimplify and belittle the play. Through such an analysis we may come to realize that they two essential facts about a work of art, that it is contemporary with its own time and that it is contemporary with ours, are not opposed but complementary facts." pg 51

TS Eliot: "Time past and time present are both contained in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable."

poetry is not descriptive, it doesn't matter if it's true.
centripetally- inwardly
Shakespeare's tragedy is high mimetic
'by reading Shakespeare, you understand it all'

"Truly, Senor Priest, it seems to me that the books called novels of chivalry are prejudicial to the nation, and though I, moved by a false and idle taste, have read the beginning of almost every one that has ever been published, I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another. In my opinion, this kind of writing and composition belongs to the genre called Milesian tales, which are foolish stories meant only to delight and not to teach, unlike moral tales, which delight and teach at the same time. Although the principal aim of these books is to delight, I do not know how they can, being so full of so many excessively foolish elements; for delight conceived in the soul must arise from the beauty and harmony it sees to contemplates in the things that the eyes of the imagination place before it, an nothing that possesses ugliness and disorder can please us. What beauty, what proportion between parts and the whole, or the whole and its parts, can there be in a book or tale in which a boy of sixteen, with one thrust of his sword, fells a giant as big as a tower and splits him in tow as if he were marzipan, and, when a battle is depicted, after saying that there are more than a million combatants on the side of the enemy, if the hero of the book fights them, whether we like it or not, of necessity we must believe that this knight achieves victory only though the valor of his mighty arm?" Don Quixote pg 411-2

Literature that entertains us vs literature that has a good moral and teaches us

all literature that is didactic: pedagogical

Superheroes:

superman

spoonful of sugar- Mary Poppins

Cartoons that water things down:

disney movies
leaf of death
school house rock
sex-ed videos

"Things that you extract from the text, not the text its self" ~Frye

reality is descriptive, art is something else

"Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. In both cases we deal with symbols, but when we attach an external meaning to a word we have, in addition to the verbal symbol, the thing represented or symbolized by it." ~Frye pg 73

centripetal vs centrifugal

"protecting us from the horror of the specifics"

stream of consciousness

talking animals: