From Rousseau’s unprecedented confessions to Hong Kingston’sWarrior Women and China Men, Alex Zwerdling traces the history of the memoir in hisThe Rise of the Memoir, reviewed by Frances Wilson for the TLS. The difficulty with memoirs is that they are written to be memorable; enough so to be a steady source of profit after ones death, so we should suspect that Rousseau’s extravagant confessions were really cryonics dressed up as histrionics.
Self-portrait (1960) by Dorothy Mead Ruth Borchard Collection, courtesy of Piano Nobile, Robert Travers (Works of Art) Ltd
Readers search in vain for the insights and humility we now require of autobiographers. I am made unlike anyone I have ever met, proclaims Rousseau, removing himself from any sense of communal identity. He plunged into his life and he plunged into the telling of his life: the further I go into my story, the less order and sequence I can put into it. Onto this formless and never-to-be-finished mass he imposed no shaping structure or narrative arc because he had no interest in, or knowledge of, a narrative self. Rousseau was our first episodic autobiographer. Looking ahead, he explained, always ruins my enjoyment.
So why did this book, described by Zwerdling as incoherent, self-indulgent, self-aggrandising, embarrassing [and] often irrational, exert such power over Wordsworth and De Quincey? Why was Rousseaus Confessions so beloved by George Eliot and Emerson, why did Virginia Woolf lament that there was no womans autobiography to compare with this, and why did John Ruskin, according to Charles Eliot Norton, feel that Rousseau, who was unlike anyone, was so like Ruskin himself that he must have transmigrated into his body?
The review manages topile on one anecdote after another while clapping hard for Professor Zwerdling rollickingmonograph. To find out some of the answers to these question and inspiration for your own memoir:
Hello Corelings! Welcome to reading period, the all-too-short span before the start of finals. Whether you're putting the final touches on your last papers, cramming for your Core exams, or looking up pictures of dogs in hopes that they may inject some semblance of motivation into your veins (we suggest huskies or shiba inus for these purposes), we hope that this installment of the Weekly Round-Up provides you with a much-needed break. Read on:
U-Theatre, a Zen percussion troupe, is presenting a five-show run of its work Dao at the National Theater in Taipei following its world premiere on April 15 at the National Theater Taichung. Percussion, martial arts, and meditation come together to explore the teachings of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.
Turns out this past Wednesday, May 3, marked the birthday of Niccolo Machiavelli. And you know how we at Core love birthdays, belated or otherwise. Now if only we could find 548 candles...
Voltaire was a lot more wily than we realized. Along with several instances of arrests and imprisonments--in the Bastille, no less--the writer once described the plays of Shakespeare as "disgusting" and characteristic of the "absurd and barbaric" English theater; nonetheless, the Bard's "enormous dungheap" still contains some desirable aspects. (We have to wonder what may have caught Voltaire's eye.)
The man himself, snickering at the audacity of English theater. Probably. Portrait of Voltaire, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, pastel on paper, 1735.
More birthdays: Karl Marx is 199 today. To commemorate the day, thespian Mamunur Rashid and Bangla Theatre is scheduled to present a stage reading of historian Howard Zinn's play "Marx in Soho" at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the national academy of fine and performing arts in Bangladesh. The play imagines a scenario in which Marx appears in the world of today and, we assume, gives us a piece of his mind. But we have to ask--does Zinn imagine him as one who has been revived from death (if so, we'd like to know if his opinions on religion have changed) or one who has lived to the present day (a lot hairier, smelly, etc.)? We need answers.
Keep guard on zombie Karl Marx. By Paasikivi of Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
...All right, how are you faring? Ready to jump back into the fray? Best of luck on your papers and exams!
Greetings, Corelings. We hope you can take some time out of your busy schedule to watch this short video. It encapsulates all of our hopes that you will do the best you possibly can on your final exams and papers. You can do it! Hang in there! Good luck! Etc.
