LitHum Flashcards
Ibn Arabi, The Translator of Desires
What we talk about when we talk about “Western Literature” – the obscured historiography of Muslim power and culture in Europe
Erotic desire alongside spiritual desire and literary form: how do we tangle/disentangle these?
Barzakh: the indeterminacy of the line
Imagery of specific places, specific plants, ways of mapping the world through poetry
There is an interfaith element to Ibn Arabi’s expressions of love and desire too!
Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France
(pick out two or more characters that you could write about in an essay)
Zones of marvelous contact (magical creatures, estranged christianity) to explore the boundaries of proper/improper “human” behavior
Authored/unauthored song: “I’ve collected these stories from elsewhere…”
Interesting connections with Citizen
Marie de France is an abstract voice in herself, does this mirror Rankine’s use of “you” as an empty signifier? Who is the author/tale-teller, is it you through your subjective prism or is it the author?
Dante, Inferno
(pick out two or more characters that you could write about in an essay)
Brunetto Latini- Dante’s teacher who is in hell for sodomy (Why would Dante put him here? Does this add to Dante’s credibility as an author, by showing impartiality to his friends and not just punishing his enemies?)
Ovid/Horace/Lucan/Homer
Virgil/Beatrice/Paolo & Francesca
The uses of hell: politics, ethics, poetics
Situating his social-cultural surroundings in Hell, and Hell in his social-cultural surroundings
Navigating classical and Christian intellectual inheritance
Terza Rima, obsessively rendered form
Massive tension between the EPIC and the autobiographical
Dante’s individual story (Beatrice, guiding from the heavens)
Biggest literary idol is his guide
The extra line at the end of each canto: 3+1
Shakespeare, Othello
“Killing fictions” – the stories we tell about race and gender
Staging – what happens when we perform words to an audience
Intentionality of each character amplified, no longer a distance between reader and character, readers “switch places” throughout the text as opposed to being attached to a narrator
Outward appearances vs inner reality (what one seems like/who one truly is, managing other people’s perceptions through storytelling)
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Metanarrative
Why does Cervantes appeal to historiography?
Idealism and madness
Is holding on to an idealized past dangerous?
The rusting armor… and the choice to not “re-test” it
Is it fair for other people to infringe on someone’s fantastical madness?
ARE BOOKS BAD?!
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The pleasures and perils of the romcom
Epistemology: how we know what we know
ARE BOOKS GOOD?!
Machado de Assis, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Dealing with death: moments of solemnity, moments of satire
The posthumous perspective: a form of clarity? Or an incentive to justify one’s life?
Experimental form: what does constructing the story in this way achieve?
The posthumous perspective, once more
Representing enslavement and atrocity through the mundane
Kafka, Metamorphosis
The central un/interpretability of the transformation: what is this novella about???
Three-part form with thresholds (doorways, oedipal dramas) at each juncture
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
The intersubjective: minds, perception, and the space between people
The indifference of the natural world
Artmaking, creation
Shift from naturalism to abstraction
What should the subjectivity of the creator
The role of memory & gender
García Márquez, 100 Years of Solitude
Magical realism and how to represent colonization
Cyclicality, recursiveness, the same story over and over/ things being made and unmade
Sex and/against civilization
Origin/Creation myth of a people, comparisons to Genesis/other myths of origin
Nature reclaiming man made items- Spanish Galleon/Ants destroying the house
Modernization and Culture
Progression of technology
Thinking too much about the past vs too little
Morrsion, Song of Solomon
How to tell a vital history: what’s written vs what’s sung
Liberation, sex, and death: the possibility (?) of transcendence
Tapestry of motifs
The role of names
Family lineage
Rankine, Citizen
Memorialization
Language and lyric: “addressability,” visibility
Intersectionality
