If you are posting a summary of the class discussion, please indicate the date of the discussion. Feel free to add comments about the book that you were unable to share in class, and to respond to others' blog comments. You might also post questions that arose from the discussion for consideration in the next discussion.
8 comments:
Wednesday January 6th 2008: Today in class you mostly dicussed the passage on page 21. We were not sure what he was just thinking and what was really happening. We came to the conclusion that while he was sick he was in a haze and was half-way dreaming and remembering things and half-way seeing and hearing what is actually happening when Parnell died. For the next discussion we are going to try and fiqure out who Parnell is, who Dante is, and what was going on at the Christmas dinner.
In our discussion of chapter two on Friday, we mostly focused on the various female figures in the story and what they represent. We thought that perhaps Stephen's encounter with the prostitute represents the loss of his romanticized vision of love and possibly his abandonment of Catholicism. We also thought that the different female figures served to represent Stephen's feelings at different points in time.
Another element of the book that we discussed was how Stephen compares himself to the moon and possibly feels like he is above everyone and feels alone.
Chapter III is less about Stephen's personal religion than a scathing criticism of the Catholic Church.
To begin, Stephen is obviously motivated by fear when he decides to confess his sins and hand himself over to God. After the preacher's first sermon, "The next day brought death and judgment, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair. The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul. He suffered its agony. He felt the death-chill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling his eyes..." (106). There is no doubt that Stephen is horrified of damnation. By the end of the retreat, Stephen resolves to confess, and feels personally relieved by doing so. However, Stephen's confession is made under duress and would not have occurred if the preacher had not given such a detailed description of the afterlife. It is impossible and irrelevent of evaluate whether or not Stephen truly believes in Catholicism by the end of this chapter because the chapter does not allow enough time to elapse after the retreat to allow him to think clearly and without fear.
What this chapter does acccomplish is to use Stephen as an example of how the Church uses Hell to prey upon the emotions of its believers, scaring them into submission.
To be continued at another time...
Stephen has been established as a fairly smart kid by now. The fact that he is duped into confession by scare tactics details how effective the Church is at using them.
Finally, the information used to justify the existence of Hell, is based less upon the Bible than upon impossible first-hand accounts, speculation, and irrelevancies. The first of these is on page 109, "Was it not Addison, the great English writer, who, when on his deathbed, sent for the wicked young earl of Warwick to let him see how a Christian to meet his end?" This quote is in reference to a good Christian not fearing death. The preacher is trying to use the celebrity of Addison to strengthen his case. The second instance occurs on page 111, "Adam and Eve, my dear boys, were, as you know, our first parents, and you will remember that they were created by God in oder that the seats in heaven left vacant by the fall of Lucifer and his rebellious angels might be filled again. Lucifer, we are told, was a son of the morning, a radiant and mighty angel; yet he fell: he fell and there fell with him a third part of the host of heaven: he fell and was hurled with his rebellious angels into hell. What his sin was we cannot say. Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant." Although Lucifer is referred to as the morning star, nothing else mentioned here can be backed up by Biblical text, only speculation. The entire physical description of Hell is based upon speculation. Nowhere in the Bible is Hell described to the detail that the priest at which the priest describes. He also bases his assertions on the visions and ideas of Saints, who, being saints, could not have visited Hell and returned to tell everyone what it was like. The first saint is Saint Bonaventure, he "says, one of them (a condemned man's body)alone would suffice to infect the whole world," (114). This is in reference to the stench of the damned. The second saint is Saint Catherine of Siena, she "once saw a devil, and she has written that, rather than look again for one single instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk until the end of her life along a track of hot coals," (117). The third saint is Saint Thomas, "Saint Thomas, the reatest doctor of the Curch, the angelic doctor, as he is called, says that the worst damnation consists in this that the understanding of man is totally deprived of Divine light and his affection obstinately turned away from the goodness of God," (121). The fourth "expert" is Pope Innocent the Third, "Just as in dead bodies worms are engendered by putrefaction so in the souls of the lost there arises a perpetual remorse from the putrefaction of sin, the sting of conscience, the worm, as Pope Innocent the Third calls it, of the triple sting," (122). The fifth reference is to Saint Augustine, "Divine Justice insists that the understanding of those miserable wretches be fixed continually on the sins of which they were guilty and moreover, as Saint Augustine points out, God will impart to them His own knowledge of sin so that sin will appear to them in all its hideous malice as it appears to the eyes of God Himself," (123). The last reference is this, "A holy saint (one of our own fathers I believe it was) was once vouchsafed a vision of hell. It seemed to him that he stood in the midst of a great hall, dark and silent save for the ticking of a great clock..." (126). All of these references, save the visions of Saint Catherine and the unnamed father whose contributions are based on visions, are based purely on speculation, as again, Hell is not described to this detail in the Bible. Yet their contributions to the descriptions give a sense of credibility to the preacher's arguments and add more fear to his message. The use of "authority" to prove the "facts" of Hell is a clear criticism of the Church playing upon the emotions of those who are less theologically educated.
