Antiquitopia

According to the NYTimes , the Dude abides in academe: December 30, 2009 BOOKS Dissertations on His Dudeness By DWIGHT GARNER Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 movie, “The Big Lebowski,” which stars Jeff Bridges as a beatific, pot-smoking, bowling-obsessed slacker known as the Dude, snuck up on the English-speaking world during the ’00s: it became, stealthily, the decade’s most venerated cult film. It’s got that elusive and addictive quality that a great midnight movie has to have: it blissfully widens and expands in your mind upon repeat viewings. “The Big Lebowski” has spawned its own shaggy, fervid world: drinking games, Halloween costumes, bumper stickers (“This aggression will not stand, man”) and a drunken annual festival that took root in Louisville, Ky., and has spread to other cities. The movie is also the subject of an expanding shelf of books, including “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers” and the forthcoming “The Tao of the Dude.” Where cult films go, acade...

Death mingles and confuses itself with our life throughout. Decay anticipates its time, and even insinuates itself into the course of our growth. (Michel de Montaigne, "On Experience," Essays 3.13; trans. J.M. Cohen) There are perhaps two major themes I have seen arise in most of the works of literature that we have studied this year in my Literature Humanities class. The first is the power, duplicity, and ambiguities of language; the other, death. From the Epic of Gilgamesh , the Iliad , etc., to Montaigne's Essays , Death interweaves itself, or, in Montaigne's terms, insinuates itself throughout my entire fall and spring syllabus, whether in the attempt to overcome it through undying glory ( Iliad ), establishing great works ( Epic of Gilgamesh ; Aeneid ), gaining or failing to gain immortality ( Gilgamesh ; Genesis), or seeking a beatific afterlife ( Divine Comedy ) or, here, through the complacent acceptance of its inevitability. In this more mature vision of ...

I'm still reading, when I can, some essays by Umberto Eco, and here's a passage that caught my eye in his essay, "Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading" in his collection, On Literature . Intertextual irony provides an intertextual second sense for readers who have been secularized and who no longer have any spiritual senses to look for in the text. The biblical and poetic second senses stemming from the theory of the four meanings allowed the text to flower vertically, each sense allowing us to approach ever closer to some Afterlife. The intertextual second sense is horizontal, labyrinthine, convoluted, and infinite, running from text to text--with no other promise than the continual murmuring of intertextuality. Intertextual irony presupposes an absolute immanentism. It provides revelations to theose who have lost the sense of transcendence. The four meanings, by the way, refers to the medieval strategies of reading the bible: literal, moral, allegorical, and ana...

Ok...I love Umberto Eco. He has fantastic verve in his verbage. He can present some extraordinarily complex ideas in beautiful language that is, at the same time, succinct. He has this to say about some rather loquacious critics: ...those who are so orgasmic in words are in fact very unlibertine in reality, and abhor alterity, since in every one of their critical embraces they are simply making love to themselves. ("On Style" in On Literature , 173). I'll remember that one, Umberto, when reviews of my work start rolling in! ;)

I was just reading an essay by Umberto Eco entitled, "Wilde: Paradox and Aphorism," and I stumbled across one of my favorite bons mots by Oscar Wilde: "When people agree with me I always feel that I must be in the wrong." Here are some others for fun: "Every great man has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography." "I can resist everything but temptation." "Falsehoods [are] the truth of other people." "The only duty we owe to History is to rewrite it." "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." These are also amusing because they reverse common sense: "Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about." "Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess." "Anyone can make history. Only a great man can write it." "The English have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language." Being a histor...

So, I have been continuing to read Umberto Eco's On Literature, and he has a nice, very short, essay on Dante Alighieri's Paradiso , called "A Reading of the Paridiso ." He argues that it has been misread and underestimated, in fact devalued, in the nineteenth century and this devaluation continued throughout the twentieth, with the Inferno and, to some extent, the Purgatorio gaining the most attention. In contrast, Eco argues that the Paradiso is the finest of all three canticas. He primarily sets it in the context of the medieval preference for bold, bright color to express themselves in daily life, refined by Dante in the Paradiso . But, what caught my attention is the Paradiso as amazingly modern, and, in fact, futuristic: "Dante's Paradiso is the apotheosis of the virtual world, of nonmaterial things, of pure software, without the weight of earthly or infernal hardware, whose traces remain in the Purgatorio. The Paradiso is more than modern; it can ...

I started reading Umberto Eco's On Literature today, and found some interesting snippets in his opening essay entitled, "On Some Functions of Literature." He discusses many issues, such as the formative influence of literature on language (like Dante's on Italian, Luther's on German, Homer's on Greek, etc.). The combination of different literatures and languages, in turn, shapes individual and communal identities. He discusses freedom and fidelity of interpretation. He has this to say about the relationship between the text and interpreter: "The world of literature is a universe in which it is possible to establish whether a reader has a sense of reality or is the victim of his own hallucinations." He also discusses how certain things are established in literature and cannot be changed because they have entered collective knowledge or can be directly looked up (like the identity of Superman as Clark Kent--Eco loves this example, interestingly en...