week 2

Monday January 22

Agon: a contest or battle between combatants or adversaries

Comedians are the only ones who have license to do whatever they want, they can be:

• foul
• grotesque
• offensive

obscene or ob-scene: meaning 'off stage'

incest is a large part of many ancient civilizations

Although it is humorous in ways, and is always being mocked with phrases like "Keeping it all in the family" or "all in one point" it is a serious offense in many countries these days.

Things to remember:

• What are the chances? 1 in 3!!
• Clueless is not in our vocabulary in Classy Lit
• think of the current and how it is interwoven in the myth

The Tempest by Willy Shakespeare

Act 1, Scene 2

PROSPERO
No harm. I have done nothing but in care of thee,Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing of whence I am, nor that I am more better than Prospero, master of a full poor cell, and thy no greater father.

MIRANDA
More to know did never meddle with my thoughts.

PROSPERO
'Tis time I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand, and pluck my magic garment from me. So:
Lays down his mantle lie there, my art. Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'd the very virtue of compassion in thee, I have with such provision in mine art so safely ordered that there is no soul--No, not so much perdition as an hair betid to any creature in the vessel which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. Sit down; for thou must now know farther.

MIRANDA
You have often begun to tell me what I am, but stopp'd and left me to a bootless inquisition, concluding 'Stay: not yet.'

PROSPERO
The hour's now come; the very minute bids thee ope thine ear; obey and be attentive. Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell? I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not out three years old.

MIRANDA
Certainly, sir, I can.

PROSPERO
By what? By any other house or person? Of any thing the image tell me that hath kept with thy remembrance.

MIRANDA
'Tis far off and rather like a dream than an assurance that my remembrance warrants. Had I not four or five women once that tended me?

PROSPERO
Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it that this lives in thy mind? What seest thou elseIn the dark backward and abysm of time? If thou remember'st aught ere thou camest here, how thou camest here thou mayst.

MIRANDA
But that I do not.

PROSPERO
Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since, thy father was the Duke of Milan and a prince of power.

MIRANDA
Sir, are not you my father?

PROSPERO
Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and she said thou wast my daughter; and thy father was Duke of Milan; and thou his only heir and princess no worse issued.

MIRANDA
O the heavens! What foul play had we, that we came from thence? Or blessed was't we did?

PROSPERO
Both, both, my girl: By foul play, as thou say'st, were we heaved thence, But blessedly holp hither.

MIRANDA
O, my heart bleeds to think o' the teen that I have turn'd you to, which is from my remembrance! Please you, farther.

George Steiner's Antigone pg 121

"On the contrary: the poet, the dramatist, calls upon, compacts, the disseminated energies and authority of myth in order to give to a current, circumstantially bounded event or social conflict to 'visibility', the compelling dimensions, the inexorable logic and extremity of the mythical. The myth precipitates and purifies the agitated, opaque elements of the immediate situation. It enforces on them distance and the definity of the insoluble. But to do this it must internalize the local occasion. It is willed attempts at 'timelessness', such as we find them in neo-classical art or in nineteenth-century epic sublimity, which bring on rapid datedness. Universal texts and works or art guard within themselves a life-giving parachialis...

But it does not tell us why the graft 'took' on the millennia; why it is that Antigone, together with a handful of other figures- Orpheus, Prometheus, Heracles, Agamemnon and his pack, Oedipus, Odysseus, Medea- should constitute the essential code of canonis reference for intellect and sensibility across western civilization."

pg 231-277 for test

Here is a link to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle

epiphany: Will Dr. Sexson ever reveal what his epiphany was about the BDC?

"Isn't it better if things go over your head, than under?" ~Dr. Sexson

Victor Borge