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Notes to Literature

Online Seminars, Courses and Tuition in European Literature and Thought Just sign up for modules of interest on the website.

Notes is an e-learning project that offers personalised higher-level tuition in European literature, history and philosophy. At its core are 12 short courses on modern and classical authors, including (among others) Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Karl Marx, and James Joyce. The courses can be taken on a one-to-one or a small group basis, and starting dates are flexible. Notes was set up with the specific idea of creating a short series of courses that would provide adult and young adult learners with a foundational, integrated and critical study of the history of Western thought and literature. This idea reflects our belief that creative and critical response to this tradition has an important role to play in understanding our current selves and predicaments, as well as in imagining and fashioning our possible futures.

22/07/2024

Thomas Bernhard's Frost (1963) and the Apocalyptic

Check out NL's latest Blog Post for some readings on the Apocalyptic, featuring Northrop Frye and Thomas Bernhard's first novel, Frost (1963).

www.notestoliterature.com/blog

"Suddenly, I was sitting in this landscape, in a meadow. The odd thing was that the people were the same colours as the landscape. I was the color of the meadow, then that of the sky, then the color of a tree, and finally I was the color of the mountains. And I was always all of the colours. My laughter caused a great commotion in the landscape. I don’t know why. This pretty irregular landscape, you know, it was as animated as any I’ve ever seen. A landscape of people. Because the people took on the colours of the landscape as I did myself, the only way of recognising them was by their voices, and it was only by my voice that they knew me."

01/07/2024

JANE AWAKE

The opals hiding your lids
as you sleep, as you ride ponies
mysteriously, spring to bloom
like the blue flowers of autumn

each nine o'clock. And curls
tumble languorously towards
the yawning rubber band, tan,
your hand pressing all that

riotous black sleep into
the quiet form of daylight
and its sunny disregard for
the luminous volutions, oh!

and the budding waltzes
we swoop through in nights.
Before dawn you roar with
your eyes shut, unsmiling,

your volcanic flesh hides
everything from the watchman,
and the tendrils of dreams
strangle policemen running by

too slowly to escape you,
the racing vertiginous waves
of your murmuring need. But
he is day's guardian saint

that policeman, and leaning
from your open window you ask
him what dress to wear and how
to comb your hair modestly,

for that is now your mode.
Only by chance tripping on stairs
do you repeat the dance, and
then, in the perfect variety of

subdued, impeccably disguised,
white black pink blue saffron
and golden ambiance, do we find
the nightly savage, in a trance.

——— Frank O'Hara

05/06/2024

-- Martin McDonagh, "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" (1996)

31/05/2024

Passionate love relentlessly twists a cord
under my heart and spreads deep mist on my eyes,
stealing the unguarded brains from my head.

— Archilocus (6BC), Aphrodite Is Censured

05/04/2024

...then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

-- from The Windhover, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

15/03/2024

.
Very gently struck
The quay night bell.

Now within the dead
Of night and the dead
Of my life I hear
My name called from far out.
I'm come to this place
(Come to this place)
Which I'll not pass
Though one shall pass
Wearing seemingly
This look I move as.
This staring second
Breaks my home away
Through always every
Night through every whisper
From the first that once
Named me to the bone.
Yet this place finds me
And forms itself again.
This present place found me.
Owls from the land.
Gulls cry from the water.
And that wind honing
The roof-ridge is out of
Nine hours west on the main
Ground with likely a full
Gale unwinding it.

Gently the quay bell
Strikes the held air.

Strikes the held air like
Opening a door
So that all the dead
Brought to harmony
Speak out on silence.

I bent to the lamp. I cupped
My hand to the glass chimney.
Yet it was a stranger's breath
From out of my mouth that
Shed the light. I turned out
Into the salt dark
And turned my collar up.

And now again almost
Blindfold with the bright
Hemisphere unprised
Ancient overhead,
I am befriended by
This sea which utters me.

The hull slewed out through
The lucky turn and trembled
Under way then. The twin
Screws spun sweetly alive
Spinning position away.

Far out faintly calls
The continual sea.

Now within the dead
Of night and the dead
Of all my life I go.
I'm one ahead of them
Turned in below.
I'm borne, in their eyes,
Through the staring world.

The present opens its arms.

.

-- From W.S. Graham, The Nightfishing (1955)

11/03/2024

Was there a "Machiavellian moment”? And, if so, when or what was it?

