October 14 lecture notes:
Assignment #1: Go out and have a bad day
-Only way to experience the muddle of mythology
Searching for clues, go be a detective!
Mythic clue: the autumn leaves
-Homeric Hymns
-Ovid: Ceres and Proserpina (Greek Persephone)
Story: Ceres is out looking for her daughter, b/c Proserpina is out looking for a flower (Narcissus) and Pluto comes up and captures her and takes her into the underworld.
-There is an agreement between Jove and Pluto that Pluto can have his daughter, Proserpina
Marriage: a contract between men that agrees that ownership of the girl is passed from one man to another; the act of abduction from the underworld
-Ceres is angry b/c Jove gave her daughter away!
-She can’t take back her daughter b/c there is already an agreement, but she can make the situation dire. She uses her powers to turn the season to nuclear winter (changing of the leaves, signifies death)
-2 men go to the underworld to rescue Proserpina, run into Pluto and comment that they are coming to take back the beautiful woman
-Dumb and Dumber Go To Hell: New blockbuster film!
-Pluto glues him to a chair in the underworld—“you must stay here FOREVER!”
-He is eternally tantalized by crisp, clear, flowing rivers and flourishing fruit trees
-Other guy rolls a rock up and down mountains, if he can get the rock to the top he is free to go
-However, Hercules comes down to be a hero (Its raining men!), and rips one of the men from the bench (‘tis the reason Greek men have such small bottoms)
*Look for something subtle and relate it back to mythology*
-From the past or the present
Arachne:
Arachne by Velazquez
Painters attempt to create a frame story in literature
Frame Story: a story within a story within a story
Moral of the story: Immortality
-Telling a story that never ends
*Metamorphosis is both punishment and reward
-If Ovid’s fate will be to always be web spinning, she will forever be immortal through spider’s webs
Homework Assignment: Find the leg of Minerva, or one that is an equivalent!
Déjà vu: French literal translation= “already seen”
The Saragossa Manuscript
-Maddening frame story
-Groundhog Day is the modern adaptation
-Point of Ovid is to become confused by the immense emersion of stories
Inggris: Jupiter and Thetis
Picasso: Guernica
Gives a pictorial quotation of the Inggris painting
-Thought Picasso was doing something dramatically new when in fact he is depicting great paintings from before him
- He was transfixed with mythological symbolism
Satyr: Greek myth one of a class of lustful, drunken woodland gods
-Roman representation as a man with a goat’s ears, tail, legs, and horns
-A man with strong sexual desires
Trope: a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression
-To turn (tropics, tropical lands)
Polytropos: Ability to turn in many ways; of many shifts
Marsyas: Claimed he could play the flute better than Apollo and his fate led to him being hung upside down, de-skinned and filleted alive
Pelops: founder of the house of Atreus, father was Tantalus
-Savage Banquet: Tantalus cuts Pelops into pieces to make a stew and served it to the gods, Demeter, still weeping over the abduction of Proserpina, absentmindedly ate some of the stew (his ivory shoulder). The other gods knew what was happening so they rebirthed him with only one piece filled in with the ivory
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