Here is a good place to post your Friday response papers.

Scroll down to the bottom of this post, click on "comments," and post your response essay in the box. Do not type your work directly into the box--you could lose it! Compose it on a word document then cut and paste it here.

***



"The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun"

--William Blake

***

Revelation 12: 1-17

1 And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:

2 And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

3 And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.

4 And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.

***

Understand: your reading experience of Blake as I've served it up to you in Romanticism: an Anthology is stripped of all that personalizes the art, of the layered symbolism in color, image, line, and idiosyncratic marks that serve as Blake's (for lack of a better word) punctuation, of the contrast between the tone of the language text and that of the illustrations (for even the letters of the words are illustrations), and of all the properties of a hand-made book. This is the worst possible distortion of his art and poetry, akin to presenting you with the head of John the Baptist on a platter: the prophet isn't in it anymore. The same is true of this virtual text (but one does wonder if Blake would've enjoyed blogging--I'm pretty sure Whitman would've been a blogger), though at least here you can see what The Book of Thel looks like. Click on "next" to navigate between plates. Click on "+" to enlarge.

***

Burke classifies the passions under the two simple ideas of pleasure and pain, from which we arrive at beauty and sublimity by distinct routes.

For Wednesday's class: (click to enlarge)

***

Edmund Burke 1729-1727

Project Gutenburg's ever expanding library includes volumes 1-12 of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, should you want to get a sense of the expanse of his writing, and if you're willing and able to read it on line. If you're looking for an encyclopedia article with some basics, you could do worse than the Wikipedia entry. Try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy where someone thought it prudent to use the word "whilst":

Whilst Burke's thought has never lacked interpreters, on the whole understanding has been attempted without the persistence of historical insight and the strength of conceptual grasp required to do justice to him. Hence he has suffered an ironic fate for one who urged breadth and precision of thought. That is to say, he has figured as the spokesman for a very limited number of points. This type of treatment began in the nineteenth century, when Burke was invoked as an antidote to the confidence of the French Revolution by liberal thinkers who prized its principles, saw their narrowness, and required a sense of historical development to situate them properly.

Whilst--?

***

Whilst the Victorian Web entry for Burke on the sublime is all too brief, you might find the contextualizing of nineteenth-century aesthetics very helpful. In fact if you're going to poke around for information on the Internet, I suggest you stick to scholarly resources as much as possible, so start learning to identify the ones you can use. Victorian Web is trustworthy and the overview of many of its featured fields is wonderfully extensive. Look at nineteenth-century religion, for example. The varieties of Christian theologies in the Victorian period alone are staggering--I know, I know, I'm jumping ahead of our Romantics and Burke--but do note that both Deism and Atheism have their public (popularized?) roots in early eighteenth-century thought. Just as we thought. It makes sense that a culture so convinced of aesthetics would also necessarily be invested in human autonomy.

***

Burke on taste: (click to enlarge)



***