The question invokes the hugely influential work of J.G.A. Pocock. He proposed such a moment while maintaining that it could only be selectively and thematically defined (across three centuries and three inter-related categories of thought — virtue, fortune and corruption). Essentially, Pocock points us to an “enduring pattern” of secular political self-consciousness and republicanism that oversees the transformation of medieval libertates (liberties) into the liberalism of early modern capitalism. As an ungentle alternative, we have Perry Anderson’s analysis: Machiavelli’s failure to grasp the actual socio-political characteristics of the new centralised States in Spain and France resulted in “unseeing empiricism” and the “banal recipes of deceit and ferocity,” which we now all know as Machiavellianism.

This, of course, is only the tail end of many centuries of disagreement over how to interpret Machiavelli's work; but I enjoy setting up the debate for new students in this way. I'm pleased to be doing so again this week with the NL Early Modern Political Theory course.

Why not join us??

29/02/2024

After today’s massacre in north Gaza, it’s worth reflecting on the long history of aspirations among Israeli statesmen for the expulsion, displacement and compulsory transfer of Palestinians. This is David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, speaking in 1937:

"The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the first and second Temples … We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty—this is national consolidation in a free homeland."

Elsewhere, the same year, Ben-Gurion wrote, “With compulsory transfer we would have a vast area for settlement… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

26/02/2024

They were showed our fashions, our pomp, and the form of a fair city. Afterward, some demanded their advice and would needs know of them what things of note and admirable they had observed amongst us. They answered three things, the last of which I have forgotten, and am very sorry for it; the other two I yet remember. They said, First, they found it very strange that so many tall men with long beards, strong and well armed, as it were about the King’s person (it is very likely they meant the Swizzers of his guard) would submit themselves to obey a beardless child and that we did not rather choose one amongst them to command the rest. Secondly (they have a manner of phrase whereby they call men but a moiety of men from others), they had perceived there were men amongst us full gorged with all sorts of commodities and others which, hunger-starven and bare with need and poverty, begged at their gates. And found it strange these moieties so needy could endure such an injustice and that they took not the others by the throat or set fire on their houses.

Michel de Montaigne, "Of The Cannibals," The Florio Translation (1603)

16/02/2024

She had not seen him since the day he stigmatised work as the end of them both, and now she came creeping upon him in the dark to execute a fake jossy's sixpenny writ to success and prosperity. He would be thinking of her as a Fury coming to carry him off, or even as a tipstaff with warrant to distrain. Yet it was not she, but Love, that was the bailiff. She was but the bumbailiff. This discrimination gave her such comfort that she sat down on the stair-head, in the pitch darkness excluding the usual auspices. How different it had been on the riverside, when the barges had waved, the funnel bowed, the tug and barge sung, yes to her. Or had they meant no? The distinction was so nice. What difference, for example, would it make now, whether she went on up the stairs to Murphy or back down them into the mew? The difference between her way of destroying them both, according to him, and his way, according to her. The gentle passion.

-- Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

12/12/2023

Still there is a genuine mystery in art, and a real place for wonder. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle distinguishes extrinsic symbols, like the cross or the national flag, which are without value in themselves but are signs or indicators of something existential, from intrinsic symbols, which include works of art. On this basis we may distinguish two kinds of mystery. ... The mystery of the unknown or unknowable essence is an extrinsic mystery, which involves art only when art is made illustrative of something else, as religious art is to the person concerned primarily with worship. But the intrinsic mystery is that which remains a mystery in itself no matter how fully known it is, and hence is not a mystery separated from what is known. The mystery in the greatness of King Lear or Macbeth comes not from concealment but from revelations, not from something unknown or unknowable in the work, but from something unlimited in it.

-- From Northrop Frye, Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols

14/11/2023

Sound advice for budding scholars?

Let us come now to references to authors, which other books contain and yours lacks. The remedy for that is very simple; for you have nothing else to do but look for a book which quotes them all from A to Z, as you say. Then you put this same alphabet into yours. For, granted that the very small need you have to employ them will make your deception transparent, it does not matter a bit; and perhaps there will even be someone silly enough to believe you have made use of them all in your simple and straightforward story. And if it serves for no other purpose, at least that long catalogue of authors will be useful to lend authority to your book at the outset. Besides, nobody will take the trouble to examine whether you follow your authorities or not, having nothing to gain by it.

— Intelligent Friend, Don Quixote (Part I),
(trans. J. M. Cohen)

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