Say more about this.

Interesting observation

Say more about this. What do you make of this comparison?

In poetry these are called "stanzas."

Interesting observation

Say more about this

Interesting

Jenn, be more specific here. Where do you see this in the poem(s)? How did you derive a meaning for the poem when faced with these moments?

Same here. How do you reach this interpretation?

Say more about how you reached this reading. What about the poem leads you to this interpretation?

Say more about this--what is the "something"?

Say more about this

This is interesting, but connect this idea to the lines more. Why music and sound? what are the differences between these things?

Say more about this

Why use the term "brain"? We usually talk about this as the mind's capacity for learning, imagination, etc. and use the term "brain" to refer to the biological organ that sits in our heads.

What do you make of this scenario? Why is it significant? Wh close? What do you make of the fact that Dickinson defines the soul in this way and not some other?

This is a good observation, but HOW does this line show this idea?

In poetry these are called "stanzas"

Good observation. But, also the soul isn't simply closing itself off; it's selecting one--a friend? a lover?a family member?-- and then closing itself off.

This is a really interesting observation. Take this one step further, though, and say HOW these lines lead you to this association. What is the relationship between the brain and the sea Dickinson sets up here?

Going beyond the question of whether or not to use these tools, but thinking about the how to use the various programs as tools. I think this approach keeps the focus on the main aim of writing: trying to express oneself.

A key question we should all ask`

Notes difference wrt technical writing class

I'm not sure what this means

I'm interested in this kind of suspicious thinking.

Malcolm and Donalbain

Banquo's soliloquy

https://www.thinglink.com/scene/483009105884086274

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scone,_Scotland

Since Malcolm and Donalbain stand to benefit from their father's death AND they have run away, people are suspicious of them.

Day and night are reversed

70 years; he's saying he's lived for 70 years and seen dreadful and strange things, but nothing like the previous night.

Malcolm and Donalbain, Duncan's sons, are next in line to the thrown, and they are therefore suspicious that they will be killed like their father.

Think about comments like this in comparison to the exchanges between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

Macbeth kills the guards (the grooms).

framing the grooms for the crime.

Duncan's younger son and in line for the throne after Malcolm

This is Macbeth's second soliloquy. How does it compare to the first?

We know this to be false.

Think about the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. What are their positions on killing the king to take the thrown?

This is Macbeth's first soliloquy: : the act of talking to oneself 2: a poem, discourse, or utterance of a character in a drama that has the form of a monologue or gives the illusion of being a series of unspoken reflections

Banquo is using this image of the bird/natural world to remark to the king on the general peacefulness of Macbeth's castle. We know there are other, disruptive things going on under the surface.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/525443481506195410/

Macbeth is having a hard time hiding his preoccupation with his desire to become king. His wife is encouraging him to be welcoming even though they want to unseat the king.

She doesn't believe Macbeth has it in him to follow through with what he will need to do to become king

Note the single quotation marks. Lady Macbeth is reading a letter to her from Macbeth. In the letter, he tells her of the witches' prophecy.

Throughout the play Duncan is naive. He has just been burned by the original Thane of Cawdor in the war with Norway, and he has no idea Macbeth now see himself as becoming king.

Is Macbeth passively accepting whatever will come of the prophecy here or is he thinking of himself as taking actions to bring it about himself?

Duncan is saying that Malcolm will be next in line, which does not align with the witches' prophecy because how can Macbeth become king if someone else is next in line for the thrown?

Meaning there's no "way" to tell what someone is thinking by looking at them.

The king wants to execute the first Thane of Cawdor, the person Macbeth will replace.

Here, Macbeth is trying to figure out if the witches' prophecy is good or bad. Think about how he parses this out.

This is very smart considering the chaos that is about to come.

From Macbeth's perspective, it appears that the witches' first prophecy is fulfilled.

All of this refers to Banquo.

He notices the witches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Witches

Macbeth will be the Thane of Cowder because he previous Thane of Cawdor was a traitor.

