Relating to the Core’s study of the Old and New Testaments, is a fascinating series of lithographs from later in Salvador Dali’s career, titled Aliyah: The Rebirth of Israel, depicting the history of the Jewish people’s return to Israel. Here is an extract from BU Today’s article on the topic:
While 250 copies of the Aliyahlithographs were created from Dalí’s original mixed-media paintings, this set is unique, says Rubin-Frankel Gallery director Holland Dieringer (CFA’05), because it’s one of the few complete sets still in existence. Most others have been broken up and sold over the years.
Dieringer says that while most art historians and critics focus on the artist’s work between 1929 and 1939, during the Paris Surrealist movement, his graphic commissions from the ’60s and ’70s merit serious consideration. She notes that Dalí, who was born in 1904 in the Catalonian region of Spain, “wasn’t part of the founding of Israel cause. In fact, he was very apolitical.” But, as the project stands, “he did a fantastic job.”
Aliyah: The Rebirth of Israel is on display in the Rubin-Frankel Gallery, Florence & Chafetz Hillel House, 213 Bay State Rd., through July 31. The gallery is open Monday through Saturday, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday, from 3 to 9 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
For more information and the full BU Today article, visit bit.ly/ZEw7my.
In the final days before the Core Journal’s release, organized chaos took over the Core Curriculum’s office. Here are photos capturing our intellectual panic:
Our happy Editors Madeline Aruffo (left) and Rania Ezzo (right)
Our very focused Editors Kesia Alexandra (left) and Corey Bither (right)
Relating to CC202′s study of Friedrich Nietzsche is an excellent and amusing attempt to explain his existentialism to a group of 5-year-olds. Here is the video:
In his review of Christian Wiman’s spiritual autobiography, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Jay Parini discusses Wiman’s emphasis on the importance of faith to a critic. Here is an extract:
It strikes me that criticism—systemic reflection on texts, even on life itself—has lost its urgency during the past 30 years or more, having complicated (and deadened) reading in ways nobody could have foreseen. It’s not simply that teachers of literature don’t often read for pleasure nowadays, or don’t believe in the transforming powers of art, or no longer value any statement that hasn’t bounced off many walls of irony and landed, like a squash ball, in some distant corner of the court. It’s the loss of pressure that stands out, a sense that literature matters because it informs, quite literally, our consciousness as well as our actions.
For example, Rich’s essay on Emily Dickinson, “Vesuvius at Home,” represents an astonishing effort to get at the heart of the writer’s project. I’ve never read Dickinson the same way after encountering the essay, almost 40 years ago. With withering aptness, Rich notes that much scholarly ink has been spilled in trying to identify the male lover whom Dickinson may have renounced in poem “#315″ (“He fumbles at your Soul”). Rich goes on to suggest that “the real question, given that the art of poetry is an art of transformation, is how this woman’s mind and imagination may have used the masculine element in the world at large, or those elements personified as masculine—including the men she knew; how her relationship to this reveals itself in her images and language.”
One looks around, half in desperation, for those critics today who direct us not beyond the text before us, but through it, to the life beyond its linguistic boundaries. These are the critics who understand the incarnational aspects of poetry, its way of refreshing the currency of feeling by how it makes life itself visible, palpable, creating what Roman Catholics refer to as “real presence,” the embodiment of spirit in matter, as in the Eucharist—the ultimate transformation.
A new book breaks this deadening mold, and it’s noteworthy that it does so within the tradition of spiritual autobiography that reaches back to St. Augustine.
In My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, to be released in April by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Christian Wiman—himself a fine poet and translator of the Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam—contemplates the meaning of poetic incarnation in specifically Christian terms, drawing on a wide range of authors. He blends poetry (his own and others’), criticism, theological speculation, and memoir in ways that defy easy categorization, although this work might well be considered a distant offspring of Pascal’s Pensées (1669), which offered a skeptical audience at the beginning of the Enlightenment a defense of the Christian religion in the form of “thoughts” that resembled journal entries.
