Saturday, February 23, 2008
Madame Roland:
P. 314 – Brings Dacier’s Plutarch to church instead of the bible
P. 323/4 quoted from the Memoirs – “To suspect that there are two sorts of reason; one for the closet, another for the world; a morality of principle, and a morality of practice; from the contradiction of which resulted many absurdities which did [...]
Friday, February 22, 2008
From her Memoirs “composed at an advanced period of her life”:
“My resolutions are suddenly taken and firmly kept. I feel so much indifference for some things in the world, so much contempt for others, and entertain so good an opinion of myself, that I would choose rather to pass the remainder of my life in [...]
Thursday, February 14, 2008
From The Rights of Woman
Like Roland MW says, “public spirit must be nurtured by private virtue…a sentiment that often exists unsupported by virtue, unsupported by that blind morality which makes the habitual breach of one duty a breach of the whole moral law.”
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
re: But why are there no actual learned ladies in JA?
this is something I have been thinking a lot about today and it is something definitely in need of address…
MH includes women both without text and without story. she will have a small paragraph simply listing the many languages a women spoke or how well [...]
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
to suspect that there are two sorts of reason; one for the closet, another for the world; a morality of principle, and a morality of practise; from the contradiction of which resulted many absurdities which did not escape my observation. In short, it appeared to me, that persons of the gay world call everone insane [...]
I’m through Persuasion, Sense, Pride, and Emma.
So far I think Austen’s take on Learned women is more complex than having an explicitly learned character — especially in Persuasion where I think she plays with the idea of what constitutes learning/education/knowledge/genres.
In Pride, Sense, and Emma, education, especially in the form of reading — being well read, [...]
the beginning of the category of history — the meeting of Odysseus and the bard Demodocus. D. tells the the story of the fall of Troy for O. who is a guest of the Pheaecians. the singing bards tell the history as it has been witnessed by the Muses. they are [...]
i think i am really circulating around some interesting issues about history, time, story telling, philosophies of theologies and histories. Penelope is in the middle of it all!
I am reading about the bard Demodocus (the one who retold the story of the Trojan war to Odysseus). He is blind but has recounted things [...]
but another thing to remember is that when Homer may or may not have written down the stories, Penelope was already a figment of cultural imagination. the Odyssey was already very much a myth by the time it became a text. add another 2800 hundred years of transmutation and you have what we are reading [...]
as far as the origins of the text, there is so much debate that my head is spinning. scholars have been working on homer for centuries and work being done on him from as far back as the 18th century (and really even further to maybe the 6th!) still informs what contemporaries argue now.
so far [...]