The Scots won!

Meaning the king of Norway, the enemy of the Scots, whih includes Macbeth.

thane /THān/ Learn to pronounce nounHISTORICAL (in Anglo-Saxon England) a man who held land granted by the king or by a military nobleman, ranking between an ordinary freeman and a hereditary noble. (in Scotland) a man, often the chief of a clan, who held land from a Scottish king and ranked with an earl's son. "the Thane of Cawdor"

It seemed like Macbeth was winning, but then the enemy got new supplies and made a new effort.

Speaking of Macbeth

There was a battle that wasn't going well, but Macbeth came on the scene and turned it around.

the fighting

"alarm"

a·non /əˈnän/ adverbINFORMAL•ARCHAIC soon; shortly. "I'll see you anon"

Paddock

Graymalkin

Heath: An uninhabited land covered with grass and small bushes.

Ere means the same as 'before.' [literary, old-fashioned] Take the water ere the clock strikes twelve

hurly-burly: commotion, uproar “When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.” Second Witch 1.1.3 When this commotion of war is over and we know who has won and lost.

Use the author's last name.

Another example would be trash. What counts as something that should be thrown away and something that should be saved? The saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure" applies here. Another example is "noise," What sounds like noise to you might be pleasant music to others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Romanticism

Madame de Stael: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_de_Sta%C3%ABl

Such as the poems by Dickinson and Whitman we've discussed.

"Let art flourish-and the world pass away." This is a play on the motto of the sixteenth-century Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand I: "Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus" ("Let justice be done and the world pass awayH).

Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), Italian writer, military hero, and political leader, was an ardent advocate of Italy's entry into World War 1 and, a few years later, an ardent Fascist. His life and his work are both characterized by superstition, amorality, and a lavish and vicious violence. Futurism was an artistic movement aiming to express the dynamic and violent quality of contemporary life, especially as embodied in the motion and force of modern machinery and modern warfare. It was founded by the Italian writer Emilio Filippo Tomaso Marinetti (1876-1944), whose "Manifeste de Futurisme" (Manifesto of Futurism) was published in the Paris newspaper Le F'igaro in 1909; his ideas had a powerful influence in Italy and Russia. After serving as an officer in World War I, he went on to join the Fascist party in 1919. Among his other works are a volLlme of poems, Guerra sola igiene del 111undo (War the Only Hygiene of the World; 1915), and a political essay, F'uturismo e F'ascismo (1924}) which argues that fascism is the natural exten

A technological factor is important here, especially with regard to the newsreel, whose significance for propaganda purposes can hardly be overstated. Mass reproduction is especially favored by the reproduction of the masses. In great ceremonial processjons, giant rallies and mass sporting events, and in war, all of which are now fed into the camera, the masses come face to face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be emphasized, js closely bound up with the development of reproduction and recording technologies. In general, mass movements are more clearly apprehended by the camera than by the eye. A bird's-eye view best captures assemblies of hundreds of thousands. And even when this perspective is no less accessible to the human eye than to the camera, the image formed by the eye cannot be enlarged in the same way as a photograph. This is to say that mass movements, and above aU war, are a form of human behavior especially suited to the camera. [Benjamin's note]

Let us compare the screen [Leinwand] on which a film unfolds with the canvas [Leinwand] of a painting. The image on the film screen changes, whereas the image on the canvas does not. The painting invites the viewer to contemplation; before it, he can give himself up to his train of associations. Before a film image, he cannot do so. No sooner has he seen it than it has already changed. It cannot be fixed on. The train of associations in the person contemplating it is immediately interrupted by new images. This constitutes the shock effect of film, which, like all shock effects, seeks to induce heightened attention. Film is the art form corresponding to the pronounced threat to life in which people live today. It corresponds to profound changes in the apparatus of apperception-changes that are experienced on the scale of private existence by each passerby in big-city traffic, and on the scale of world history by each fighter against the present social order. [Benjamin's note. A more literal translation of the last phrase before the sentence in italics is: "seeks to be buffered by intensified presence of mind [GeistesgegenwartJ." - Trans.]