Down in New York, Kathryn Schulz has penned a penetrating article exploring the literature's obsession with the arctic regions. What is it about the North Pole besides Santa Clause and cute polar bears which could have induced writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle to take in it such interest?:
In the nineteenth century, the Arctic, then still largely undiscovered, captured the imagination of the Western world. Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi
Conan Doyle was twenty when he left Peterhead and twenty-one when he returned. On Saturday, May 22nd, in the meticulous diary he kept during that journey, he wrote, A heavy swell all day. I came of age today. Rather a funny sort of place to do it in, only 600 miles or so from the North Pole. Funny indeed, for a man who would come to be associated with distinctly un-Arctic environments: the gas-lit glow of Victorian London, the famous chambers at 221B Baker Street, andfurther afield, but not muchthe gabled manors and foggy moors where Sherlock Holmes tracked bloody footprints and dogs failed to bark in the night. Shortly after returning from the north, and long before writing any of the stories that made him famous, Conan Doyle told two tales about the Arcticone fictional, the other putatively true. The first, in 1883, was The Captain of the Pole-Star, one of his earliest published short stories. In it, a young medical student serving as the surgeon on a whaling ship watches, first in disbelief and then in dread, as his captain goes mad. Although winter is closing in, the captain sails northward into the Arctic until his ship is stuck fast. Then, obeying a ghostly summons, he walks out alone to his death on the ice.
The good news is that as the earth gets warmer many of the problems faced by such writers as Doyle in the North Pole will be obviated. The bad news is that it will be all water and lose the fecundity it has hadas inspirationfor good writing.
Here follows the set-list of texts read at the Annual Core Poetry Reading, held this year on April 11, 2017 (this information is listed in the 2017 Core Almanac, part of the Core Journal published this year, Issue 26: http://bu.edu/core/journal/xxvi):
A roughly 8-foot sculpture of Aristotle has been restored and returned to its rightful place in Assos--where, it is said, he opened the first-ever philosophy school--in Turkey after being vandalized over a year ago.
Imago Theatre of Portland, Oregon, presents a rather gruesome production of Medea, beginning April 21 to May 20. With limited props and a tilting stage, the play builds off of a 2014 version of the tragedy by written by Ben Powers.
Shakespeare's plays face extinction because Americans are too dumb to understand his genius, fears Washington Post contributor Peter Marks. Meanwhile, the lesser-known Shakespearean play Timon of Athens, directed by Robert Richmond, will be taking place May 9 to June 11 at the Folger Theatre in D.C.
Wyndham Lewis's pen-and-ink drawing illustrating Timon of Athens. (Folger Shakespeare Library ART Box L677 no.7)
Moreover, the Southeastern Teen Shakespeare Company is setting its own production of Much Ado About Nothing in 1959 America. This Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at the Pensacola Opera Center in Pensacola, Florida.
To top it off with more Shakespeare news, the American Shakespeare Center of Staunton, Virginia, hopes to find plays that vibe off of and are inspired by Shakespeares work"--all 38 of them. And we know at least some of our Corelings have written Shakespeare fanfiction. Now is your time to shine!
That's all for today! We hope that your last week of classes of the semester goes swimmingly!
If you could not attend the Core Banquet this past Tuesday, then you missed this enlightening four-minute creation brought to us by our very own Word & Way Society. "Core on the Street," hosted by Chloe Hite and edited by Priest Gooding, features many of our beloved Corelings. Impersonations, Q&A, synced audio, AND MORE await.
Like the enlightenment, modernity is an umbrella term that is useful for what it covers but also in danger of excluding thinkers or ideas that might deserve the label. A.C. Grayling's new book, The Age of Genius, devotes itself in part to answer the question of what exactly we mean when speaking of modern philosophy. Most people believe that Descartes is the first modern philosopher because they think he is. But the issue isn't so arbitrary:
Two ancient Greeks walk past a pile of drunk philosophers by what looks like the Acropolis. (Conde Nast TagID: cncartoons024458.jpg) [Photo via Conde Nast]
But plausible claims to the title could also be made on behalf of Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon or (several decades earlier) Michel de Montaigne, all of whom made original and significant, but very different, contributions to what A. C. Grayling refers to as the modern mind. On the other hand, we might want to save the founders honour for some figure later than Descartes, someone whose thought seems more familiar to us, less influenced by Scholasticism and less informed by theological assumptions and ostensible religious motivations say, John Locke, with his radically empiricist theory of knowledge; or Baruch Spinoza, the most iconoclastic thinker of his time; or, even later, the sceptical atheist David Hume.
