SUMMER ART EXPERIENCE Monday 9 - Friday 13 January 2012

David Hume

Description

Summer Art Experience 2012 ARTISTS SOCIETY OF CANBERRA SUMMER ART EXPERIENCE Monday 9 – Friday 13 January 2012

• vibrant paintings with bold colour
• watercolour bold
• artists society
• a.g.r.a.
• landscape painting
• painting techniques
• colour
• landscape

Sujets

• Cooper
• Publishing
• Parsons
• Canberra
• Temple
• Griffen
• Diefenbach

Informations

• Publié par: dubon
• Nombre de lectures: 16
• Langue: English

Extrait

(Revised 8 December 2011)

Winter Term 2011

Department of English and Cultural Studies
McMaster University

English and Cultural Studies 3Q0
Cultural Studies and Critical Theory 3Q03

History of Critical Theory:
Representation, Education, and the Question of the Just Community

Instructor: Dr. David L. Clark
T.A.: Mr. Tyler Pollard

Study Questions and Course Blog



2

(Matthew Paris, 1200-1259 AD)




Photographs: Sir Philip Sidney, Plato and Aristotle
Plato instructing Socrates to write [That’s weird.]; John Locke
Friedrich Schiller

How to Use the Study Questions and Course Blog Document

The purpose of this document is to help you understand and consolidate some of the key elements
of this course. This document is not a summary of the lectures and is not designed to replace your
careful reading of the course material or the notes that you are taking in class. It is rather a series
of questions designed to help you connect your understanding of the assigned reading materials to
those notes. The document also includes sections--blogs--where I return to points that I made in
class, reiterating those points to assist you in keeping on track in the course.

After each lecture, my suggestion is return to the assigned reading materials and to your lecture
notes, and ensure that you are able to answer the study questions listed here. If not, take the time
to track down the answers to these questions by going back to the assigned texts. The objective is
fourfold: 3

1) To confirm that you are consistently able to anchor the large concerns of each theorist
in specific details, arguments, and illustrations in their work;
2) To help you to learn how take better notes, i.e., notes that are robust enough to yield
strong answers to the questions that are posed here.
3) To help you better knit together the lectures, the assigned readings, and your
understanding of the assigned readings.
4) To help you move from thinking of the course material in terms of broad
generalizations to addressing the course material in much more specific ways, i.e.,
rooted in the specific details, arguments, illustrations, and questions that quicken the
assigned readings. The midterm and the final examination will call upon you to discuss
the course materials at just such a level of detail.

I have complete confidence that you can do this….if you put your back into it! These Study
Questions and Blog entries are best used as the course unfolds, i.e., to ensure that you have the best
possible grasp of the materials and questions and problems at hand. In other words, the Study
Questions and Blog entries are best used while the lectures and the readings are freshest in your
mind. Therefore, I strongly encourage you not to leave wrestling with this document until just
prior to the midterm or just prior to the final examination.

Hint: experience with this course suggests that forming purposeful and focussed Study Groups
designed to address the Study Questions and Course Blog can be very useful to students. What
about creating a Facebook page for the course?

This document is dynamic, i.e., all sections—not just the last section--are updated and revised as
the course unfolds. Check the “Revised” date in bold at the top left hand corner of this document
to confirm that you are reading the latest version.

Plato

Cite and explain at least six different ways in which Plato evokes the question of justice in the
Republic. Point to particular arguments that he makes.

How and why does Socrates distinguish between speech and writing in the Phaedrus? How
exactly does Socrates’ argument about the differences between speech and writing end up
qualifying and compromising itself? Why does this glitch happen? What is its significance?

Point to particular examples of loss and mourning in the Republic. What are Socrates’ concerns
about these scenes? Connect these scenes to the Republic as a whole, which commemorates the
life and teachings of his mentor, Socrates.

Why does Plato situate the fictional discussion with Socrates at the heart of the Republic back in
time, indeed, to the time of Plato’s childhood?