Hans Arp (1887-J.966), Alsatian painter, sculptor, and poet, was a founder of the Zurich Dada group in 1916 and a collaborator with the Surrealists for a time after 1925. August Stramm (1874-1915) was an early Expressionist poet and dramatist, a member of the circle of artists gathered around the journal Der Sturm in Berlin. The French painter Andre Derain (1880-1954) became weH known when he, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck were dubbed the '(Fauves," or "wild beasts," at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Austro-German lyric poet and writer, published his Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) and Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus) in 1923.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

"The artwork," writes Andre Breton, "has value only insofar as it is alive to reverberations of the future." And indeed every highly developed art form stands at the intersection of three lines of development. First, technology is working toward a particular form of art. Before film appeared, there were little books of photos that could be made to flit past the viewer under the pressure of the thumb, presenting a boxing match or a tennis match; then there were coin-operated peepboxes in bazaars, with image sequences kept in motion by the turning of a handle. Second, traditional art forms, at certain stages in their" development, strain laboriously for effects which later are effortlessly achieved by new art forms. Before film became established, Dadaist performances sought to stir in their audiences reactions which Chaplin then elicited more naturally. Third, apparently insignificant social changes often foster a change in reception which benefits only the new art form. Before film had started to create its public, images (which were no longer motionless) were received by an assembled audience in the Kaiserpanorama. Here the audience faced a screen into which stereoscopes were fitted, one for each spectator. In front of these stereoscopes single images automatically appeared, remained briefly in view, and then gave way to others. Edison still had to work with similar means when he presented the first film strip-before the movie screen and projection were known; a small audience gazed into an apparatus in which a sequence of images was shown. Incidentally, the institution of the Kaiserpanorama very clearly manifests a dialectic of development. Shortly before film turned the viewing of images into a collective activity, image viewing by the individual, through the stereoscopes of these soon outmoded establishments, was briefly intensified, as it had been once before in the isolated contempJation of the divine image by the priest in the cella. [Benjamin's note. Andre Breton (1896-1966), French critic, poet, and editor, was the chief promoter and one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, publishing the first Manifeste du surrealisme in 1924. In Zurich in 1916, an international group of exiles disgusted by World War I, and by the bourgeois ideologies that had brought it about, launched Dada, an avant-garde movement that attempted to radically change both the work of art and society. Dadaist groups were active in Berlin, New York, Paris, and elsewhere during the war and into the 1920s, recruiting many notable artists, writers, and performers capable of shocking their audiences at public gatherings. On Chaplin, see note 13 above. Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) patented more than a thousand inventions over a sixty-year period, including the microphone, the phonograph, the incandescent electric lamp, and the alkaline storage battery. He supervised the invention of the Kinetoscope in 1891; this boxlike peep-show machine allowed individuals to view moving pictures on a film loop funning on spools between an electric lamp and a shutter. He built the first film studio, the Black Maria, in 1893, and later founded his own company for the production of projected films. The Kaiserpanorama (Imperial Panorama), located in a Berlin arcade, consisted of a dome-like apparatus presenting stereoscopic views to customers seated around it. See Benjamin~s "Imperial Panorama" (Chapter 6 in this volume), excerpted from his Berlin Childhood around :1900 (1938).-Trans.]

