So, does these two critics agree or disagree? How?
I hope to invoke a discussion of these materials
in our discussion of Sontag and Fried.

Ideally, it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be . . . ( Read more... )

As a followup to the post in which I suggested that (the Sarah Chang video of) "The Four Seasons" is Kitsch, let me post a response to that piece of music by the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, a tribute I believe he wrote in order to bring out the true essence and finest qualities of Vivaldi's timeless masterpiece. Please, have a listen.

Click to view

Now ( Read more... )

The English Countenance:


( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Canticle of The Sun

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing.

To you, alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And ( Read more... )

This is a post I wrote a while ago for an English class I was teaching. It gets at the heart of issues you were asking about in class today.

For the ear of eksarkosisI think you correctly identify some of the limitations which have brought Achebe's argument under critical fire. Here, I don't want to see the term limitation as necessarily pejorative. We ( Read more... )

They key to understanding the issues we are currently discussing, or at least to understanding these matters as Krauss does, is to read what I've written on Saussure, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Althusser as carefully as possible, in order to gain an insight into just how completely our consciousness, for these philosophers and critics, is ( Read more... )

STUDENT:Wollstonecraft seems to believe that love is detrimental to the personal power of women. I think very differently. I believe that marriage should have a strong element of friendship as well as passionate love. True love cannot be achieved without equality and respect, therefore Wollstonecraft's philosophy is very compatible with romantic ( Read more... )

In the same way today certain plastic representations are the expression of an intransigent materialism, of a recourse to everything that compromises the powers that be in matters of form, ridiculing the traditional entities, naively rivaling stupefying scarecrows.

- George Bataille


( Read more... )

Click the image below and have a look at all the reverential and pandering nonsense PBS has to offer with regard the life and work of Robert Rauschenberg, a true American "master". Then conduct a Google search and have a look at Rauschenberg's actual art. This brief exercise will give you a wonderful lesson in what textual scholars call " ( Read more... )