Monday, September 28, 2009

Definitely not a Nashville Party

"When, in The Spectator No. 411, Joseph Addison situates the "pleasures of the imagination" between "sense" and "understanding," he puts a broadly literary category in the place of two similarly-structure assertions of "the human": Philip Sidney's location of "humanism" between the bestial and the divine, and Thomas Reid's identification of society (or of what we called "culture") between "the brutes and devils below, and the celestial orders above." What are the implications, practical and/or theoretical, of Addison's critical gesture? How does his project compare with Sidney's and Reid's with respect either to literature or the category of "the human"? Does it (or does it not) significantly resonate with or differ from Plato's or Aristotle's ideas concerning literature?"

So...is mfhd still an option?

2 comments:

  1. favorite thing that plato says about literature: it's in the republic. he says poets can't be citizens because they don't create anything useful.

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  2. I'm calling you out on your Miley Cyrus reference, but in doing so I reveal the fact that I recognize the lyrics to a Miley Cyrus song.

    I may also know that the next line is "cause all I'm seein' are stilettos. I guess I never got the memo."

    Oh yeah and Aristotle and Plato and stuff. I know that stuff too... ahem.

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