Of course, a comprehensive analysis of these films should not overlook their double meaning. It should start from the ambiguity of situations which have both a comic and a horrifying effect. As the reactions of children show, comedy and horror are closely related. In the face of certain situations, why shouldn't we be allowed to ask which reaction is the more human? Some recent Mickey Mouse films offer situations in which such a question seems justified. (Their gloomy and sinister fire-magic, made technically possible by color film, highlights a feature which up to now has been present only covertly, and shows how easily fascism takes over "revolutionary" innovations in this field too.) What is revealed in recent Disney films was latent in some of the earlier ones: the cozy acceptance of bestiality and violence as inevitable concomitants of existence. This renews an old tradition which is far from reassuring-the tradition inaugurated by the dancing hooligans to be found in depictions of medieval pogroms, of whom the "riff-raff" in Grimm's fairy tale of that title are a pale, indistinct rear-guard. [Benjamin's note. The internationally successful Mickey Mouse cartoon series developed out of the character of Mortimer Mouse, introduced in 1927 by the commercial artist and cartoon producer Walt Disney (1901-1966), who made outstanding technical and aesthetic contributions to the development of animation between 1927 and 1937, and whose short animated films of the thirties won praise from critics for their visual comedy and their rhythmic and unconventional technical effects. See Benjamin's "Mickey Mouse" (1931), in this volume. "Riff-raW' translates "LumpengesindeJ," the title of a story in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's collection of tales, Kil1der- und Hausmarchel1 (Nursery and Household Tales; 1812, 1815).-Trans.]

Think about the point he makes here with respect to our moment. The trend of the difference between readers and writers has only gotten smaller. We are all writers and posters, shaping our public image and broadcasting our worldview on social media platforms.

It should be noted in passing that proletarian class consciousness, which is the most enlightened form of class consciousness, fundamentally transforms the structure of the proletarian masses. The class-conscious proletariat forms a compact mass only from the outside, in the minds of its oppressors. At the moment when it takes up its struggle for liberation, this apparently compact mass has actually already begun to loosen. It ceases to be governed by mere reactions; it makes the transition to action. The loosening of the proletarian masses is the work of solidarity. In the solidarity of the proletarian class struggle, the dead, undialectical opposition between individual and mass is abolished; for the comrade, it does not exist. Decisive as the masses are for the revolutionary leader, therefore, his great achievement lies not in drawing the masses after him, but in constantly incorporating himself into the masses, in order to be, for them, always one among hundreds of thousands. But the same class struggle which loosens the compact mass of the proletariat compresses that of the petty bourgeoisie. The mass as an impenetrable, compact entity, which Le Bon and others have made the subject of their "mass psychology," is that of the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie is not a class; it is in fact only a mass. And the greater the pressure on it between the two antagonistic classes of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the more compact it becomes. In this mass the emotional elemcnt described in mass psychology is indeed a determining factor. But for that very reason this compact mass forms the antithesis of the proletarian cadre which obeys a collective ratio. In the petty-bourgeois mass, the reactive moment described in mass psychology is indeed a determining factor. But precisely for that reason this compact mass with its unmediated reactions forms the antithesis of the proletarian whose actions are mediated by a task, however momentary. Demonstrations by the compact mass thus always have a panicked quality-whether they give vent to war fever, hatred of Jews, or the instinct for self-preservation. Once the distinction between the compact (that is, petty-bourgeois) mass and the class-conscious, proletarian mass has been dearly made, its operational significance is also dear. This distinction is nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the not uncommon cases when some outrage originally performed by the compact mass becomes, as a result of a revolutionary situation and perhaps within the space of seconds, the revolutionary action of a class. The special feature of such truly historic events is that a reaction by a compact mass sets off an internal upheaval which loosens its composition, enabling it to become aware of itself as an association of class-conscious cadres. Such concrete events contain in very abbreviated form what communist tacticians call "winning over the petty bourgeoisie." These tacticians have a further interest in clarifying this process. The ambiguous concept of the masses, and the indiscriminate references to their mood which are commonplace in the German revolutionary press, have undoubtedly fostered illusions which have had disastrous consequences for the German proletariat. Fascism, by contrast, has made excellent use of these laws-whether it understood them or not. It realizes that the more compact the masses it mobilizes, the better the chance that the counterrevolutionary instincts of the petty bourgeoisie will determine their reactions. The proletariat, on the other hand, is preparing for a society in which neither the objective nor the subjective conditions for the formation of masses will exist any longer. [Benjamin's note. Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), French physician and sociologist, was the author of Psychologie des foules (Psychology of the Crowd; 1895) and other works.Trans.,!

