The Books/Reading Thread

[Einherjar86]

You're such a pain in the ass sometimes. Do you know when it was written? Put yourself in the historical moment. There's a reason it's become so cliched as to seem utterly predictable to us today.

You have no conception of perspective when it comes to texts. All you seem to go off is your own opinion of what you read. That's not literary analysis, bro.

 

[unknown]

I'm sort of adapting it from a research paper I wrote last semester and turning it into a thesis. I can send you guys a copy of that paper sometime if you guys desire. I'll have to edit it and add a few new things before I send them though.

Basically, I interrogate Spenser's conception of heroism found in Book I and discuss how it is both similar to his predecessors and totally his own creation. Specifically, I am focusing on Redcrosse Knight as the hero. I've already drawn parallels between RDC and Homer, and after reading Vergil I DEFINITELY see a big influence there, but there is still something different about Spenser's heroics. I talk a lot about humility and swallowing pride (Orgoglio) in favor of teamwork. Shit like that.

I'd be interested in reading it. Are you going to talk about the importance of being "meke and myld" of nature and how it was not manly to be emotional or "wode"?

 

[Einherjar86]

Basically, I interrogate Spenser's conception of heroism found in Book I and discuss how it is both similar to his predecessors and totally his own creation. Specifically, I am focusing on Redcrosse Knight as the hero. I've already drawn parallels between RDC and Homer, and after reading Vergil I DEFINITELY see a big influence there, but there is still something different about Spenser's heroics.

Christianity?

 

[Zephyrus]

Yeah, I'd read The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost again to see the Christian influence.

Plus, there may be influence from other Roman epics such as those of Lucan and Statius. That stuff was much more popular in Spenser's day than now.

 

[Master_Yoda77]

Lucan is probably something that I'll pick up over the semester. And yes, of course Christianity's influence seeps through, but it's not just that.

Each epic builds on each other, and I feel that Milton was the one who created the ideal Christian hero, at least, at that time.

 

[Einherjar86]

True; although, unintentionally, he kind of created the anti-Christian hero. According to the Romantics, at least.

Restoration epic is shot through with so many political and religious dynamics, I have to imagine it's a difficult field to navigate. I'd be interested in reading your work as well. Good luck!

 

[Zephyrus]

Yes, send me that paper you already wrote and I can make more suggestions. But it's really Dante who formulates the Christian hero.

 

[Master_Yoda77]

Tasso and Ariosto are something that I need to read as well. Too many epic poems, not enough fucking time.

Er, I suppose there is time, but I'm too busy watching Top 10 videos and slamming back Schlitz to give me that time.

 

[unknown]

Are you going to talk at all about the role of literature during the 14-16th centuries having didactic purposes? A lot of hagiographies and poetry from the time period were constructed as learning tools and to make digesting Christianity easier (see some of the poems from Codex Ashmole 61) and some of the other big texts like the Sir Gawain poems

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Hope this is as good as Prof Robert Sapolsky says

 

[Einherjar86]

Yes, send me that paper you already wrote and I can make more suggestions. But it's really Dante who formulates the Christian hero.

Not for Protestants though. Even if Dante's vision was induced by exile, he desired a reunification with the Catholic Church. Italians and Catholicism do not, for Reformation England, heroic material make.

 

[Zephyrus]

One True Church! Christian Neoplatonism!

 

[Einherjar86]

Blasphemy!

I haven't read this, but I wanted to plug it here because it's written by one of the English faculty at BU:

A review: http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-brandos-smile-by-susan-l-mizruchi-1404433281

Susan Mizruchi's "Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought and Work" forcefully reminds us of the actor's guile and charm, as well as his reckless bohemian spirit. But it tries to be something more, an "intellectual biography" of man who wasn't an intellectual in the conventional sense. But it's wise to remember that Brando was trained by the great Stella Adler, who emphasized that actors needed to respect writers and cultivate an expansive knowledge of the world. Ms. Mizruchi, an English professor at Boston University, has thus gone through scripts, letters, audiotapes and Brando's heavily annotated 4,000-book library to construct something that is less than what her subtitle claims but still more than I imagined possible.

 

[rms]

Watching Heart of Darkness ruined Marlon Brando for me haha

 

[Einherjar86]

You mean Apocalypse Now. But he's incredible in that...

 

[rms]

Heart of Darkness is the documentary that follows the creation of Apocalypse Now. Have you seen it? It paints a pretty terrible light of Brando and his performance in the film

 

[Einherjar86]

You should read this article by Mizruchi:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-l-mizruchi/brando-v-coppola-debunkin_b_5587675.html

According to director Francis Ford Coppola, Brando showed up entirely unprepared: he was grossly overweight, had not read Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness (the novel upon which the film was based), and was eager to stall the production to increase his already inflated salary.

Except this is not what happened. Letters between Brando and Coppola, audios of the two discussing the film's conception on a houseboat while filming was suspended, and Brando's personal script, notes, and the many books he read and annotated for the film -- reveal that Brando not only was well prepared for the production, but also contributed ideas and script revisions that shaped the entire film.

 

[Blind Guardian]

Finally some new fantasy that isn't a tryhard medieval version of The Wire (cough Malazan cough). It's pretty simple and straightforward, entertaining without resorting to tropes like farmboys with magic swords.

 

[Vimana]

Just finished this book called The G.O.D. Experiments. It talks about how the universe naturally creates order and meaning, how true randomness does not exist, and how chance alone does not explain emergent phenomena like life. What I find particularly intriguing is how levels of phenomena keep creating emergent phenomena. So cool to see metaphysics applied to science.

 

[Einherjar86]

In my opinion, if the author correlates emergence with some kind of ordained metaphysics, then he has misunderstood what emergence is/entails.

The universe may naturally strive toward thermodynamic equilibrium, but this should not be confused with pattern; if anything, absolute equilibrium looks more like randomness than pattern. It is pure chance that certain states of equilibrium happen to achieve evolutionary or chemical success within a given ecosystem/biosphere. Upon the development of more complex lifeforms (a tenuous category, in my opinion) it is possible that institutions of aesthetics, ethics, and survival play a role that cannot be reduced to chance. Tracing matter down to its base dynamics, however, all we find is the continual economic exchange of energy in order to maintain thermodynamic equilibrium. Arguing that the universe gravitates toward some complex divine or metaphysical order flies in the face of thermodynamic physics.