As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence. ― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Socrates uses this parable to explain to one of his pupils that things aren’t always as they seem. In the world we live in, it’s too easy to be unknowingly held captive. In 2021 we have smartphones and social media that we get locked into. My made-up social media platform, “The Cave,” has 400 million users and only one source of obtaining information, me. So if I posted on “The Cave that no American citizen will receive a legal, taxable paycheck from their employer due to violent protest and rioting in Dallas, TX, at least half of my users will believe me and half of that population will acton my false information. In that example, all 400 million people are in the cave watching my shadows pass against the wall. — Anthony
Illusions captivate. I see so many examples of people (myself included) accepting illusions as reality. I experience this tragedy as a black man in America, because the way my formal education was structured, I honestly believed my heritage and history began with slavery. This is the biggest lie I was ever told. This illusion has destroyed an entire race of people, because they were detached from their spirituality, language, and customs and re0engineered to become something else, and we still believe the illusion of us as subservient, subhuman, less-than, undeserving, second rate, less intelligent. Our self image was destroyed and replaced, and we are still battling to get out of the darkness of the cave. We just have to realize that our hands aren’t shackled…
The Black experience in America has been a mirror image of this Allegory of the Cave. I mean, seriously consider my position for a moment. If I control your cultural direction, religion, name, language, and even delete huge chunks of your heritage and history, don’t I have your neck shackled? Aren’t I projecting what I want you to see and believe? If I deny you the right to participate in democracy, if I disenfranchise you, under-educate, or miseducate you, hide inner workings of systems and structures (economic) from you, do I not shackle your legs in this way? This story reverberates in my soul in a way that is so vast I find myself unable to articulate and express every item I relate to Black Americans and how we are perpetually trapped. Even the liberated prisoner who wants to, or tries to liberate the captives is
Exiled (Elridge Cleaver, Asaata Shakur), Vilified (Anglea Davis), written off, killed (Malcolm X, MLK, Fred Hampton)…..
Sight is distorted, vision is blurred, blindness persists, truth is fake, reality is diluted, light creates fear and discomfort, darkness consumes. — Xavier
“It was a very pleasant sport to see,” the Elizabethan court official Robert Laneham wrote of a 1575 bear-baiting. “To see the bear, with his pink eyes, tearing after his enemies’ approach…with biting, with clawing, with roaring, with tossing and tumbling, he would work and wind himself from them. And when he was loose, to shake his ears twice or thrice with the blood and the slather hanging about his physiognomy.”
For the first Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles….
A play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue….
In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor. The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, London, 1765, p. 207.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, 1835
The story of Lear and his daughters was left by Shakespeare exactly as he found it in a fabulous tradition, with all the features characteristical of the simplicity of old times. But in that tradition there is not the slightest trace of the story of Gloster and his sons, which was derived by Shakespeare from another source. The incorporation of the two stories has been censured as destructive of the unity of action. But whatever contributes to the intrigue or the denouement must always possess unity. And with what ingenuity and skill are the two main parts of the composition dovetailed into one another! The pity felt by Gloster for the fate of Lear becomes the means which enables his son Edmund to effect his complete destruction, and affords the outcast Edgar an opportunity of being the saviour of his father. On the other hand, Edmund is active in the cause of Regan and Goneril; and the criminal passion which they both entertain for him induces them to execute justice on each other and on themselves. The laws of the drama have therefore been sufficiently complied with; but that is the least; it is the very combination which constitutes the sublime beauty of the work. The two cases resemble each other in the main: an infatuated father is blind towards his well-disposed child, and the unnatural children, whom he prefers, requite him by the ruin of all his happiness. But all the circumstances are so different, that these stories, while they each make a correspondent impression on the heart, form a complete contrast for the imagination. Were Lear alone to suffer from his daughters, the impression would be limited to the powerful compassion felt by us for his private misfortune. But two such unheard-of examples taking place at the same time have the appearance of a great commotion in the moral world: the picture becomes gigantic, and fills us with such alarm as we should entertain at the idea that the heavenly bodies might one day fall fro their appointed orbits. The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate, Penguin, 1997, p. 383.