The change noted here in the mode of exhibition-a change brought about by reproduction technology-is also noticeable in politics. The crisis of democracies can be understood as a crisis in the conditions governing the public presentation of politicians. Democracies exhibit the politician directly, in person, before elected representatives. The parliament is his public. But innovations in recording equipment now enable the speaker to be heard by an unlimited number of people while he is speaking, and to be seen by an unlimited number shortly afterward. This means that priority is given to presenting the politician before the recording equipment. Parliaments are becoming depopulated at the same time as theaters. Radio and film are changing not only the function of the professional actor but, equally, the function of those who, like the politician, present themselves before these media. The direction of this change is the same for the film actor and the politician, regardless of their different tasks. It tends toward the exhibition of controllable, transferable skills under certain social conditions, just as sports first called for such exhibition under certain natural conditions. This results in a new form of selection-selection before an apparatus- from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors. [Benjamin's note]

The significance of beautiful semblance is rooted in the age of auratic perception that is now coming to an end. The aesthetic theory of that era was most fully articulated by Hegel, for whom beauty is "the appearance of spirit in its immediate ... sensuous form, created by the spirit as the form adequate to itself" (Hegel, Werke, voL 10, part 2 [Berlin, 1837], p. 121). Although this formulation has some derivative qualities, Hegel's statement that art strips away the "semblance and deception of this false, transient world" from the "true content of phenomena" (Werke, vol. 10, part 1, p. 13) already diverges from the traditional experiential basis of this doctrine. This ground of experience is the aura. By contrast, Goethe's work is still imbued with beautiful semblance as an auratic reality. Mignon, Ottilie, and Helena partake of that reality. "The beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil"; this is the quintessence of Goethe's view of art, and that of antiquity. The decline of this view makes it doubly urgent that we look back at its origin. This lies in mimesis as the primal phenomenon of all artistic activity. The mime presents what he mimes merely as semblance. And the oldest form of imitation had only a single material to work with: the body of the mime himself. Dance and language, gestures of body and lips, are the earliest manifestations of mimesis.-The mime presents his subject as a semblance. One could also say that he plays his subject. Thus we encounter the polarity informing mimesis. In mightily interfolded like cotyledons, slumber the two aspects of art: semblance and play. Of course, this polarity can interest the dialectician only if it has a historical role. And that is, in the case. This role is determined by the world-historical conflict between the first and second technologies. Semblance is the most abstract-but therefore the most ubiquitous-schema of all the magic procedures of the first technology, whereas play is the inexhaustible reservoir of all the experimenting of the second. Neither the concept of semblance nor that of play is foreign to traditional aesthetics; and to the extent that the two concepts of cult value and exhibition value are latent in the other pair of concepts at issue here, they say nothing new. But this abruptly changes as soon as these latter concepts lose their indifference toward history. They then lead to a practical insight-namely, that what is lost in the withering of semblance and the decay of the aura in works of art is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play. This space for play is widest in film. In film, the element of semblance bas been entirely displaced by the element of play. The positions which photography had occupied at the expense of cult value have thus been massively fortified. In film, the element of semblance has yielded its place to the element of play, which is allied to the second technology. Ramuz recently summed np this alliance in a formulation which, in the guise of a metaphor, gets to the heart of the matter. He says: "We are currently witnessing a fascinating process. The various sciences, which up to now have each operated alone in their special fields, are beginning to converge in their object and to be combined into a single science: chemistry, physics, and mechanics are becoming interlinked. It is as if we were eyewitnesses to the enormously accelerated completion of a jigsaw puzzle whose first pieces took several millennia to put in place, whereas the last, because of their contours, andto the astonishment of the spectators, are moving together of their own accord" (Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, nature" [peasant, Nature], Mesure. 4 [October 1935]). These words give ultimate expression to the dimension of play in the second technology, which reinforces that in art. [Benjamin's note. It should be kept in mind that Schein can mean "luster» and " as well as "semblance" or "illusion." On Hegel, see note 10 above. The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) visited Italy in 1786-1788 and in 1790, gaining new inspiration from his encounter with Greco-Roman antiquitYj a classically pure and restrained conception of beauty informs his creation of such female figures as Mignon in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; 1796), Ottilie in Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities; 1809), and Helena in Faust, Part II (1832). Benjamin's definition of the beautiful as "the object in its veil' is quoted (with the italics added) from his essay "Goethe's Elective Affinities" (1924-1925), in Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 19.13-1926 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 351, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) was a Swiss writer resident in Paris (1902-1914), where he collaborated with the composer Igor Stravinsky, for whom he wrote the text of Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale; 1918). He also published novels on rural life that combine realism with allegory.Tram.]