What I love in Wiman is the way he reads poems as urgent messages in a bottle, weaving their texts into his evolving consciousness, his sad personal story, linking his language with theirs, showing us clearly and definitively what Dr. Johnson, the great English critic, meant when he said: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
In his review of Roy Morris Jr.’s Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America, Justin Beplate discusses Oscar Wilde’s trip to America, and the lasting effect that it had on his writing and personality. Here is an excerpt:
Wilde’s reception in America was uneven. If some were bemused by the colourful paraphernalia of aestheticism, others bristled at the suggestion that this export from Britain had anything to teach them about beauty and taste. Wilde was, by his own admission, a lame public speaker – but he was a born self-promoter. At a time when celebrity interviews were just beginning to take off in the US, Morris argues that ‘Wilde pioneered the way in which modern celebrities are created, cultivated, and commodified’. In his dealings with the press Wilde knew how to play the game, dispensing quotable copy and maintaining a genial air in the face of tiresomely repetitive questions. The same equanimity was extended to his hecklers, and many of those who came to jeer the ‘too too utterly utter’ spectacle of an overwrought fop in satin knee breeches with crushed velvet coat and green cravat found themselves disarmed by Wilde’s unflappable demeanour and genial good humour. It was less an ability to laugh at himself – his commitment to aestheticism was too sincere – than a willingness to deflect ridicule with humour, honed as the occasion required.
If America did not always know what to make of Wilde, the country was in many ways the making of him as an artist. He returned to England richer in pocket and, more importantly, in experience. The tour marked a divide between what Wilde himself designated ‘the Oscar of the first period’ (‘the gentleman who wore long hair and carried a sunflower down Piccadilly’) and what was to come. In the following decade Wilde would assiduously cultivate the Oscar of the second period, publishing the stories and plays that made him famous. His fall, when it came, was colossal. When The Importance of Being Earnest opened to wild acclaim on 14 February 1895, its author was the toast of London society. Less than two months later, having lost a disastrous libel claim against the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for imputations of homosexual conduct, Wilde was arrested on charges of gross indecency and later sentenced to two years’ hard labour. The physical and moral devastation of the trial and its fallout shattered him. Three years after his release, Wilde died as an impoverished and ignominious exile in Paris.
The Core presents a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Letters, by Keith Miller. Vonnegut is not a writer directly studied in Core classes, however, his influence on the literary world is worth examining. Here is an excerpt:
Most of Vonnegut’s early writing is – despite his protestations about “genre-ism” – fairly easy to ghettoise as science fiction, though he is manifestly a “hard” SF writer (space ships, tentacles) who would like to be a “soft” one, exploring the Philip K Dick stuff about memory and identity. One of his richest themes – very notably in Slaughterhouse 5, which contains elements of SF, as well as memoir, realism and several other notes – is the conceit that we’re all somehow adrift, rogue cosmonauts in our own lives, an idea that is by no means confined to genre fiction (it is present in Proust, though clad there in white tie rather than a space suit).
…
The writ of this collection of letters runs from about 1950 until 2007, the year of Vonnegut’s death. It is not exactly packed with revelations. We don’t write to those we see every day; anthologies such as these are documents of absence, plaster casts of empty rooms – involuted autobiographies. It’s only when Kurt, teaching in Iowa, steps up his correspondence with Jane, his first wife, that we sense their relationship is amiss – sure enough, he soon notifies a friend that “something telepathic has busted between us”.
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It is for their literary rather than their documentary value that these letters commend themselves, in the end. They have a directness and a consistency, a scruffy but ensnaring humanity, that I’ve never quite been able to find in Vonnegut’s fiction, either two decades ago as a refusenaut and psychonik, or over the past fortnight, researching this piece. Kurt seems by turns kind, engaged, imaginative, witty, self-deprecating (“I write with a big black crayon… grasped in a grubby, kindergarten fist,”) and – on various fronts – courageous.
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