Sunday, November 2, 2008

Wednesday, October 29

"Be one on who nothing is lost..." ~Henry James





Henry James (Kelsey)
  • great novelist
  • themes: personal relationship, loneliness, unreliable characters
  • love and morals
  • possibly gay?
  • 'turn of the shrew' is a ghost story
  • interested in people, but never liked them

Ernst Cassirer (Victoria)

  • jewish historian
  • 'philosophy of symbolic form' book
  • man as a symbolic animal (domestic)
  • 'transcendental idealism'- Khan
  • human world created through symbolic form: expressive, representative, and significant

Walter Benjamin (Ben)

  • work rejected because too confusing
  • work of art and mechanical reproduction
  • aura: ability to be unique
  • sense of awe and amazement by viewer
  • because of mechanical representation: no auras anymore

Oscar Wilde (Kyle)

  • doesn't want truth- illusion
  • art is better than life and truth
  • cannot tell the truth, make them laugh instead or you will be killed
  • a portrait done with feeling is not of the sitter, but of the painter

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Keats of Negative capability:
  • sounds like Sidney
  • beauty and truth: 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'
  • if something is really beautiful, than it is true
  • Shakespeare didn't write what he felt, he wrote to become everything
  • Shakespeare doesn't exist, only the world he created does

Don Quixote:

  • 'woo, woo' pages: 429, 556-7
  • cannon: everything should be didactic
  • DQ creates an entire Romance novel in his mind
  • aesthetic
  • didacticism is being parodied
  • nonsense writers: James Joyce, Lewis Carroll
  • Polonius from Hamlet
  • Walter Pater: "all the arts aspire to the condition of music"
  • don't ask what it means, experience what it is
  • 'nature is only nature, it needs and artist to portray it'
  • lobster quadrille
  • Ovid's final words "I shall have life"

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