Art and Literature (Paris)

We're going to be viewing a lot of art and reading a lot of literature, but what do we mean by "art" and "literature?" How do you define these things/ideas? You can find many definitions, but what do they mean to you? Does art have a purpose? Does it have to illicit pleasure? What kind of pleasure? Does it teach a "lesson?" Who gets to determine what is literature and what is not? How do you think I picked our reading list? Why is The Da Vinci Code not a required text? In 3-4 paragraphs, respond to one or all of these questions.

Candide and Leibniz

The philosophes of the Englightenment, such as Descartes and Voltaire, were concerned with discovering a foundation for Truth that relied not on superstition and the opinions of others, but on matter and the mind. Consider this statue of Voltaire in reference to the "Archaic Torso Of Apollo" of Rilke's poem. Voltaire's statue is starkly realistic and yet profoundly human and dynamic at the same time. In Candide, Voltaire was responding in part to Leibniz' argument that, roughly speaking, as God is "good" and as he has created this world, then there could be no better world than the one we currently have. Candide, on the other hand, raises the question of how to live in a world dominated by tragedy - both natural and man-made. It's the same question that I think we all still deal with one way or another today: how do we deal with pain, with death, and with faith and science. Voltaire and Leibniz represent, for our purposes, the opposite sides of the Englightenment argument: Is rationality a useful response to the world if it makes us feel less secure; to what degree is "reason" our particular faculty to exercise and perfect; can "reason" actually make us less fulfilled and even more prone to tragedy?

Dostoevsky, Marx, and the Crisis of Narrative

Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" and Marx's Communist Manifesto have at least one thing in common, which is that they both seek to impose a new narrative onto a reality that has lost its old force. As we move out of discussing works that arise of the Enlightenment, we are faced with the crises created by Enlightenment ideas - individual liberty, scientific discovery and exploration, Protestantism. Voltaire's response to the old order, the old narrative - the aristocracy, the church - is primarily satirical, at least in Candide, but his solution is arguably conservative, or at least not revolutionary: tend your garden. This solution places the nexus of the argument squarely on the shoulders of the individual, but this individual is not a revolutionary in the Marxian sense. Moliere's response to the old narrative is similarly satirical, at least in Tartuffe, but it ends on an even more conservative note than Candide. Tartuffe is "outed" by the king, who himself has donned the language of the Enlightenment, i.e. Right Reason.

The "Grand Inquisitor," on the other hand, while specifically concerning the Roman Catholic Church, is also about the problem of freedom. If we are all essentially equal, if there is no authority over us determining how we are to live and providing us with basic necessities, then how are we to satisfy our needs without killing each other, without anarchy? The English writer Thomas Hobbes, in the 17th Century, argued that we cannot. Such lives of freedom are "nasty, brutish, and short," he wrote in Leviathan; consequently, we require a ruler (a monarch) endowed with absolute power who can maintain order and provide for the well-being of the masses. Hobbes believed that we must even give our freedom of conscience over to the monarch, who will then decide what "we" are to believe.

The Inquisitor would agree. He argues that Christ offered freedom of belief to all humanity, essentially viewing all people as equal before God. The Inquisitor argues that by refusing the devil's temptations, Christ was asserting that one's love of God cannot arise out of fear or manipulation, but out of free choice. After all, is it love if one is forced to it? The problem, the Inquisitor argues, is that given freedom, humanity will revert to Hobbes' chaotic state. We will destroy each other. The Inquisitor's solution, then, is to provide the "millions" with the things they crave - bread, moral certitude, and universality. The church will demand absolute obedience, but in return it will provide the "millions" with peace, the peace of innocent children. In this way, the Inquisitor argues, the church is actually more benevolent than Christ himself, who misjudged human nature and assumed that we are essentially "good" when in fact we are essentially "bad."

This solution, however, is not simply to be dismissed as the solution of a corrupt church. Rather, it is the solution offered by every narrative - political, economic, and religious - that seeks to tell the "millions" how to live. Marx's narrative in The Communist Manifesto is another example of a narrative that seeks to justify a certain "will to power." And in this sense, it is the same narrative as that developed by one of the "Founding Fathers" of liberal democracy, John Locke. Locke argued that we are all naturally free, but he further asserted that capitalism and competition were right and natural. Marx would agree with the first part of this argument, but he would argue that capitalism and competition are finally barriers to real freedom, the freedom of the proletariat - the "millions" - from the oppression of the bourgeoisie. Such freedom, however, became a kind of oppression of its own, at least as practiced in the former Soviet Union. But in relation to the "lies" offered by the Inquisitor, the narrative offered by Marx seems almost refreshing.

In any case, what is clear is that in the 19th Century, Western and Russian literature were trying to deal with the problem of the proper relationship between the individual and society. Dostoevsky, in this chapter from The Brothers Karamazov at least, explores the central aspect of this problem for his time, a problem that was still to be very much at play in the run-up to the cataclysmic wars of the early and mid 20th Century. Of course it is a problem still with us, though since the Industrial Revolution, the narrative that has been developed to deal with it has been the narrative of National Exceptionalism, which itself, at least in America, contains within it the narratives of the church and of capitalism. And it is against this "new" narrative that much Modern and contemporary literature sets itself.