The reviewer, Steven Nadler, is nettled that Graylingomits proper treatment of Baruch Spinoza while gabbling about less relevant philosophers. The debate goes on, which one may
If there is anybody who can speak of the need to defend the right to free speech, and the need to use that right to protect what is valued in literature, then it is certainly Salman Rushdie, a man for whom the matter is one of life and death, literally. This literary icon was therefore an apt chose for a keynote speaker last Friday for an audience at the Unbound Book Festival. Here is a loose leaf excerpted from Britanny Ruess' reporting of the speech for the Columbia Daily Tribune:
Rushdie dazzling audience to his right with wit.
The more pluralistically we see ourselves, the easier it is to find common ground with other people, even if theyre very different from us, he said. And this is what the novel has always told us; it has always told us that human beings are not one thing, they are many things at once.
Great art tries to open the universe and push back borders of understanding to increase peoples capacity to know the world around them, Rushdie said. But he said artists are often met with the unpleasant sensation of powerful forces pushing against them from individuals who dont want understanding to be increased. Rushdies The Satanic Verses is banned in India and his writing has been the subject of lawsuits and other threats.
Rushdie omitted presumably the advantage that being on a most wanted list can give in the dating game, which favors bad boys, especially when they are good men.High-mindedness comes at a risk,but perhaps we might infer from Rushdie that it can be diversified by having more plurality.
Greetings, Corelings! Are you excited about classes winding down? Or are you slowly spiraling into the void as you plunge into studying and writing final papers? Regardless, here is the weekly round-up:
In case you missed it: The online version of the Core Journal has been released! Thank you to our editorial staff and contributors. Now show us your support by plastering the link all over your social media pages.
The Aeneid: a musical play with songs. Duke University's musical theater organization Hoof 'n' Horn produces a modern-day version of Virgil's work that avoids the term "musical" in hopes of evading the connotations and tropes of the genre. In light of the current refugee crisis, the production is particularly relevant.
Paradise Lost: Reclaiming Destiny is a production that can only be described as a "steamy dance/theater" piece (we assume, considering we haven't had the privilege of seeing it). Two differences from the original text stand out: God is now two beings (Father God and Mother God) and Adam eats the fruit before Eve does, which certainly shakes things up a bit. The show ran until April 3 at Greenway Court Theatre in LA.
Head-to-head. (Photo Credit: Anthony Roldan)
There ishope that, should House Bill 2177 be passed, monuments bearing verses from the Bhagavad-Gita may be erected in public places in Oklahoma, such as public universities, city halls, and the Myriad Botanical Gardens in Oklahoma City. The work is said to have influenced a number of American icons, such as Henry David Thoreau, Albert Einstein, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
A new RPG adventure entitled A Flower from Hermes, created by 3 Halves Games, is based on Book X of the Odyssey. It is part of Odyssey Jam, a game jam (a challenge that involves planning and creating video games in a short period of time) that took place early last month.
Turn-based action. A screenshot from A Flower from Hermes.
That should do it! We wish you the best of luck in these last few weeks of class!
The Core Blog is a hub for information and media related to the CAS Core Curriculum at Boston University. It will be updated regularly, with photo galleries, interviews, links to related reading online, news of events or activities, and other kinds of content that help connect our Core people—prospective, current, and former students—with each other.
You can stop by here once a week to scroll through the posts, or make this your homepage in order to keep your finger on the pulse of the Core. Either way, we hope you find this to be a pleasant way to strengthen your connection with the great people, the great books, and the great questions we encounter in the Core.
![Two ancient Greeks walk past a pile of drunk philosophers by what looks like the Acropolis. (Conde Nast TagID: cncartoons024458.jpg) [Photo via Conde Nast]](/core/files/2017/04/modernphilosopher.jpeg)
