(Im)Possibilities

During class on Friday we discussed how King Lear was “obviously” egocentric. I kept thinking about what other reasons besides him being egocentric would contribute to him wanting to hear his daughters declare their love for him. One of the reasons I came up with was that King Lear is a king. As a king he always has to double guess what people say to him and that can make a person paranoid and insecure in themselves. Could King Lear have wanted to hear his daughters explain how much they loved because he thought that his own family wouldn’t lie to him. When Cordelia did not give a good enough answer he might have felt embarrassed by what she said in front of so many people and decided that she needed to be punished.

If this was a reason why he wanted to hear his daughters declare their love for him then it clearly backfired as we find out in Act I that his two oldest start plotting to remove his left over respect and power.

Do you think King Lear could have been insecure in himself, is he just an egocentric king that always wants to be flattered, or is he both?

During our discussions in class today I was really interested in the conversation that surrounded Edmund’s status as a bastard, or illegitimate child. I found that during both the small group that I was a part of, and when we all reconvened as a class, people had interesting ideas and interpretations of what it meant for Edmund to identify as a bastard and in particular, the connotations that the word, bastard, has. Continue reading “[Edmund the] bastard”

I was stuck with the documentary we watched in class. I’m also sure that mine wasn’t a singular reaction. One moment that stood apart from the others was when Mr. Gettridge’s daughter wouldn’t tell him the exact date of his wife’s homecoming. It seemed like a great surprise, then June Cross told us that he’d an agreement with Anderson Cooper of CNN to televise her return. It felt gaudy and awkward. Why would Mr. Gettridge strike this deal when his own daughter recognized it as something her mother would detest?

*I subsequently checked myself* Continue reading “Survival and Selfishness (and other ramblings)”

I was part of the ENGL 458: Major Authors class that Beth taught last semester focusing on the work of Toni Morrison, and how it related to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Throughout the semester, I (as well as my fellow classmates- many of whom are in this class as well) learned how to change the way I think and process information, working past the shock of different experiences and instead understanding causes/effects and the humanness of reactions and emotions. Also, Toni Morrison wrote novels that examine the wonder of language in regards to its specificity and limitations as well as certain themes that I believe are applicable to this course as well, including diaspora, disenfranchisement, memory/forgetting, and loss/gain (to name a few). Continue reading “ENGL 439 in conversation with ENGL 458”