Dr. Sexson on Burnt Norton

Here are some scans of Dr. Sexson's copy of the Burnt Norton section of the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot!! Click on the image to enlarge.

Class Notes 2/8 Presentation: Burnt Norton

Presentation #1: Burnt Norton

Today was the first of four presentations in class. We heard from Adam, Kevin, Pat, Erin, Zuzu, and Mick. Adam talked of the musical quality in Eliot's poem. And we listened to a stringed quartet? Beautiful and appropriate. Adam informed us of the critics and how Burnt Norton was received when it was published. Kevin talked about echoes, paths of life not followed. Also talked about was the still point and time. Brief moments of eternity are caught. paradox. Also the creepy language of the poem. Maybe an epiphany is scary. And a bird. go go. a call to action. Please go see their blogs in order to gain a full appreciation for the group/individual hard work and the information shared. It is just too much for me to recapitulate.
For Wednesday: East Coker

Class Notes 2/5

(Happy SuperBowl Sunday)

Lecture Notes:
Harold Bloom - quoting Empson, taking the notion of epiphany out of the religious shpere.
ghostly aesthetic father - Walter Pater

Joyce asks far less rom his epiphanies. Hopkins a student to Walter Pater.

HW for over the weekend: Here is the conclusion to Walter Pater's study, THE RENAISSANCE and it comes close to a summative statement about the nature of epiphanies........http://www.subir.com/pater/renaissance/conclusion.html
*the last paragraph is as important to Lit. Crit. as the last paragraph of The Dead is to short stories.

We watched scenes from the Houston film version of The Dead. There were some technical difficulties so we did not get to watch as much as hoped for.
We watched the Recitation scene, which I think added to the culmination of the epiphany even though it is not in the text. You see Gretta along the wall reacting to the poem, a small epiphany for her I suppose, a showing forth of memories. And we watched the Lass of Aughrim scene. And of course we watched the end scene.


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By the way I wanted to share that I found Gretta Conroy, Gabriel's wife in Ulysses!!! I was reading along and I thought the name sounded familiar and knowing that Joyce used some characters from Dubliners in Ulysses I checked just to make sure. But she's there at the end of Calypso!

"Timing her. 9.15. Did Roberts pay you yet? 9.20. What had Gretta Conroy
on? 9.23. What possessed me to buy this comb? 9.24. I'm swelled after that
cabbage......." (56).

Class Notes 2/3

Class Notes Feb 3rd.

Eliot and Joyce interested in the tension between past and present.

The Dead and this Capstone class both structured the same way. Heading towards a still point.

Lily - lila - great dance of the universe, 'after the ecstasy comes the laundry' - we gt back to the everyday life. Lilies are often flowers at funerals.

Theophoric names - Michael (One who is like God) and Gabriel.

Lass of Aughrim is about seduction and abandonment. banisters. the banistars.

While reading Joyce we need to pay special attention to the details.

upturned faces around the dinner table in The Dead, like a cemetary.

Derek, Joan, Sam, ZuZu, Brianne, Jennie Lynn, and Adam presented their diamonds. See their blogs.

Dr Sexson: Joyce does have a moral to the story in The Dead, page 152, "Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and with dismally with age." A good moral, penultimate because to follow is a vision experienced by the nervous system.

Memorize the last paragraph in The Dead for extra credit and a spiritual reward, and a change in personality. The last paragraph just doesn't get better than that.

Diamond #2, this is more legit

So I hate to repeat a diamond, but it was one I had chosen before.
Gretta's epiphany begins when she hears the song "The Lass of Aughrim" at the top of the stairs sung by Mr. D'arcy with a cold, and continues at the hotel. It is like the song uncorcked a bottle of emotions/memories she had sealed. She seems alone and isolated in her grief/memory. Which begs the thought of what could have been, with what is I suppose. That reminds me of Taylor wondering if music could be an epiphany, and I think it is illustrated here very well.


LASS OF AUGHRIM, THE

If you'll be the lass of Aughrim
As I am taking you mean to be
Tell me the first token
That passed between you and me

O don't you remember
That night on yon lean hill
When we both met together
Which I am sorry now to tell

The rain falls on my yellow locks
And the dew it wets my skin;
My babe lies cold within my arms;
Lord Gregory, let me in

Class Notes 2/1 and a link

First things first......Happy Anniversary Dr. Sexson!!!


A glossary of terms for "The Dead" http://www.mendele.com/WWD/WWDdead.notes.html

Lecture:

Joyce - finding the divine in ordinary & Commonplace
MS "cultivate boring friends, they slow time down."

Star trek the Next Generation
caught in a time loop because the ship collides with something sending them back in the time loop, repeat the same thing over and over, eventually start getting deja vu, realize they are about to collide with something and need to communicate that to themselves in the next time loop so they leave clues......
message in a bottle, have to pick it up.

Dr. Sexson shared his diamond discovery on page 126, picture of Romeo and Juliet, this enriched our sense of the experience of what is going on. Pay attention to the picture because it contributes to the larger theme. The Romeo and Juliet scene echos Gabriel gazing up at his wife up on the stairs, and also the scene of Michael Furey throwing rocks at Gretta's balcony.

BLOG: There is also a connection of the two murdered princes on page 126, just after the Romeo and Juliet reference, to the last paragraph in The Dead. Richard III, two ghosts of the boys, "despair and die".

Pat, Kerri, Kevin, Helena, Robert, Taylor, Tai, Ronald, and Doug shared their diamond discoveries.

Four distinct narrators in The Dead.

TS Eliot, Four Quartets, Dry Salvages
"Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts."

Furniture and Memory - Gordon's FW Plot Summary

(*click this image to enlarge, it works this time!) Bedroom Image from page 34 in Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary by John Gordon, "Excessively neat as this may seem, its rationale is firmly based on the author's understanding of psychology, and it has a precedent in the ancient art of memory:" (Gordon 35)

"Such a system, which Joyce would have encountered through his readings in Giordano Bruno, might have first taught him to consider the extent to which a person's environing circumstances may be both palimpsest of past associations and prompting of future mental acts, the extent to which 'memories [are] framed from walls', as conjured by a reminiscensitive' observer. In making if the furniture of his own little room an everywhere, our dreamer simply follows suit. Like everything Joyce wrote, Finnegans Wake begins in a richly particular here and now."