Category: Video

Reconstructing reality

My apologies for the late augmenter post. Hope you enjoy it. The authors of the convener post on Pushkin’s A Feast During the Plague presented us with very interesting questions. They first explain how there’s “a variety of responses to the plague…displayed in [the] play.” And they note that there’s a spread of “emotional responses […]

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Can you see my ghosts?

Richard Eyre was the director of Ibsen’s Ghosts at the BAM Harvey Theater in 2015. In this interview he is asked “Why do people have to write plays which are so sad?”  He answers that “that is what art is about… perceiving pieces of the world that can’t be put together in any other way.” He is touching […]

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Camus the Existentialist

The fact that Camus was a real deal existentialist may shed light on Dr. Rieux’s deattached, abstracted manner of narrating the devastating nature of plague. Careful! The guy in the video isn’t Camus! But he could perfectly be. Enjoy. https://www.youtube.com/embed/qzGEend32LM

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Chaos Syndrome: A Systemic Reason for Madness?

The following is an excerpt from an article written by Jonathan Rauch for the Atlantic about a political ‘disease’ in America that he has dubbed the ‘chaos syndrome’. It reminded me of the chaos prevalent in Pushkin’s play that the conveners’ discussed earlier and that time we talked about the similarities between a demagogue like […]

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A Feast: Remixed, Recreated, and Reimagined

“The “little tragedies” contain a number of scenes that are so intensely dramatic that they demand to be seen and heard, rather than merely read” (Anderson, 6). From our reading aloud of Pushkin’s A Feast During the Plague it became clear that the play is chock-full of emotion, ranging from love to guilt to horror. […]

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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. […]

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