We’ve read a number of works over the past few days in an attempt to triangulate an understanding of this “Romanticism” thing. Here are links to most (a second read is worth your while):

Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” especially these lines:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Milton’s Paradise Lost ((note that he, like Ellison, begins in medeas res. Not so modern after all…)):

 The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

We can contrast them nicely by looking at the way in which the speaker knows his world: Whitman understands through experience, while Satan is busy cogitating. ((Later we’ll see Hamlet say something similar: “Denmark’s a prison. . . . for there is nothing / either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me / it is a prison. . . . I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count / myself a king of infinite space” II.ii)) Both, however, refuse a universal, objective reality that Enlightenment thinkers founded their philosophies upon. As we move forward we’ll find other examples, further work out their attraction to Milton’s Satan, and look at the role of the artist/hero.

Also: There is a great series of lectures on this topic here, if you’re interested, and a previous post by me on the Gothic.

Yesterday we read W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” in all its apocalyptic glory. If you didn’t get chills the first reading ((“vexed to nightmare”?! That’ll keep me up…)), give it another go.

Today we discussed what it means to represent an individual, a personality, in literature. This has become our guiding question:

How is identity represented in literature?

An odd question and one worth unpacking a bit before we attempt an answer. In moving toward a better understanding of identity, we made connections between our representation of ourselves to others—or any autobiographical act—and the relationship between an author and his creation.

We’ll read a number of works (Oedipus Rex, The Stranger, Things Fall Apart, others likely) and call on previous readings (Hamlet, especially) to better answer this question. Ensure that you are reading and journaling—you’ll have time for group discussions on Monday.

This week we looked at a number of advertisements as an introduction to the three rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos. ((Go ahead and bookmark The Forest of Rhetoric—we will refer to it often.)) These will be the basis of your analyses of arguments for the next few weeks, so make sure you’re familiar with them.

Your homework for the weekend is to find an argument in the wild—the topic does not matter, nor does the medium—email a link to me (if possible), and bring a copy to school. After you’ve chosen the piece, note how the author appeals to his or her audience: what kind of emotions is it meant to elicit? how does the piece inspire trust? what is the audience meant to do with this information?

You will (briefly, informally) present the argument to the class and we will discuss on Monday.

[T]here’s a really interesting conversation about the role of Batman in civil society and his usurpation on the state’s monopoly on violence going on right now.

via Batman, Vigilantism, and the State | Law and the Multiverse.