aglarien-Literature (EN) @[email protected]

Willam Blake died at the age of 70. It is said that on the day of his death, he was fervently working on some illustrations of the divine comedy and he said to his wife, "Stay! Keep as you are! You have ever been an angel to me: I will draw you!"
Several hours later, he passed away.

I strongly suggest everyone who has some interest in English literature or Western culture to read the Bibles, preferably from a literary perspective. I also recommend using a small amount of commentary works to company your reading. After all, there's a large chance that you'll discover that the Bibles are not what you think. You would have assumed that they're all boring allegorical stories or strained apologies written by theorists, only if you don't read the Bibles on your own.
They are first-class fantasy novels with a small dose of history. They are beautiful. They have been inspiring generations of artists and authors over the last three thousand years.

I'm taking four courses this month. Shakespeare Studies,Biblical Literature, Close Reading, Poetry. And I'm also reading Romantic literature and fantasy literature in my spare time. So generally my posts in May and June will focus on Shakespeare, the Hebrew Bible, Romantic Poetry and their intertextuality pertaining to the contemporary fantasy novels.
From mid-June to August, my eyes will shift to Homer's Odyssey and it's afterlife in contemporary culture.
That's my plan. Let's see how it goes.

#Realconversation
My classmate: I'm wondering if the past authors would know that their works might become "literature" taught at schools one day.
Professor: I read too much William Blake to answer this question.

Professor at tonight's seminar: repetition is a good thing in literature as well as in discussion.

The early English fiction mostly tried to teach the readers as well as to entertain them. Jane Austen, (if we dared to guess her great mind,) was believed to do this teaching enormously.
Women in her era could not get in the university, and would be lucky if received any schooling at all. It's all upon the parents' whim really. Therefore, Austen tried to teach her (female) middle-class readers in her novels, to encourage them to learn something from those novels and even to read them critically.

Why did Shakespeare write so many characters in parallel to those in the story of David? Partly because Shakespeare's patron King James was obsessed over King David...

When I'm using this very English language I'm like a bull in the china shop—though I'm Chinese！

Everytime I went to some English literature seminar I realized sharply how awful my oral English is. Worse than those German/French non-native speakers; worse than those Vietnam/Indian non-native speakers. It's almost distressing. But I do hope I can improve my oral English by participating these seminars, because I rarely can find the urge to open up my mouth to speak if were not discussing literature. I'm such an introverted nerd there's no way out.

Earlier today my friend and I chatted about a new film called Power of the Dog, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. She said this film title was drawn from a scene in which the protagonist read from the Bible, "...deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog. "
I went and checked this line. I found that it was Psalm 22, a prayer declared to be penned by King David.
King David you are everywhere in my life.
Though it's very likely that this particular Psalm was written centuries later, by monks in 16th or 17th century and attributed to King David.

I re-drafted some of my posts for readability's sake.

Contemporary audiences and readers may find these two scenes less alike because the witchess seem very alive and vile creatures while Samuel the prophet and priest of the God was summoned from death as a soul.
However, we must bear in mind that in the Early Modern performance practices Three Witches were supposed to appear from the trap door on the floor. They were legitimately souls/demons from Hell. Samuel, though a saintly figure in his life, could only mean foul and evil when summoned as a soul, because the prominent traditional Hebrew idea of life afterdeath is to linger endlessly as pale souls in the Hell and not to be summoned by any means. Saul's employment of necromancy surely would evoke anger from God.
Therefore, Three Witches lead Macbeth into his doom, and Samuel prophesied that Saul should die tomorrow if only to deprive Saul of any hope that left.

(the idea that these two scenes are comparable is indebted to Robert Alter)

I suppose those theatre-scholars in general still does not trust these websites enough...
Theatre-scholars lack a tradition of assessing the acceptance of "ordinary" audience of the play. Only in the last decade did the academies of theatre studies start to practice a certain dose of quanti-qualitative research. Some people believe that this tardiness of taking on new methods must arise from the fact the present researches imposed on the general audience are inclined to extract some partial information, emphasizing the aspects in the experience of the general audience that can support scholars' original assertions so papers of these researches are not neccesarily more "justified" than the traditional lengthy experience reports of some professional critics. Theatre experience is a organic entity, after all.
That is an interesting topic, I wonder how the video game scholars would do in the similar situation. I suppose scholars of most genres of contemporary arts must have similar problems with regard to their research method.

1. ShakespearesWords, this free-to-use website is a convenient research engine where you may look up certain words or phrases in ALL Shakespeare's works with the context. e.g. I can search for all the "dream" mentioned in Hamlet or in Macbeth or in all the other Shakespeare's works with one click.
2. JSTOR and its understanding Shakespeare series. JSTOR is a large database with all these essays. If you were a student, you could access JSTOR via your uni's account, and if were not (just like me), go Taobao and buy one account! That's 68 China Yuan for an account that you could use for a life time the last time I checked, including an enormously amount of other academic resources.
The "Understanding" feature is a search tool where you can look up essays relevant to some certain lines in the playtext. For example, if I would like to know more cultural and theatrical traditions behind Beatrice's line "...eat his heart in the marketplace." , I could look up all the essays in the database that were quoting or talking about this single line by using this JSTOR's feature.

Not that I can understand Empson fully, quite the contrary, sometimes I do hate him for his laconic way of deciphering texts, his strong assertion, and his self-contained theory over all poetry. All these things above combined make his work even more difficult to be critized. I mean, sometimes when I read his analysis, my CPU is preoccupied 100% with the task of attempting to understand him, leaving no room for reading it critically.

When I read William Empson's commentary, seldom am I able to distinguish the joy I have from discerning the literary texts from the ecstasy I have from reading such an elegantly written scholarly piece. As people said, reading works of New Criticism (and those of its descendants), this behavior itself can be indulgent.