Ninth lecture for my students in English 140, UC Santa Barbara, Summer 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/su12/index.html

1. Lecture 9: “Houses rise and fall”
English 140
UC Santa Barbara
Summer 2012
20 August 2012
“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every
individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of
discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits
and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of
social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of
maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the
knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”
—Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language

2. St. Michael’s church, East Coker, England

3. A few words on Eliot’s critical method
“It is not a permanent necessity that poets should
be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject.
We can only say that it appears likely that poets in
our civilization, as it exists at present, must be
difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety
and complexity, and this variety and complexity,
playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce
various and complex results. The poet must
become more and more comprehensive, more
allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to
dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”
—“The Metaphysical Poets” (1921)

4. “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his
sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for
his work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate
experience, the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic,
irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads
Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do
with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the
smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these
experiences are always forming new wholes.
“We may express the difference by the following
theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the
successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed
a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of
experience. […] In the seventeenth century a dissociation
of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.”
—“The Metaphysical Poets”

5. “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel
between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is
pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.
[…] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a
shape and a significance to the immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. […] It is
a method for which the horoscope is auspicious.
Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be
comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have
concurred to make possible what was impossible even a
few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now
use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step
toward making the modern world possible for art […]. And
only those who have won their own discipline in secret and
without aid, in a world which offers very little assistance to
that end, can be of any use in furthering this advance.”
—“Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923)

6. “Tradition […] involves, in the first place, the
historical sense, which we may call nearly
indispensable to anyone who would continue to
be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the
historical sense involves a perception, not only
of the pastness of the past, but of its presence;
the historical sense compels a man to write not
merely with his own generation in his bones,
but with a feeling that the whole of the literature
of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of
the literature of his own country has a
simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order.”
—“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)

7. “The existing monuments form an ideal order among
themselves, which is modified by the introduction of
the new (the really new) work of art among them. The
existing order is complete before the new work arrives;
for order to persist after the supervention of novelty,
the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly,
altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of
each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and
this is conformity between the old and the new.
Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form
of European, of English literature, will not find it
preposterous that the past should be altered by the
present as much as the present is directed by the
past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware
of great difficulties and responsibilities.”
—“Tradition and the Individual Talent”

8. Immanence Transcendence
● The temporal world ● The Logos (λόγος)
● Becoming ● Being
● Motion ● Stillness
● Knowledge ● Wisdom

9. Media credits
● The photo of Eliot’s final resting place may be
under copyright – it is used for teaching
purposes and is a low-resolution reproduction
of an existing plaque, not suitable for making
quality prints from the photo.
Original source:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/findagrave/photos/20
01/222/eliotts2.jpg