amimetobios

[renaissance poetry] Cowley's elegy on Crashaw, Crashaw's metaphysical intensity, Suckling as a change of pace.

[closer reading] An introduction to Merrill's Book of Ephraim through a consideration of the formal games of OuLiPo.  How the language given to you becomes what you put together.

[renaissance poetry] The convergence of prayer with the earnestness of passionate utterance that makes that utterance seem to be self-ratifying.  "Redemption" and its weird temporality explained (at least in part) by "Affliction (III)" "The Flower"

[close reading] Last clase on Turn of the Screw.  Importance of the use/mention distinction.  Who figures whom out first?  Why Miles had do die.

[close reading] Turn of the Screw, again, with some excursus on rhyme and orthography and literacy and the rhythms of processing speed.  With a return to Turn of the Screw and the question "what we had done to Flora."

[renaissance poetry] A second class on George Herbert, focusing on "Hope" and "Denial."  What it means to address poems of these sort to the figure supposed to answer the prayer just by hearing or listening to it.

[close reading] Working out more of what we know happened.  How did Miss Jessel and Peter Quint die?

[renaissance poetry] First (of two) classes on George Herbert.  His subtlety.  The importance of his formal thinking.  His conversational style.  "The Pulley," "Church Monuments," "The Collar," and "Redemption."

[close reading] Ambiguity and meta-ambiguity in Turn of the Screw.  Back to Dworkin: what does it mean to say a work should be the best that it could be?  Does that mean that it should give us our preferred outcome?  Cases of King Lear and Great Expectations considered.  The idea of changing your taste, or learning what would make it best.  Then back to thinking about Turn of the Screw.

[close reading] The overdetermination of all phenomena in Turn of the Screw.  Such overdetermination as an aesthetic parameter.  Examples from the book.  Spookiness of the fact that it isn't finished until Henry James dies: as with a will, his death is what completes the work.