Jonathan Dollimore, 2004
King Lear is, above all, a play about power, property, and inheritance. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Jonathan Dollimore, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1999, p. 190.
Read a draft all the way through before you begin to comment on it.
Point out the strengths of the draft.
When discussing areas that need improvement, be nice. Offer appropriate, constructive comments from a reader’s point of view.
Before giving your written comments to the author, reread your comments to make sure they are clear and make sense.
Be respectful and considerate of the writer’s feelings.
Use “I” statements.
Offer suggestions, not commands.
Raise questions from a reader’s point of view, points that may not have occurred to the writer.
Make sure comments are specific (not “This paper is confusing. It keeps saying the same things over and over again” but rather “It sounds like paragraph five makes the same point as paragraphs 2 and 3.”).
Avoid turning the writer’s paper into YOUR paper.
Complete the following sentences:
The author’s main point is…
I like…
I wonder…
I suggest…
Then, more specifically, complete these sentences:
The introduction makes the reader (curious/interested about the essay?) …
The essay cited sources (effectively, rarely, never?)…
The essay is organized (sufficiently? somewhat? in a logical order?) …
The essay’s details are (rich? evocative? insufficient?) …
The essay has a (strong, somewhat weak) ___________________ conclusion.
Here’s a clear and helpful guide on how to quote Shakespeare.
And here’s the same professor’s clear guide on quoting prose.
using MLA parenthetical citations. Also include a “Work Cited” reference, in which you correctly cite the article. Print your reflection and bring it to class on October 10.
French philosopher Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943), whom Albert Camus described as “the only great spirit of our times”
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity
Starting sentences with “but”:
There is a widespread belief—one with no historical or grammatical foundation—that it is an error to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and, but or so. In fact, a substantial percentage (often as many as 10 percent) of the sentences in first-rate writing begin with conjunctions. It has been so for centuries, and even the most conservative grammarians have followed this practice. (Chicago Manual of Style)
“Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with “but.” If that’s what you learned, unlearn it—there is no stronger word at the start. It announces total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is primed for the change.”
“I can’t overestimate how much easier it is for readers to process a sentence if you start with ‘but’ when you’re shifting direction.” (William Zinsser, On Writing Well)
Unnecessary phrase: The obvious effect of such a range of reference is to assure the audience of the author’s range of learning and intellect.
Correction: The wide-ranging references in this talk assure the audience that the author is intelligent and well-read.
Unnecessary phrase: It is a matter of the gravest possible importance to the health of anyone with a history of a problem with disease of the heart that he or she should avoid the sort of foods with a high percentage of saturated fats.
Correction: Anyone with a history of heart disease should avoid saturated fats.
The thing gets made, gets built, and you’re the slave who rolls the log beneath the block, then another, then pushes the block, then pulls a log from the rear back to the front again and then again it goes beneath the block, and so on. It’s how a thing gets made – not because you’re sensitive, or you get genetic-lucky, or God says: Here’s a nice family, seven children, let’s see: this one in charge of the village dunghill, these two die of buboes, this one Kierkegaard, this one a drooling
nincompoop, this one clerk, this one cooper. You need to love the thing you do – birdhouse building, painting tulips exclusively, whatever – and then you do it so consciously driven by your unconscious that the thing becomes a wedge that splits a stone and between the halves the wedge then grows, i.e., the thing is solid but with a soul, a life of its own. Inspiration, the donnée,
the gift, the bolt of fire down the arm that makes the art? Grow up! Give me, please, a break! You make the thing because you love the thing and you love the thing because someone else loved it enough to make you love it. And with that your heart like a tent peg pounded toward the earth’s core. And with that your heart on a beam burns through the ionosphere. And with that you go to work.