By Cynthia Chung What say of it? what say CONSCIENCE grim, That spectre in my path? – Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida There has always been a fascination with “horror” since time immemorial, such that much of what functions to thrill us today is not much different from the sort of folk tales told hundreds if not thousands…
Tag: Aesthetical Education
James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘The Bravo’: A Lesson in Political Intelligence
By Cynthia Chung [This is a transcript of an RTF lecture that was delivered as part of the “Storytelling, Myth-making and the Shaping of Universal History” Symposium.] So the subject of this class, as the title would suggest, is on James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘The Bravo,’ and I am sure many people here are probably aware of…
Schiller’s Ghost Seer, Intelligence Methods and a Global Citizenry
A Study of Schiller’s The Ghost Seer By Cynthia Chung [The audio version of this article can be listened to here.] The Ghost Seer first appeared in several instalments in Schiller’s publication journal Thalia from 1787 to 1789, and was later published as a three-volume book. It was one of the most popular works of…
How To Conquer Tyranny and Avoid Tragedy: A Lesson on Defeating Systems of Empire
By Cynthia Chung This is a transcription of a lecture, which can be found here, given as part of the RTF series “Art, Science and Civilization: The Renaissance Principles Across the Ages.“ It is common today to be confronted with the belief that any country, any civilization that gains a certain degree of power, will…
Plato’s Fight Against Apollo’s Temple of Delphi and the Cult of Democracy
By Cynthia Chung Homer’s great poems that are left to us today, The Iliad and The Odyssey, describe the events of the Trojan War and its immediate aftermath, events which marked the descent of Greece into a Dark Age. Following the Trojan War, c.1190 BCE, the civilization of mainland Greece collapsed, written language was lost, and cities disappeared….
Rabelais and the Fight for the Modern Nation State
Early 16th century France was a newly formed nation-state following the exploits of Joan of Arc and unification efforts of Louis XI. The counterattack coming from the oligarchic forces was a most bloody religious warfare and Inquisition throughout Europe, pitting each against all. In the midst of all this raging madness, stood in France a…
Cervantes and His Age: Don Quixote and a Spain in Crisis
For this lecture from the Rising Tide Foundation Symposium “Storytelling, Mythmaking, and the Shaping of Universal History” Adam Sedia will go over the relevance of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” for today. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is commonly considered the first modern novel. It certainly is one of the most beloved — it has more translations…
Romeo and Juliet: “It was just that the time was wrong”
By Boniface One of Dire Straits greatest hits was their song Romeo and Juliet. It takes a seemingly normal view of the Shakespeare tragedy, that it is the greatest love story of all time. But it does have one line that is good: Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start And I bet, when you…
Spenser and Marlowe – God’s Spies
By Gerald Therrien “Come, let’s away to prison:We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laughAt gilded butterflies, and hear poor roguesTalk of court news; and we’ll talk with them…
Art, Metaphor and Epiphany
By David Gosselin The experience of great art is similar to the experience of a great scientific discovery. There is a common sentiment of “epiphany”. It is the strangely familiar feeling of remembering something for the first time, or having our attention fall on something that had been there all along. In both the case…