British Affairs/Dr. Prof. Young Suck Rhee
강의노트 모음Lecture 1 Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge
The course helps students deepen the understanding of literature as well as the aspects of English society as manifested in literary and art works by studying particular literary or art pieces of some important writers and artists of the UK and Ireland. Social and cultural aspects as in a play: Synge’s Riders to the Sea and two essays on it. Society in fiction and nonfiction: Pictures from Italy (a travel essay) by a great English novelist, Charles Dickens. Life and art as reflected in poems: Shakespeare’s long poem, Venus and the Adonis, and his perfect poem, “Phoenix and the Turtle”; Yeats’s poems, “The Muncipal Gallery Revisited,” “Long-legged Fly,” “Under Ben Bulben,” “Lapis Lazuli”
by Yeats. Society, art, and artists: in critiques, such as “Constable,” “Twombly” I and II, by David Sylvester.
Today we are going to give you an introduction to J.M. Synge and begin reading a play by him, Riders to the Sea, which is one of his early plays. Synge scholars agree that it is one of his best plays, even though it is one of his earliest works. Today we will read half of this play and discuss what is happening in the play, and what makes this play a good play.
Lecture 2 Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge
We keep reading this play today. This is a one-act play, but when you read it, you could feel that this is not so simple a play. What makes us think that it is a complex play? First of all, the playwright Synge in this play is a keen observer of nature, that is, the Aran Islands, the people in them, plants and animals, the geography, the air and the sea around it. Second, Synge is very sensitive to the language, the Gaelic spoken by the islanders. He uses the dialect in the play very effectively and beautifully. Let’s hear the people in the play speak.
Lecture 3
This afternoon we are going to read an essay, “Reading the Poetics of J.M.
Synge: Nature and Poetry in The Aran Islands and Riders to the Sea.” I did the essay and published in 2013 after I had visited Inishmore and Inishman: the second island is where Synge had gone and lived for several times. The Aran
And the play Riders to the Sea is what the islands stand for, the essence of the islands’ life being there in the play: the theme of man versus nature, and man adapting to and living with nature. Let’s read the essay and have some discussion on the islands and the play.
Lecture 4
Let’s read another essay, “The Aran Islands and the Travel Essays,” by Elaine Sisson, which is an excellent criticism on Synge’s book The Aran Islands. Synge said this, talking about living in nature:
One wonders in these places why anybody is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent air, which is like wine in one’s teeth. [J.M. Synge, “In West Kerry,” The Shanachie, 1907]
Elaine Sisson concludes by saying:
What the travel essays and The Aran Islands illustrate is not only Synge’s ability to read the Irish landscape, captured in language, but his acceptance of mortality, beauty, fragility, death and the cyclical nature of life. (62)
Lecture 5
Charles Dickens is generally considered the greatest English novelist. But it is hardly known that he is a great non-fiction writer. His travelogue is very entertaining and interesting. Over time things change, and the America and the Italy he had seen must be very different from today’s America and Italy. The book is American Notes and Pictures from Italy, which is a combination of two travelogues. We are going to read two essays, “To Rome by Pisa and Siena” and
“Rome.” It is interesting that we can see Dickens the novelist in these two travel essays: we can discern the Dickens’ style we see in his novels, and at the same time we can see what Dickens as thinker as well as an individual is. We find what he likes and dislikes, which reals what we don’t find in his novels.
Lecture 6
We go to another essay, “Rome”: it is interesting that somewhere in the essay he spends a lot of time describing the execution of a man in the street. Maybe it is because he is a novelist. He is very good at describing it in full detail, without losing anything. It is like a moving picture of the execution. Maybe he may have wanted to use it while writing a novel. Let’s begin reading it.