Rudolf Arnheim, Film als Kunst (Berlin, 1932), pp. 176-177. In this context, certain apparently incidental details of film directing which diverge from practices on the stage take on added interest. For example, the attempt to let the actor perform without makeup, as in Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc. Dreyer spent months seeking the forty actors who constitute the Inquisitors' tribunal. Searching for these actors was like hunting for rare props. Dreyer made every effort to avoid resemblances of age, build, and physiognomy in the actors. (See Maurice Schultz, "Le Maquillage" [Makeup]' in CArt cinematographique,vol. 6 IParis, 1929], pp. 65-66.) If the actor thus becomes a prop, the prop, in its turn, not infrequently functions as actor. At any rate, it is not unusual for films to allocate a role to a prop. Rather than selecting examples at random from the infinite number available, let us take just one especially revealing casco A clock that is running will always be a disturbance on the stage, where it cannot be permitted its role of measuring time. Even in a naturalistic play, real-life time would conflict with theatrical time. In view of this, it is most revealing that film-where appropriate-can readily make use of time as measured by a clock. This feature, more than many others, makes it clear that-circumstances permitting-each and every prop in a film may perform decisive functions. From here it is but a step to Pudovkin's principle, which states that "to connect the performance of an actor with an object, and to build that performance around the object, ... is always one of the most powerful methods of cinematic construction" (V. L Pudovkin, FilmRegie und Filmmanuskript [Film Direction and the Film Script] (Berlin, 1928), p. 126). Film is thus the first artistic medium which is able to show how matter plays havoc with human beings [wie die Materie dem Menschen mitstJieltj. It follows that films can be an excellent means of materialist exposition. [Benjamin's note. See, in English, Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 138. Arnheim (1904- 2007), German-born Gestalt psychologist and critic, wrote on film, literature, and art for various Berlin newspapers and magazines from the mid- 1920s until 1933. He came to the United States in 1940 and taught at Sarah Lawrence, the New School for Social Research, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. Besides his work on film theory, his publications include Art and Visual Perception (1954), Picasso's Guemica (1962), and Visual Thinking (1969). La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, was released in 1928. Dreyer (1889-1968), Danish writer-director and film critic, is known for the exacting, expressive design of his films, his subtle camera movement, and his concentration on the physiognomy and innerpsychology of his characters. Among his best-known works are Vampyr (1931), Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath; 1943)j and Ordet (1955). Vsevolod IIariollovich Pudovkin (1893-1953), one of the masters of Soviet silent cinema, wrote and directed films-such as Mother (1926), The End of St. Petersburg (1927), and Storm over Asia (1928)-that showed the evolution of individualized yet typical characters in a social environment. l-le also published books on film technique and .film acting.-Trans.]

the process of distancing oneself from one's own feelings or activities, such as may occur in mental illness or as a symptom of emotional distress.

Beginning in 1917, the Italian playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello(1867-1936) achieved a series of successes on the stage that made him world famous in the 19205. He is best known for his plays Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author; 1921) and Enrico IV (Henry IV; 1922).

