Why hello there, scholars. Fancy meeting you here, on the longest-running weekly series of posts on the Core Blog. What’s that? This is theonly weekly series on the Core Blog? …Ignore us, then. Read on:
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau is misunderstood, says Nelson Lund, guest blogger for the Washington Post. His book, Rousseaus Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy: A New Introduction, hopes to expound upon Rousseau’s theories for an American audience.
- The New Orleans Opera Associations staging of Charles Gounod’s Faust is “devilishly good,” according to the New Orleans Advocate. The three-hour show features a dapper Mephistopheles who is nothing short of a businessman as well as a particularly moving Valentin, Marguerite’s brother.
Paul Groves as Faust. (Photograph by Tom Grosscup)
- Amid controversy over a “tired-looking bust” of Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury, London, that contrasts sharply with a “jaunty and full-bodied” sculpture of James Joyce in Dublin, the charity Aurora Metro Arts and Media hopes to commission a new full-size statue of Woolf that treats her with due respect. (Unfortunately, no image was included of the original bust, so we can’t judge for ourselves.)
- Make Italy Great Again: Two translated volumes of Petrarch’s letters(translated by Elaine Fantham)reveal a strangely familiar goal, albeit one achieved more academically (to restore that greatness, he set about copying Roman texts by Cicero, Seneca, and Julius Caesar, to name a few). Fun fact: His Canzoniere was originally titled “Bits of Stuff in the Vulgar Tongue” (Fragment rerum vulgarim).
- Actress Noma Dumezweni (whom you may know as Hermione from the West End version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) performs an exquisite rendition of William Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” or “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”
That’s all for this week! Come back next Friday for another edition of the Weekly Round-Up!