What are the virtues most prized by Socrates in the Republic? What does these virtues tell us
about how Plato views the world? What does he value and what does he value much less?

Socrates criticizes artistic mimesis for being two removes from the “real” world. Referring to the 4
particular arguments he makes in the Republic, explain the basis for his criticism. Why two
removes? What is one remove from the “real” world?

Locate the following passages and explain what Plato means in them, beginning by situating them
in his argument, and then connecting them to the Republic’s larger concerns:

…faith in reasoning (75)

And when rationality does make its appearance, won’t the person who has been brought up
in this way recognize it because of its familiarity, and be particularly delighted with it? (92)

Even that might help them to care more about the city and one another. (108)

We shouldn’t be lead by success, money, power—or even poetry—into neglecting justice,
or virtue in general. (330)

In this way, they will be kept safe, and they will keep the city safe. (110)

Then we must select from the guardians the kind of men who on examination strike us most
strongly, their whole lives through, as being utterly determined to do what is in the city’s interests,
and as refusing to act in any way against its interests. (105)

There’s not the remotest chance of becoming properly educated—either for ourselves or
for the people we way we must educate to be our guardians—until we recognize the sort of thing
self-discipline is. Likewise courage, liberality and generosity of spirit…. (93)

When things go wrong, and he faces death and wounds, or encounters some other danger,
in all these situations he holds out to the end in a disciplined and steadfast manner. Plus another
mode for someone engaged in some peaceful, voluntary, freely chosen activity. He might be trying
to persuade someone of something, making some request—praying to a god, or giving instructions
or advice to a man…He might be listening patiently to someone else making a request, or
explaining something to him, or trying to get him to change his mind, and on that basis acting as
he thinks best—without arrogance, acting prudently and calmly in all situations… (89)

And…then we must do what lovers do when they have fallen in love with someone and
decided their love is not a good thing. (32

There is a long-standing antagonism between poetry and philosophy. The “howling dog”
which “yelps against its master,” “great in the empty eloquence of fools,” “the mob of wise men
who have mastered Zeus,” “how subtle thinkers are but beggars yet,” and countless other
passages, are evidence of their long-standing opposition. (329)

Because we shall say, I imagine, that writers of poetry and prose both make very serious
errors about mankind. They say that…injustice pays if you can get away with it, whereas justice is
what is good for someone else, but damaging to yourself.

…enemy of rational argument (104)
5
Where does Socrates speak of betraying our truest selves?

What is a “Form” in the Republic?

Like each of the texts on this course, Plato is unwilling to discuss conceptual problems (the nature
of knowledge, mimesis, love, etc.) without connecting these problems to moral and ethical
concerns. Education—teaching and learning—is the setting in which he makes these connections.
Explain.

Aristotle

Notice the painting above showing Plato and Aristotle standing side by side. Plato points upwards,
whereas Aristotle, book in hand, gestures to the world. Why? How are their respective
understandings of mimesis captured by this difference in the painting?

Aristotle pins part—but a central part—of the effectiveness of tragedy on hamartia, or
mistake/error. Why is it important for the central character of a tragedy to make a mistake and to
be capable of making a mistake? Later Christians will translate the Greek term as sin, but this
translation obscures the meaning of the original in profound ways and gives emphasis to moral
features of a character that Aristotle does not. Plot means so much more to him than character.
(Why? What exactly is plot in the Poetics?) Heroes who make mistakes in Greek tragedy are not
considered to have suffered a moral flaw of the sort that, for example, we sometimes see in the
villains of Shakespeare’s plays. But the consequences of a mistake in Greek tragedy are often
enormous. Audiences are expected to feel pity and fear because these consequences are so
undeserved. Point to the particular passages in the Poetics where Aristotle makes this point.

Rehearse with Aristotle the various ways in which plots may work in tragedy, and explain how and
why some are so much