Borges' "Shakespeare's Memory", & criticism

"Quien adquiere una enciclopedia no adquiere cada línea, cada párrafo, cada página y cada grabado; adquiere la mera posibilidad de conocer alguna de esas cosas. Si ello acontece con un ente concreto y relativamente sencillo, dado el orden alfabético de las partes, ¿qué no acontecerá con un ente abstracto y variable, ondoyant et divers, como la mágica memoria de un muerto?" (Borges, 1998). Found something cool Borges' "Shakespeare's Memory" is a fantastic short story I happened to stumble across this morning. Interested, I began to research literary criticism on it major themes after devouring the text itself. Though it does not appear to deal thematically with Shakespeare himself, its connection to Shakespeare and the themes that it does...

Posted by Erik on 1:53 PM · Comments (3) · Full article

"Nothing can be made out of nothing"

OSWALD:  What dost thou know me for?KENT:  A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats;a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave ... EDMUND: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behavior,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars:  as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion ... KING LEAR:                         It may be so, my lord.Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intendTo make this creature fruitful!Into her womb convey sterility! While reading the...

Posted by Erik on 9:48 PM · Comments (0) · Full article

Shakespeare Project

Just some simple project ruminations... At first, I got to thinking that Spanish Translation had to take a part no matter what in the final project that I am going to do with Shakespeare. I still think that I am going to continue this work, but I have been captivated by the idea of the Shakespeare Art Gallery and would love for that to take its place. Mason and Cassandra and I have been chatting about how this will work, and it sounds like a blast; we are about to start working on the ideas to 'finalize' it. My initial ideas: I would love to try to experiment in Mixed media, and also do some piano composition. I am not extremely well-practiced in art at all, and making anything at all would take a lot of time; that would certainly make it worth it. I am anxious to see what others are thinking...

Posted by Erik on 10:33 AM · Comments (2) · Full article

Formalism, take one

King of France, “proposal” to Cordelia: (King Lear, Act 1) °Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, •being poor;                 __          / u u / u u u u / u / Most °choice, •forsaken; and most °loved, •despised!          __            u / u / u / u / u /**    Thee and thy °virtues here I seize upon:                               __              …Be it lawful I take up what’s...

Posted by Erik on 9:40 AM · Comments (0) · Full article

Self-Assessment

A. Learning Outcomes: 1. How have I gained Shakespeare Literacy? Honest confession: when I started to read our first play together, Hamlet, I had to spend significant amounts of time in order to be able to understand simply what was going on. I started from scratch, not knowing what was going to happen, and trying to pick it all out. Since then, I have developed literacy in two ways: (1) utilize better tactics to understand Shakespeare: for the rest of the plays now, I use sites to get a background knowledge on the plot, and I understand the importance of using video renditions (see here too) and the plays themselves to get a better context and comparative analysis. The more times I have repeated this process (with The Winters Tale, Richard II, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Tempest). Doing...

Posted by Erik on 1:19 PM · Comments (0) · Full article