Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Thursday's "Jerusalem" Student Colloquium

Tomorrow's class will begin with two indivudual presentations and an introduction to Goethe on Science, and will then move into the main event; a colloquium on Blake's Jerusalem. Of the people who do encounter Blake, including those who fall in love with his work, very few engage his prophetic books; finding them dauntingly inacessible. Well, pity them. The prophetic books are simply Blake at his fullest potency. That is to say, works like Jerusalem are read exactly like the Blake writings that we have been studying for the past three weeks.

At our Thursday colloquium, you will all put your heads together in a student-led round-table format and analyse Jerusalem in terms of the previous works: There is no natural religion and All religions are One; Auguries of Innocence; The Marriage of Heaven & Hell; and Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. I believe that with your combinded insight and intellectual, a valid & perfectly comprehensible picture of this superlative work of literary genius will appear.

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