Literary History Tour

For our purposes, we are going to explore the different periods of literary history since 1650 by looking at a few representative pieces. As our focus is Western literary history, we're talking about what is called "Rationalism" or the Enlightenment (roughly from the mid-17th to the late 18th century); "Romanticism" (roughly the late 18th through the mid-19th century); "Modernism" (roughly the late 19th through the mid-20th century); and "Postmodernism" (everything since and the kitchen sink). Here are the links to the pieces for today. As this is only a quick peek at each period, I've only utilized poems, and each is associated with a well-known piece of art from the same period:
1. Rationalism: Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" (1681) and Johannes Vermeer, "Girl With a Pearl Earing" (1665)
2. Romanticism: Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself, Section 6" (1855) and Caspar David Friedrich "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog" (1818)
3. Modernism: T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) and Pablo Picasso, "Guernica" (1937)
4. Postmodernism: Dean Young, "Undertow" and Serrano Andres "Untitled" (1987) and Born Magazine
What are your thoughts? Which pieces do you find most interesting?

Research Papers/Presentation

You are writing a 5-7 page research paper on any text of your choice from our anthology, as long as we haven't previously covered the work in class. This is not a biography of an author or a summary of their work. Rather, it is an argument about a text from a particular point of view. For this post, please include the following information:
1. Thesis Statement (3-4 sentences)

Ask yourself the following questions: From what perspective am I approaching the text? What information does my audience need to know in order to understand the text? What particular moments in the text am I going to highlight in order to prove my thesis?

2. List of Resources (5-7, plus the primary text)

Most of your sources are going to come from scholarly journals. Internet sources are acceptable if they are credible (no .com sites, no tertiary sources). Be specific in your list.

3. Presentation Information (1-2 sentences)

How are you going to present your findings to class? Keep in mind, your audience will not have read the text, so a small amount of summary will be necessary. You may use all of the multi-media resources available in the room, but you may not read your paper verbatim.

Hemingway and Modernism

Ernest Hemingway, writing about his creative process in his autobiographical novel A Moveable Feast, says, “I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them” (13). I find this a rather astonishing statement, considering that Hemingway, as an ambulance driver, had just witnessed the horrors of trench warfare and yet was turning to Impressionist painting to find something missing in the act of simple observation, but there must have been something in Cézanne's work that hinted at more than simple “representation.”

Consider this Cezanne work. Obviously it isn't realistic in the purely representational sense. You could take a much more "accurate" photograph of a plate of apples and oranges. So if "Realism" is not the goal, then what is? And considering "Hills Like White Elephants" and "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," which are almost painfully realistic, in what ways are these texts similar to the Cezanne? If Hemingway had viewed these Henry Moore sculptures, which are contemporary with the Modernist period Hemingway was writing in, I think he would have found a great affinity with these works, and a closer aesthetic to his own. How so?

Moliere and Candide

Post a 5-6 paragraph analysis comparing any character in Candide and any character in Tartuffe. You must utilize at least three quotes from each work. For the play, quote Act, Scene, and Line number (e.g. Act II, Scene 3, Line 1-5). For Candide, quote chapter and paragraph (e.g. Chapter 12, Paragraph 4).

Moliere

Tartuffe is all about class, religion, hypocrisy, and politics. As a comedy, it ends on a positive note, but the issues it tackles are serious and in fact landed the playwright in trouble. Tartuffe had to fight in order to be seen, having been censured by Louis XIV after its original debut in 1664. Read these petitions to find out more about what Moliere had to go through to get his play onto the stage. Can you imagine any contemporary analogs in terms of the play's themes or in terms of the issue of censorship?

The version that we are reading by Richard Wilbur utilizes rhyming couplets and a ten-syllable line or pentameter. The original French is a rhyming couplet in a twelve-syllable line or alexandrine. It's of course extremely difficult to translate rhyme out of another language, and not every translator of Tartuffe has made the attempt. Some have chosen other forms. Consider this translation by Curtis Hidden Page from 1907. Which do you prefer?

Rilke

I've given you three versions of the Rilke poem in English, all of which have been translated out of the German by three different translators. It's amazing how different they are! I have a favorite, but what is your's? And why do you think it ends with the line, "You must change your life." Consider this bust at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before you answer.

Camus and "The Guest"

Look up absurdism. What choice is he faced with? What decision does he make and what is the consequence. How is Daru's position absurd?

Moliere Part Deux

Act 1, Scene 5 contains an important exchange. Orgon criticizes what he calls "free-thinking" because it challenges "faith," while Cleante delivers his long monologue about Nature (read "human nature") and "Reason's laws." This is the heart of the Enlightenment argument. But note as you read further that Cleante, for all his wise words, is relatively powerless. For that matter, power itself is an important issue here. Who wields it, or who thinks they do when perhaps they really do not?

Les Miserables

Hi everyone. You should watch the film Les Miserables in the next few days. (I really like the 1998 version with Liam Neeson, available for viewing instantly at Netflix.) The author of the novel upon which the movie is based, Victor Hugo, is one of our authors in the Literary Paris book. It's a very modern story in a sense about the conflict between the law, government, and the individual. In particular, I find Javert's "solution" to the quandry that he finds himself in at the very end of the movie to be especially interesting.

Verlaine

Verlaine is also one of the writers in our Literary Paris book. Read his description. What do you think is the tone of the poem? There is one line that I think is espcially poignant, and it comes in the final stanza. Which do you think it is? Why is it interesting? You can find more information about Verlaine on Poets.org

Buttering the Bagel and French Theory

1. Under what conditions is buttering my bagel an artistic act?

2. As you read the essay on French theory, don't get bogged down in all the names. What I want you to understand is the author's description of the Enlightenment period and the problems that arose as a result of the movement toward rationalism and away from the faith-based arguments of the church. There are direct applications here to Voltaire, but also to all of the rest of the readings. The readings in the packet could not be possible without the Enlightenment and the problems/solutions that it proposed.