amimetobios

[Renaissance poetry] A class on Herrick, including"The Hock Cart" and "Corinna's gone amaying."  Reversal of standard carpe diem theme.  Cavalier poetry.  His poems about jonson.

[close reading] The governess.  Her character.  Compared to Blake's Nurse.  Different possibilities of the relation between the characters and what they know the others know.

[renaissance poetry] A class on Ben Jonson: his lyrics, his country house poem "To Penshurst," his songs.

[close reading] Part 1 of our reading of Henry James's Turn of the Screw, on the frame narrative.  What is the narrator's relation to Douglas.  What is the narrator's gender.  Reasons for the frame.

[close reading] How to read: Ronald Dworkin's idea that we should read a work as the best work it could possibly be.  What would make Roland as good as it could be?  That he's the quester, and that he succeeds, and that the line he succeeds in reaching - hiding in plain sight - he reaches adequately, unlike those fairy tale goals that the hero gets to in the wrong way and must depart from in order to get to them in the magical way.  Adequately here means that it's the best line it could be, as mysterious as in the original.

[close reading] Relation of poem to the Intimations Ode and Mont Blanc.  Interesting referential confusion in student comment.  Edgar's song.  Its contextlessness.  The fact that the title is in quotation marks: it is a quotation.  Slughorns and slogans.  The hoary cripple.  The ominous tract which all agree hides the Dark Tower being the text ("tract") of Lear.

[Renaissance poetry] Who his speaker is.  The woman in "Break of Day."  Her grace. The allegedly variety-loving speaker of "The Indifferent."  The Holy Sonnets, especially "O to vex me..." Their paradoxes.  Truth in the third satire.

[Renaissance poetry] Some poems of Donne's: his salacious wit, and the difference between the speaker who'd really think this salaciousness was attractive, and the more sophisticated speaker Donne is actually presenting, who thinks the game of exaggerated salaciousness is fun and therefore flirtatious: a flirtatious flirting with flirtatiousness.  And a different and more bitter Donne in "Love's Alchemy."

[close reading] Shelley's Mont Blanc concluded, and some reflections on the sublime and its relation to the human.

[close reading] The question of what the poem's about becomes mapped into the question of whether the poem subsumes the mountain or the mountain the poem.  If the poem is about the mountain, it, the poem, is still master.  But if the poem can't manage to capture and communicate the mountain, then it isn't: it's about its own defeat as the mountain pierces the infinite sky.  Comparison, again, to DIckinson's "sky" in "The Brain is wider than the Sky."  Quick mention of the difference, in that poem of syllable and sound.  God would be just a sound, the natural world, but the difference the brain might make in turning sound into syllable is the difference that imputing meaning makes.  If the mind imputes meaning, then the home of meaning is in the mind.