amimetobios

A quick exposition of Berkeley's idea that to be is to be perceived, followed by a viewing of Beckett's Film, starring Buster Keaton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqh6uwCkZno

I finally discuss, somewhat clumsily, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, after a brief introduction to Berkeley.  A short class because the second half was given over to a viewing of Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr.

We conclude Satire 3, and talk about the difference between an aesthetics of difficulty (Donne's) and of effortlessness (e.g. Herrick and the Cavaliers).  Satire 3 as promoting difficulty as promoting thought.  Then on to "Batter My Heart..." and "Father, part of his double interest..." Some discussion of the NIcene Ring.

A line by line exposition of most of Satire 3 (TBC).  More discussion on metonymic relations among a series of metaphors.

A class where we mainly discuss Dark City (1998, Alex Proyas).  Question of memory, personal identity, love, and of course space and time. Some of the same issues as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Me, I felt that the class didn't cohere, but the students seemed to like the more extensive conversation.

A full class on the poem, and on teasing out the metonymic interaction of its metaphors.  The interesting sexual switch at the very end.  A discussion mid-class about whether people liked Donne passionately or not: are his wit and strangeness a bug or a feature. Is his poetry poetry you want to quote?

More on the different speakers in Donne's "Songs and Sonnets."  The idea of the most capacious intelligence: the one who gets most others.  How this plays out in kinds of narrative, especially fantasy fiction.  Who gets whom better: Aslan or the White Witch? Voldemort or Dumbledore? Sauron or Gandalf?  Yoda or Palpatine?  The surprise when we're surprised that the good guys get the evil guys being a staple of narrative interest, because more generally being able to understand others' limitations is central to our assessment of literary characters.  Then on to the two poems: "To his Mistress" and a beginning of "A Valediction: forbidding Mourning."

...which is an overgrand way of saying that I try to give a quick view of Heidegger on the worldhood of the world, its relation to the image, and the sorts of ontological discussions that ontologists have.  A quick summary of the periods of Platonic dialogue, and a little of the Parmenides.  Achilles and the tortoise.  The relation of object to image, in Cavell and Blanchot.  A start....

A class devoted entirely to puzzling out the figurative language in "Love's Alchemy," and the way it's partly about puzzling out figurative language. The punctuational crux of the last lines. The idea that Donne's "Songs and Sonnets" have multiple speakers and that they address each other.

More on Donne's "Ecstasy."  The strange proto-modernism of Donne's addressees.  Their consciously dramatic quality -- that is we're supposed to be conscious that their speaker is being dramatic, and that the drama is for us. As in "The Sun Rising," with its female speaker.  Why a female speaker?  Then we begin on "Love's Alchemy."