Assuming that the University doesn't close on Thursday, we'll have a great closing class. Shepherds' Pie, cheese, wine and laudnum .... or brandy at least, a last loving look at the glory that is Mary Shelley, and a fond reflection on early English Romanticism. We're all Canadians -- we'll be there!
Mary Shelley saw in a terrible nightmare "...a pale student of the unhallowed arts: " a scientist, that is, doing unholy things to the dead.
This article from slate.com titled "How Science can Finally Make You Skinny" will give you, ahem, food for thought as we continue with Mary Shelley's prophesy of the consequence of the Baconian model of science.The image here is the frontispiece to the Great Instauration of Francis, Lord Bacon ("Verulam") and emblamises his rejection of the classical tradition of accepting that the search for knowledge must be limited by our moral capacity to use the fruits of study wisely-- itself a wisdom which was summarised with the Latin tag ne plus ultra -- "not beyond the limit." Bacon's book shows the ship of knowledge sailing beyond the legendary Pillars of Hercules to the defiant call "Plus Ultra!"
Blake’s Auguries of Innocence and selections of Goethe’s writings both detail how the microcosm and the macrocosm are apparent separately but also combined in nature. As enumerated in this essay, the observation of nature connects us with not only ourselves and our perceptions, but with the divine as well. We must use our senses of sight and hearing to allow nature her luminance and voice if she is to reveal to us the true quality of the divine. This essay explicated the contextual meanings of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the divine, the particular and the general, and others to show how Blake’s and Goethe’s ideas of nature are fundamentally the same. Personally, however, the opening quadruplet of Auguries of Innocence raises even more questions: if a world is in one grain of sand, does that mean there are millions of different worlds in all the grains of sand? Similarly, if a heaven is in one flower, are there many heavens to be found in all flowers? These questions seem to cross the line into the unknown, the unanswerable. I choose to believe that once we have found our individual versions of the divine in nature our own personal world or heaven then any questions we have will become irrelevant.
The word "peripateticism" refers, in the manner of my useage, to a philosophy of, or philosophising whilst, walking about. It derives from the name given to the custom of Aristotle and Socrates to walk about as they talked, reflected and taught. The OED establishes a nominal and the adjectival form "peripatetic" with this quotation:1607 T. DEKKER & J. WEBSTER West-ward Hoe II. i. sig. B3v, I was so stiffe..I would ha sworne my Legs had beene wodden pegs: a Constable new chosen kept not such a peripateticall gate.
John Ruskin's (arch-Victorian & thus anti-Romanticist) 1856 polemic (from an invetrate polemicist) Of the Pathetic Fallacy shows him driving a wishful nail into the undead coffin of Romanticism in general & Samuel Coleridge in particular.§ 8. The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. For it is no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect, and make it believe what they choose. But it is still a grander
condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating ; even if he melts, losing none of his weight.
Classfellow S.Y. provides the following useful bibliographic essay in support of her presentation on Francisco de Goya's perenially well-regarded artistic vision & the Romantic movement.The following is the address to the Art History text that was my primary source for my presentation. It also has a chapter on Blake. Nineteenth century art : a critical history -- Stephen F. Eisenman; [with contributions by] Thomas
Crow ... [et al.] London : Thames and Hudosn, c1994. http://troy.lib.sfu.ca:80/record=b1478249a
I cited another text, Gardner's Art throught the Ages in my notes. The library doesn't have it, I wouldn't recommend it anyway if one's particularly interested in Goya, it's very much a survey text. I also used the following texts from the library (primarily for images): Disasters of war : Callot, Goya, Dix ; [exhibition catalogue] /[essays by Antony Griffiths, Juliet Wilson-Bareau, John Willett]. London: South Bank Centre,
c1998. http://troy.lib.sfu.ca:80/record=b1914367a
Saturn : an essay on Goya / [translated by C.W. Chilton]. New York : Phaidon Publishers ; distributed by Garden City Books, [1957] http://troy.lib.sfu.ca:80/record=b1022689a
As we turn into our final four weeks, I am reminded of that sense of sadness from summer camp in boyhood that only a short time left until the delights are concluded. I am enjoying this class very much. I hope that your peripatetic engagement with The Prelude are adding to your Romantic pleasures -- on our schedule we still have good time to learn from it and good time to bring our time to a close with the currently-popular Mary Shelley.It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils....