This chapter is intended to criticize the Catholic Church, especially in terms of their tactics of conversion, and the evidence upon which they describe Hell.
These are some other interesting things about this chapte. First the preacher has more dialogue than any other character so far in the book besides Stephen. Second, the flow of this chapter parallels the flow of a mass: dialogue, response, dialogue, response ... confession. Stephen has a short reflection period after each sermon until he eventually confesses.
-Will H
Wednesday, January 30th- Ch.3
-Did Stephen go through a change in this chapter or did his ideas of religion just change?
-Did Stephen go to confession out of fear, or teen rebellion?
-How do you determine if a person is religious or not?
Just because you don't go to church doesn't mean your not religious. To have a belief is to be religious.?
-Is Stephen looking for happiness?
-His bed symbolizes lust where as above his bed on the wall is a picture of the Virgin Mary, symbolizing lost of innocence.
GOAT in greek mythology
Pan is the Greek god of shepherds and flocks, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music: paein means to pasture. He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr.
Satyrs are a troop of male companions of Pan and Dionysus— "satyresses" were a late invention of poets— that roamed the woods and mountains. In mythology they are often associated with sex drive
Thursday February 7th 2008:
Questions brought up in class:
Was Stephen ever sincerely religious or simply in fear of religion? -- This was never quite resolved.
When does Stephen decide not to be a priest? --Around P. 161 after he visits siblings and is walking around. Someone also mentioned a quote on P. 156
Is Stephen Dedalus or Icarus?-- one answer I liked said he is both; he has two sides and I saw it that when he is watching the bird those two opposing parts seem to unite and he feels whole.
I really thought the discussion was interesting when we traced Stephen's admiration of women from Mercedes (with the quote where he wants to meet in the real world what he has beheld so many times in his mind), to the prostitute, back to this girl standing in the water, where he does actually meet "Mercedes." I thought what made it interesting was our close attention to the details of aesthetic and metaphysical verses the tangible and physical.
We also discussed how Stephen describes women with religious words/imagery and bird adjectives/imagery.
Another question we did not answer was whether Stephen's rejecting his initial decision to be a priest mean that he is rejecting all religion or just that career? I hope we can talk about this more soon.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Today we discussed chapter four.
In chapter four we were puzzled on the idea and reoccurrence of what is hither and fither on pages (131), (132), (165). We said it could be the flow of the waves that mirrors his emotions, the receding could be connected to his unsure feelings of religion, his fading admiration of the Virgin Mary, or his ideas about the priest as a higher being. We decided that his contemplations represented his growing up and trying to develop a certain lifestyle.
Also he is constantly using similes and metaphors comparing himself to nature. He abuses the word fulfilling in this chapter and we felt that it was because he is trying to find something to fulfill his life, to make it complete. The two siblings are talking in code and we thought that was odd, maybe it was to show that Stephan is becoming secluded from the world, or a childhood life.
After that, we questioned why Stephan referred to himself as a woman? We never really came up with a sure answer.
He utilizes prose between colors and feelings, letters and numbers on page (154). The explicate language that he uses in both chapters 1 and 4 relate to each other.
He uses the image of flames to describe music, a red glow, fluttering of or like flames, red, blushing cheeks, and describing his “perfect” woman all on pages (152), (153), and (165). But in previous chapters we noted that flames were used to describe hell but now it is switching from something horrid to the perfect woman. Is the perfect woman a symbol for hell?
Wednesday February 27th 2008: Today in class we began our first discussion of Beloved. There was obvious confussion throughout the first part of this novel since Morrison really did not make the first part to to clear. We began with discussing how the house was haunted and what the real significance of what that was. There were a lot of questions of significance, but not many answers. The class had questions about who Paul D and Baby Suggs were and what that represented. Numerous symbols were brought up such as the scars on Sethe's back, the nature elements, and also the roses. Doug brought up the point of perhaps Beloved is just a character trait rather than a real person. Rob was wondering about the behavior as a whole in then beginning of the novel with questions of morality, i.e. sex with cows. Questions of how nature completely parrallels with the characters lives were also of discussion. At the end of the discussion we all said what we wanted to talk about for the next discussion. We will be talking about the different characters as well as symbolism.
Post a Comment