Lecture 7
When you read a poem, you instantly feel it is beautiful, sad, lovely, exciting, moving, and so on. But when you find it puzzling, is it still a poem? A poem comes as a surprise sometimes, in a different way than what we used to think of it as. William Shakespeare’s “Phoenix and the Turtle” is such a poem. I’ve come to like this poem, because it does not open itself easily. Every time you read it, it feels different and it gets deeper and stranger than before. That’s why I like this poem. Some call it nonsensical; some think it is a pure poem. I belong to the latter.
Lecture 8
Shakespeare is regarded as a playwright. He also seems to have thought so. But in his heart he has always wished that he would be called a poet. Finally the chance came for him to become a poet: the plague has spread throughout England, and the theaters has had to be closed. He has begun to write poems, the long poems, including “Venus and Adonis.” Today we are going to read this poem.
It is a long poem, so we will read it in two meetings, today and the day after tomorrow. The poem is a narrative poem: that is, it has a story. But it is just too simple a story: a girl loves a boy, and the boy loves hunting, without paying attention to her. But looking into the poem closely, there is a trick in it: love between Goddess and shepherd, love between an older woman and a young boy;
the language in it is very light, as light as the light and sunshine, full of punning and witticism. Though it is a poem, Shakespeare the playwright makes efforts to please the readers and maybe himself playing with language and the idea of love-making.
Let’s read the long poem further, and discuss what makes this a great poem. It is not an epic; it is a lyric in an epical length. It is not a play, but it reads like a play. Still, you could enjoy reading it as a poem, rather than as a play. One of the reasons may be because of the use of language, as well as because of much of the imagination that the poem stirs in our mind’s eye.
Lecture 10
It is well known that W.B. Yeats has wanted to be a painter, as his father John or his younger brother Jack. As a failed painter Yeats is a great words painter. As painter poet he is different from other poets who make use of words as images or pictures. He has hardly used words to paint in his poetry, which is exemplified by his poem, “The Muncipal Gallery Revisited.” Also, this poem is different from the so-called ekphrasis poems. Each person that shows up in the poem is depicted as the essence of the person as person. There hardly appears any embellishment. He differs totally from Shakespeare in this respect. I wonder if we could call Yeats a Romantic in this poem at all? “Long-legged Fly” is anther example of this characteristic.
Lecture 11
John Constable is the greatest landscape painter of England. Maybe J.M.W.
Turner is the only rival of his. David Sylvester is a great art critic who is able to say what he says. Turner has contributed to a new art movement of the world, by turning in his last years to the light in painting, and eventually helping to create Impressionistic and abstract painting. Constable is no less important, as Sylvester says:
Wordsworth is limpid, reflective, precisely evocative of the joy or panic the poet has experienced in the face of given phenomena and of the mark this has left upon him; he essentially talks about the phenomena, does not re-create their substance, does not make them immediate. Constable’s paintings are congested, packed with sensation, are among the most physically immediate pictures ever painted: they take us there. (260)
That is to say, Constable is to me father of Modernist painting, including Expressionism and action painting.
Lecture 12
Cy Twombly is like Picasso, after Picasso. He takes everything and turns it into his own painting, which is an amazing ability. Today we are going to read David Sylvester’s essay, “Twombly,” which is about Twombly’s sculpture. When you look at his sculptures, it may be confusing and you may be unable to think what to think. Art is convention: art is what we have learned to look at. Sylvester is capable of giving us both history of art and new intuition. On finishing reading his essay we are ready to read any Cy Twomblys. Let’s go read his essay.
Lecture 13
This is the last lecture this semester. We have covered Synge, Dickens, Shakespeare, Yeats, Constable, and Twombly: they probably are the best of writers so far and the best of artists so far. Work is not in a vacuum: it’s in society, language, art, nature, man, intellect, feeling, emotion, thinking. Reading it enriches humanity.
Twombly’s painting is a result of a long history of art, and if you understand all before him, you can understand and even appreciate his art. It is one of the reasons that art collectors pay so much for his painting. Is it simply an act of investment to make money? I don’t think so.