It’s hard to remember that Diana’s death spawned one of the first exhibitions of grief pornography, replete with an Elton John-penned theme song and fame predators like Tom Cruise and Donatella Versace jetting in for the funeral. Blair tries, with exasperation and a filial protective instinct, to explain to the Queen why private grief is outdatedI mention this because it shows what I consider the timeless relevancy of Coleridge's dissection in Biographia Literaria of this staged descent into tabloid journalism ("....sundry petty periodicals of still quicker revolution, "or weekly or diurnal:")
In times of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank still lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the decision 'of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner.'[B.L. Ch. III).
The title of this post is a hotlink to a google image search of "Lake District:" you might prefer to do a search for "paintings," for examples such as shown here.
I hope that you are all well on track with your mid-term essays. I am going to hold extra Office Hours this week for any last-minute questions or discussion -- Monday October 22nd from noon to three o'clock. Best wishes!
A sound précis of the character of Ken Russell's filmmaking is found here. He is very much a British filmmaker, who has influenced genre television there substantially. He has incalculable progenecy in rock film and video -- indeed, he is chiefly known in North America for his nineteen-seventies film adaptation of The Who's "prot opera" Tommy.
Friendship is a social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of garbage buckets. It has no spiritual significance. For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. Because the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication. Even on the rare occasions when word and gesture happen to be valid expressions of personality, they lose their significance on their passage through the cataract of the personality that is opposed to them. Either we speak and act for ourselves - in which case speech and action are distorted and emptied of their meaning by an intelligence that is not ours, or else we speak for others - in which case we speak and act a lie.
The URL of "Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science" (the title you may now recognise as a phrase from Blake) is a bloggy reference to the fashion trend of my youth. Romanticism endures ....
.....procedures regarding assignments handed in outside of class. The new procedure is as follows: Department staff do not date stamp assignments handed in outside of regular class time; nor does the General Office any longer maintain a sign-in procedure for such assignments. Instructors are therefore strongly advised to have students hand in all assignments during class meeting times, or during their office hours. Please do not encourage your students to slip papers under your office door.
Coleridge gave many talks as a literary critic, usually with a few drops of laudanum in his drink. An observer remarked that he "spoke so wonderfully because he was absolutely spontaneous. He would think about his subject beforehand but not about his words. He relied on his passion to inspire him. As a result his lectures were riveting to his audiences and completely terrifying to himself."
In conclusion, while seeking release from unbearable physical pain, opium turned what was a physical affliction into a mental one, plaguing his mind and shattering his character overall. In his later years he is recorded saying, "The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind."
Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.I can't begin here to describe the excellencies of easily our greatest poet. Consider picking up some volume of hers for your indugence.
The optic heart must venture: a jail-break
And re-creation.
Thanks to classfellow J.L., we have a permanent visual record of the truly impressive class analysis of Blake's major prophetic work Jerusalem. As I said at the close of the class, this is substantial scholarly endeavour by, I believe, any standard. You collectively made sense of a work that confounds many, and your work to produce a top-level overview of the design & the contents made me, Blake-like, weep for the sheer joy of it. From one of the "horses of instruction," thank-you.
Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism
in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
A Brief History of Chimney Sweeping"Many Sweeps’ Boys were parish children or orphans, although others were sold into the trade by their families. Some grew up to be Journeymen (assistants to the Master), the remainder were put out to various trades to attempt to become skilled at other work.In London there was the London Society of Master Sweeps with its own set of rules, one of which said that boys were not required to work on Sundays but must go to Sunday School to study, and read the Bible. Conditions for the children were harsh and sometimes cruel. Some were forced to sleep in cellars on bags of soot and washing facilities rarely existed. Cancer of the testicles was a common illness amongst the boys and was contracted from the accumulated soot."
T.S Eliot, moderist, works very directly and admiringly with Blake's The Tyger in his 1920 poem Gerontion ("old one"?) Click the title of this post for an online version. "In the juvescence of the year / Came Christ the tiger .... / Tenants of the house, / Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season."
