Class Notes January 18, 2011

Must Knows to be a Literature Major

1. Bible
1. No one can completely know the Bible but everyone should have a general idea of it as it is the cornerstone for so much of the world's literature/culture
2. Shakespeare
1. He is responsible for much of our language
3. Classical Greek Mythology
1.  Ovid & Greek Dramas
4. Everything else
1. secular scripture (all literature that is not the Bible)

• Bible
• Anxiety of influence: the Bible often creates this for writers
• Everyone must read it even if they do not like it as affects so much of our culture
• School of Night
• all of the men were very science minded
• psudo-sciences: tarrot cards, neoplatinion, Kabala, Hermetic mysteries
• all reintroduced by the School of Night
• Spencer's Sonnet
• everyone should read it as we will all be assigned to write a sonnet
• Professor Sexson talked about texts that are our own personal bibles
• Antony & Cleopatra
• page 1696 line 84
• Cleopatra's histrionics
• "If going to use language use it to the hilt" Professor Sexson
• myth means story
• Midsummer's Night Dream
• levels of myth
• occult ladder: low to high
• right vision: bottom is top & top is bottom
• God/Goddess, fairies/demons/lower Gods, Duke/Duchess, Working class (rude mechanicals)
• Ted Hughes
• page 85
• Puritan=bad literature
• complex literature is better because it involves mythology
• Shakespeare's Alls well that ends well
• strips mythology of Venus & Adonis
• one of his least popular plays
• Interiorized myth
• Shakespeare uses this which makes him a great author