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Comment on The English 102 Project | Literary Devices by Jeremiah Henry

Jeremiah Henry — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:02:28 +0000

In a later article, I discuss how the results of "looking ahead."

Comment on The English 102 Project | Literary Devices by On Teaching Shakespeare – Freytag and Nunn for Them, Bloom for Me, and Growth for Us | jBlog | jeremiahhenry dot com

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:54:06 +0000

[...] if anything, I wish for the students of my Shakespeare unit in English 102 to take away. In a previous post, I wrote about the place of literary devices in the literary discourse of a classroom and the [...]

Comment on Irish Awareness Day by Jeremiah Henry

Jeremiah Henry — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:35:37 +0000

That’s one of the aspects of Folklore as I understand it: “Artifacts that are variable and transmitted through space and time by the ‘common folk’” – by that definition, if the art didn’t vary from performance to performance, it wouldn’t be folklore.

Comment on Irish Awareness Day by Craig Bernthal

Craig Bernthal — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:49:52 +0000

Seeing the scenery on these Transatlantic Sessions gives me the itch to get to Ireland.
The stuff I’ve got posted on Donegal fiddling shows that “aural” transmission of the fiddle tunes kept them changing and developing from generation to generation even in Ireland, so the American amalgamation of Scots, Irish, and whatever other strains was the natural progression of Celtic music in both America and in the British Isles. No big puzzles, as the man in the video says.

Comment on Multiple Interpretations of Hamlet by Grant Dempsey

Grant Dempsey — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 12:29:56 +0000

“To be, or not to be. …Not to be.” Cue explosions.

Comment on Multiple Interpretations of Hamlet by Jeremiah Henry

Jeremiah Henry — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 03:03:51 +0000

Oh yes! At this point, Hamlet isn’t ready to find out “what dreams may come” or to, ahem, put Claudius to sleep either. As you suggested to our class, this clip from The Last Action Hero is the perfect parody. I really do love the line you quoted, too. It ties the parody and the text together, and it’s just plain funny.

Comment on Multiple Interpretations of Hamlet by Craig Bernthal

Craig Bernthal — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 01:58:19 +0000

Well, you know how much I love doing it this way. “No one is going to tell this sweet prince good night!”

Comment on Multiple Interpretations of Hamlet by Grant Dempsey

Grant Dempsey — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:17:28 +0000

I just wanted to add that in part this stems from a certain impulse in me actually to oppose “bardolatry.” For that reason, I was a little bit in conflict with myself when I wrote “a part of Shakespeare’s brilliance” in my proposal of the second interpretive idea. I do think that if we really want to get to the heart of these texts, then at a certain point we’ve got to kind of drop the idea of Shakespeare’s brilliance as something that renders his consciousness distant from ours not only in time and space but also in its nature (i.e. the idea that his thought is simply “beyond” ours because of his talent). At a certain point we should want not primarily to celebrate Shakespeare’s genius and instead to recall Shakespeare’s humanity. It’s sometimes said that a goal in science is to make the familiar unfamiliar, to see an object in a way that is new and facilitates deeper thought about that object. I think maybe we should do the opposite here: we should make what we’ve made unfamiliar familiar again in order to make deeper thought possible. If we assume that Shakespeare’s fallible, and that he’s pretty much like ourselves except in that he happens to be very talented and practiced at poetry, then we can get better in touch with Shakespeare as a-human-being-who-has-communicated-with-us-in-writing.

That’s why I like the question of whether it’s to be said that Shakespeare’s made a whole elephant for directors to touch different—but all practically preformed—parts of, as if the text were so broad just ontologically, or that, I dunno, Shakespeare’s conscious of and working with the intrinsic vagueness of his medium, in this case according to the particular demands of theatrical writing. How do we want to understand the manner in which a text seems to invite not slavish interpretation but creative reconstruction (i.e. the apparent truth that every reader of Hamlet has his or her own fundamentally unique Hamlet)? It gets us thinking about Shakespeare’s writing process, about his text as a way of entrance into his experience as one of us, and in that way lets us start to think of engaging Hamlet as in principle not terribly unlike just sitting down and having a beer with the ol’ bard.

Comment on Multiple Interpretations of Hamlet by Grant Dempsey

Grant Dempsey — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:46:15 +0000

I think another interesting question at least to mull over, if not to answer (because it’s probably unanswerable), is the extent to which the texts are designed to generate such a range of interpretations as they’ve generated. That is to say, to what extent do we want to think of it as true that Kenneth Branagh’s realization of the scene represents one possibility that Shakespeare pretty much had in mind while composing the scene in text, that Franco Zeffirelli’s represents another, that Laurence Olivier’s represents another, etc.? It’s kinda like the story of the blind men who all touch a different part of one elephant… Or do we want to say that there is no elephant already there, that Shakespeare’s text doesn’t somehow contain all of these interpretations as inherent potentialities but that a part of Shakespeare’s brilliance and technique is his self-conscious manipulation of the vagueness of the medium of text? That Shakespeare is able deliberately to construct texts so they can be read in ways that are cohesive and yet that even he can’t anticipate specifically?

Comment on On Turning Thirty-One by Jeffro

Jeffro — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 01:07:29 +0000

Have a great birthday, man! Best wishes as always! Have fun and be safe…

…but not too safe