There are so many roads to Oedipus and so many ways we could take out of it to what comes next. Here are a few older posts, or multiple versions of posts, that can take us in a few of those directions. On summarizing the play: what matters? Why? (With a hat tip to Freud […]
Read More →Category: Popular culture
Podcast – Isolation, Connection and everything in between
Hi everyone! We are making our last post of the semester to present our final podcast. We loved the idea of having a final project that involved us having conversations about the texts we read during the semester. We narrowed down on a theme, and tried to explore it (and a little bit extra) as […]
Read More →Misreading Freud’s misreading
In some recent iterations of this class, we encounter Oedipus not just through Sophocles’ play but even earlier, via Tony Sampson’s strong endorsement of some prominent critiques of Freud’s definition of the unconscious. (At stake in his book Virality is how we understand crowd behavior — how imitative behavior from fashion to fascism operates.) Sampson illustrates how […]
Read More →How (not) to write about contagion
(With intended nod to this piece, which came up in class yesterday.) Heather Schell, a Stanford University graduate student in the late 1990s who now teaches writing at George Washington University in DC, wrote what I think is my favorite critique of Preston’s Hot Zone only a few years after it was published. Her piece […]
Read More →Love for Life
From Yan Li, who took this course in the spring of 2015: As promised, here is the link to the full movie based on Dream of Ding Village. This movie is directed by Gu Changwei, one of the most famous “fifth generation directors” in China, and performed by many famous Chinese actors, such as Zhang Ziyi. You […]
Read More →ORPHÉE ET EURYDICE: Act III Duet
I’ve posted this in the past, but the version I used has been taken down. Here’s another version, though the subtitles are in Spanish instead of English. Perhaps you can piece it together if you’re not one of our resident hispanohablantes. Early in Part IV of Camus’s The Plague, Cottard and Tarrou head to the Municipal […]
Read More →Everyday is like Sunday
[Originally posted in Feb. 2015] I stumbled across this “pocket history” of the plague in London, 1348-1665, produced by the Museum of London, and the line “One eyewitness said that London became so quiet that every day was like a Sunday” made me think of Morrissey’s apocalyptic anthem from the start of my Cold War college years. Enjoy. […]
Read More →What is a Black Hole?
At the beginning of our last class, we tried to summarise what a black hole is and how it is formed. Much to the astronomers’ and physicists’ frustration, we could not fully comprehend the phenomenon of the black hole. It is necessary to understand how a black hole works and therefore, it is only right […]
Read More →The Summer they Executed the Rosenbergs
As a person who is relatively unfamiliar with American history, many of the references inAngels in America did not ring a bell and had to be looked up – except one particularly notorious reference that often shows up in literature: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs…The idea of being […]
Read More →Nothing unknown is knowable
Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’ is laden with examples of intertextuality, with references to either ‘The Wizard of Oz’ or ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ in “People come and go so quickly here…” (Act 1 Scene 6). Kushner also references Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, and the almost verbatim allusion in the following lines (Act […]
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