Modernism and Postmodernism in Art

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am By Peter Leithart

The Modernday Dictionary of Deceived Ideas offers this definition of postmodernism “This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible.” Mike Featherstone, who quotes this dictionary, offers a more serious discussion of what postmodernism means when applied to artistic movemements. He gives this summary of the sensibility of modernism: “The basic features of modernism [ie, the high modernism of Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Stravinsky] can be summarized as: an aesthetic of self-consciousness and reflexiveness; a rejection of narrative structure... Read more

Proverbs 13:1-6

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

INTRODUCTION Waltke proposes the following structure for chapter 13. 13:1 is an introductory verse that picks up on the exhortations of the prologue to listen to the father’s instruction. There is a multiple inclusion around the chapter. The “discipline” of v. 1 is taken up in v. 24, and the terms “eat” and “soul” (nephesh, translated as “desire” or “appetite”) are found in both verses 2 and 25. (13:25a reads, more literally than the NASB, “the righteous eats to the... Read more

Hamlet, 3.4

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

This scene, like the scene that opens Act 3, shows Hamlet encountering a woman who in his mind has betrayed him. Again, he has been sent for, and probably suspects that it is another setup like the one with Ophelia. He has just come from the play, ready to drink hot blood and to kill, and he is given his opportunity. This is the first time that Hamlet and Gertrude have been alone together in the play, and in fact... Read more

Pierre and Hamlet

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

FO Matthiessen described Melville’s Pierre as “an American Hamlet,” a novel that attempts to “translate” Shakespeare into 19th-century American life. In part, this is a matter of Melville matching characters and plots: “Lucy’s pale innocence fails Pierre as Ophelia’s did Hamlet; the well-named Reverend Mr. Falsgrave’s cushioned voice of worldly policy is not unlike the platitudinizing of Polonius; Charlie Millthorpe plays a kind of Horatio; Glen Stanly confront’s Pierre’s seemingly mad violence with the decisiveness of Laertes. But the crucial... Read more

Metaphysics of presence

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am By Peter Leithart

Derrida, famously, challenges what he calls the metaphysics of presence. What is challenging is not the reality of presence as such, but the notion that we can arrive at some pure presence of a thing, a moment, a self that is unmixed with anything other than itself. A pure instant of time that is not filled with past and future; a pure ego that is not a product of training, a pure substance uncontaminated by accidents. (more…) Read more

How Deconstruction Works

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:44 pm By Peter Leithart

Culler offers an example from Nietzsche that provides an excellent example of the ju-jitsu of deconstruction. Nietzsche argues that causality is not something given, but is the product of a rhetorical operation, a chronological reversal ( chronologische Umdrehung ). I feel a pain, and go searching for a cause of the pain; behold, there’s a pin sticking in the spot where I feel pain, and I conceive a link and invert my actual experience: “The fragment of the outside world... Read more

New Criticism and theory

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:09 am By Peter Leithart

At the beginning of his book on Deconstruction , Jonathan Culler notes that critical theory, seen “as an attempt to establish the validity or invalidity of particular interpretive procedures,” is profoundly indebted to New Criticism: This movement “not only instilled the assumption that the purpose of literary study is the interpretation of literary works but also implied by its most memorable theoretical project – the effort to define and combat the intentional fallacy – that literary theory is the attempt... Read more

Thoughts on Beowulf

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:51 pm By Peter Leithart

All page numbers are from the Heany translation. The central focus of the first two fights is Heorot, the mead-hall of Hrothgar. The mead-hall is the focus of a complex of imagery. (The last fight has a similar origin, as Beowulf’s hall is destroyed by the dragon. The house is a place where his warriors can celebrate and feast. As in the Odyssey and Macbeth, the feast is a microcosm of an ideal society, displaying on a small scale what... Read more

Christianization of Germanic Lit

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:49 pm By Peter Leithart

Beowulf reflects the tensions between the Christian culture spreading throughout Northern Europe and the pagan cultures into which it came into conflict. The poem has its place within this clash of civilizations in the first 500 years AD. It is a product of the history of missions. The Germanic presence in Northern Europe posed a significant challenge to Christian missionaries, writers, and poets, and this challenge had several dimensions to this challenge, which are well described by Peter Brown at... Read more

Still more on Hamlet

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

SERPENT KING Among other things, Hamlet is a dramatic reflection on philosophical anthropology: What is a man? and What are the conditions of human experience and existence? This is related to the theme we explored a few weeks ago under the heading of “action”: What are the rules and guidelines for human action? The two are related because the answer to the first – what sort of being is man? – will provide some insight into the second – how... Read more