ancient literature
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Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)Professor Wai Chee Dimock positions her reading of Tender Is the Night alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald's career as a Hollywood screenwriter. She shows how the novel borrows narrative techniques from film, particularly flashback, "switchability" on a macro and micro scale, and montage. Invoking the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, she reads scenes of wartime death and individual murder to show how love ...more
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Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)Professor Wai Chee Dimock continues her discussion of The Sound and the Fury by juxtaposing Quentin's stream-of-consciousness to his brother Benjy's narrative subjectivity. Professor Dimock argues that Faulkner uses stylistic parallels between the two sections to communicate "kinship" and "variation" between the two narrators. In her readings, she focuses on their relationship with the black charac...more
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The last class of the semester consists of a brief recapitulation of topics in the Divine Comedy addressed throughout the course, followed by an extensive question and answer session with the students. The questions posed allow Professor Mazzotta to elaborate on issues raised over the course of the semester, from Dante's place within the medieval love tradition to the relationship between his roles as poet and theologian.
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The discussion of Gadamer and Hirsch continues in this lecture, which further examines the relationship between reading and interpretation. Through a comparative analysis of these theorists, Professor Paul Fry explores the difference between meaning and significance, the relationship between understanding and paraphrasing, and the nature of the gap between the reader and the text. Through Wolfgang Iser's essay, "The Reading Process," the n...more
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The Apostle Paul's description of the Jewish Law in his letter to the Galatians demotes from being an expression of Jewish faith to an object of idolatry and one that imprisons those who follow it. Paul is careful to nuance this position, however, in his letter to the Romans. In Romans, it seems that Paul is defending himself against charges of being antinomian. Perhaps Paul treads carefully in order to ensure that his deliverance of a don...more
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The final cantos of Inferno are read with a view to the role of the tragic within Dante's Comedy. Using Dante's discussion of tragedy in the De vulgari eloquentia as a point of departure, Professor Mazzotta traces the disintegration of language that accompanies the pilgrim's descent into the pit of Hell, the zone of treachery, from the distorted speech of Nimrod in Inferno XXXI to the silence of Satan in Inferno XXXIV. The ultimate triumph...more
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Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (AMST 246)Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying by orienting the novel to the Great Depression in the South, as focalized through such famous texts as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Once this macro history is established, she reads the narrative techniques of As I Lay Dying through two analytic lenses. First, she draws on Bakhtin's notion of social dialects to underscore...more
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In this lecture on post-colonial theory, Professor Paul Fry explores the work of Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha. The complicated origins, definitions, and limitations of the term "post-colonial" are outlined. Elaine Showalter's theory of the phasic development of female literary identity is applied to the expression of post-colonial identities. Crucial terms such as ambivalence, hybridity, and double consciousness are explained. The relati...more
