Getting lit
A cure for the reduction of the world to a measurable object; shows us that existence is contingent
What is the novel?
A modern critique of modernity
What is Romanticism
A public declaration attempting to radically shift consciousness
What is a manifesto?
“Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.”
Don Quixote- Miguel de Cervantes
His name didn't "matter very much to our story; in its telling there is no derivation from the truth"
Don Quixote
(This quote shows the novel is an experience of the entanglement of truth and fiction. To pass from one domain to another is to read, the capacity of the mind. The problem with novels is not that they do not tell us the truth, the problem is that we are never sure when they do it.)
A collective work composed by the writer and audience
What is narrative?
Because Dr. Frankenstein believes that science and technologies can turn him into a god able to create life, the subtitle of Frankenstein is
The Modern Prometheus
A surrealist technique enabling the writer to escape their consciousness
What is automatic writing (psychic automatism)?
“What do we do? /You bomb! You bomb them!/ What do we do? /You bomb! You bomb them!/ What do we do? /We bomb! We bomb you! /What do we do? /You bomb! You bomb you!”
"Hum Bom"- Allen Ginsberg
It's an interpretation that shows how the text speaks about itself.
What is a self-reflexive interpretation?
_______ can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in it reach toward the ineffable.”
Language
(It is the only way for us to access things like untold stories, repressed events, unrecorded events.)
Represents the transient immortality of poetry
The Nightingale
The instinct toward chaos
What is the death drive?
“Could this be possible! This old holy man in the forest has heard nothing of this yet, that God is dead!”
Thus Spoke Zarathustra- Friedrich Nietzsche
This film inhabits rather than re-tells the apocalyptic violence of the Vietnam War and is as such a translation of Conrad's novel.
What is Apocalypse Now?
The bird symbolizes this in Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize speech?
What is language?
The Romantic poet's ability to be nothing, and thus to inhabit everything
What is negative capability?
Regarding humans (man=anthro) as the center of the universe
What is anthropocentrism?
“ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS AN OLD
WOMAN. BLIND BUT WISE. OR WAS IT AN OLD
MAN? A GURU, PERHAPS. OR A GRIOT
SOOTHING RESTLESS CHILDREN. I HAVE HEARD
THIS STORY, OR ONE EXACTLY LIKE IT, IN THE
LORE OF SEVERAL CULTURES.”
"Nobel Prize Lecture"- Toni Morrison
According to Marx and Engels, the idea waiting for political embodiment
What is the spectre of Communism?
According to Kundera, the novelist creates imaginary characters as a way to explore this.
What is the contingency of existence?
Romantic writers believe in the powers and limits of this
What is Imagination?
An indeterminate state of passions that can become extreme feelings
What is the vague des passions?
“If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful”
"Call of Cthulhu"- H.P. Lovecraft
The phrase Kurtz writes to express the hidden wish of colonialist discourse: to exterminate the natives.
What is "Exterminate all the brutes!"?