Department Colloquium "Being a Man (in the Lousy Modern World)"Gnosticism, as detailed in lecture, is a catch-all term covering an overlapping complex of institutions, ideas, and traditions; characterised generally by a shared sense of secrecy and conspiracy.
To frame the class' questions from today on Blake's assertion that Contraries are a necessary condition for fulfilled existence, in preparation for discussion on Thursday after the lecture on Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, consider the relationship between the concepts of "good & bad" and Blake's contraries as being seperate categories.
...boredom was literally nonexistent until the late eighteenth century - that is, it came into being as Enlightenment was giving way to Industrial Revolution. While its continental cousins "ennui" and "Langeweile" are older, they were not used synonymously, that is, in the modern sense that combines an existential and a temporal connotation, until about the same time. This linguistic convergence reflects experiential transformations that were transnational in nature, for modernization literally altered the quality of human being in time. In the course of the nineteenth century, even as the temporal rhythms of everyday life were being revolutionized by technological and economic developments, a new, secular interpretation of human temporality was gaining ground. Faith in a coming redemption and in a divinely ordered eternity was increasingly being displaced by enlightened belief in human progress toward an earthly paradise; religious vocabularies of reflection on subjective existence were being eclipsed by a radically different language grounded in bodily materiality....Boredom epitomizes the the dilemma of the autonomous modern subject, for whom enlightenment has also meant fragmentation - for whom modernization and scientific progress have caused, in Max Weber's term, the "disenchantment" of the world such that history and religion can no longer anchor identity in the fabric of collective meaning.
3. Individual class research presentation: sign-up schedule handed around in seminar. Prepare and deliver a five-minute-maximum oral presentation on a subject that helpfully elaborates some interesting background feature to the Romantic movement. Consider, for example, the social or geographical situation, the domestic & international political situation, the biographies of relevant public figures, or the work of major or minor Romantic writers or intellectual progenitors not on our reading list.
The criteria include research comprehensiveness, relevency and contribution to the class' understanding; with an emphasis on the cohesiveness, clarity, comprehensibility, organisation, timing and other acknowledged elements of effective oral delivery. Hand in a copy of your rough notes at the conclusion of the representation. You will receive a sheet with Instructor's analysis, comments, and your assignment grade, a week after your presentation.
4. Final Paper, thirty-five hundred words: due December 4th at midnight. Topic to be discused and approved in writing with the course instructor. There is also an available option for a Creative scholarly paper, provided that strict failure standards are detailed and approved by the Instructor in writing, in advance.
Course Approach
The course is designed to provide an experiential engagement with the themes and materials declared in the course outline. In addition to information and and analysis in lecture, a variety of opportunities for students to experience different informative facets of the outlined subject area will be presented.
Course requirement weighting:
10% Participation
10% Individual presentation
20% Group Field School Project
20% Mid-term essay (2500 words)
40% Final essay (3500 words)
Nb: “Participation" requires both contributions in seminar discussion and attendance and punctuality at lecture and seminar.
Instructor Contact:
[UPDATED] Office Hours: AQ 6094 -- Tuesday 10:30-11:30; Wednesday, 12:00-14:55; Thursday 10:30-11:30; Friday 12:00-12:55. Bring your coffee and discuss course matters freely. E-mail to ogden@sfu.ca Please only use your SFU account for email contact.
In urgencies, I may be reached on my cellular telephone at 604-250-9432.
Thus to the eternal question of what follows postmodernism, Cairns Craig suggests the term postoppositional. He also analyses the place of postcolonialism.
There will be specific detail to come, but I'd like to give you an introductory sense of the Group Project this term. I am certain that you will find this a very exciting and memorable assignment: I know for my part, I'm looking forward very much to seeing your compleated projects.
Essentially, your group of classfellows will spend some time looking at an application of modern science, defining how it operates on materialistic, mechanistic and atomistic principles, and then re-visioning the large-scale practice along Romanticist lines -- using the understanding of Romanticism that you gain from lecture and your readings. How you organise your project and present your conclusions is entirely free for you to decide: you may want to use a blog format, or construct a White Paper for example.
Here are some areas of focus for you to consider choosing from. You may want to add your own special interest.