Paavo Nurmi (1897-1973), a Finnish long-distance runner, was a winnerat the Olympic Games in Antwerp (1920), Paris (l924), and Amsterdam(1928).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paavo_Nurmi

Meaning the camera

https://www.britannica.com/art/montage-filmmaking

Franz Werfel, "Ein Sommernachtstraum: Ein Film von Shakespeare und Reinhardt," Neues Wiener Journal, cited in Lu, November 15, 1935. [Benjamin's note. Werfel (1890-1945) was a Czech-born poet) novelist, and playwright associated with Expressionism. He emigrated to the United States in 1940. Among his works are Del' Abituriententag (The Class Reunion; 1928) and Das Lied lion Bernadette (The Song of Bernadette; 1941). Max Reinhardt (Maximilian Goldman; 1873-1943) was Germany's most important stage producer and director during the first third of the twentieth century and the single most significant influence on the classic German silent many of whose directors and actors trained under him at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. His direct film activity was limited to several early German silents and to the American movie A Midsumme1' Night's Dream (1935), which he codirected with William Dieterle.-Tral1s.]

Charlie Chaplin wrote and directed The Gold Rush in 1925. On Chaplin and A Woman of Paris, see note 13 above. Giovanni da Fiesole (1387-1455), known as Fra Angelico, was an Italian Dominican friar, celebrated for his "angelic~) virtues, and a painter in the early Renaissance Florentine style. Among his most famous works are his frescoes at Orvieto, which reflect a characteristically serene religious attitude.

1. Séverin-Mars, cited ibid., p. 100. [Benjamin's note. Severin-Mars was a playwright and film actor who starred in three of Gance's films: La Dixieme Symphonie, Taccuse, and La Roue.-Trans.]

Abel Gance, "Le Temps de l'image est venu!" in L'art cinematographique. vol. 2, p. 101. [Benjamin's note. On Gance see note 3 above.-Trans.

On the nineteenth-century quarrel between painting and photography, see Benjamin's "Little History of Photography" (1931), in this volume, and Benjamin) The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 684-692.

A Woman of Paris (1923)-which Benjamin refers to by its French title, L'Opinion publique-was written and directed by the London-born actor and director Charlie Chaplin (Charles Spencer Chaplin; 1889-1977). Chaplin came to the United Stares with a vaudeville act in 1910 and made his motion picture debut there in 1914, eventually achieving worldwide renown as a comedian. He starred in and directed such films as The Kid (1921), The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), Modem Times (1936), and The Great Dictator (1940).

Eugene Atget (1857-1927), French photographer, spent his career in obscurity making pictures of Paris and its environs. He is widely recognized as one of the leading photographers of the twentieth century. See Benjamin's "Little History of Photography" (1931), in this volume.

The aim of revolutions is to accelerate this adaptation. Revolutions are innervations of the collective-or, more precisely, efforts at innervation on the part of the new, historically unique collective which has its organs in the new technology. This second technology is a system in which the mastering of elementary social forces is a precondition for playing [das Spiel] with natural forces. Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach. For in revolutions, it is not only the second technology which asserts its claims vis-a-vis society. Because this technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action [SpielraumJ, immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he registers his demands on it. Furthermore the collective makes the second technology its own, the more keenly individuals belonging to the collective feel how little they have received of what was due them under the dominion of the first technology. In other words, it is the individual liberated by the liquidation of the first technology who stakes his claim. No sooner has the second technology secured its initial revolutionary gains than vital questions affecting the individual-questions of love and death which had been buried by the first technology-once again press for solutions. Fourier's work is the first historical evidence of this demand. [Benjamin's note. Charles Fourier (1772-1837), French social theorist and reformer, urged that society be reorganized into self-contained agrarian cooperatives which he called "phalansteries." Among his works are Theorie des quatre mouvements (Theory of Four Movements; 1808) and L..e Nouveau Monde industl'iel (The New Industrial World; 1829-1830). He is an important figure in Benjamin's Arcades Project. The term Spielraum; in this note, in note 23, and in the text, literally means "pJayspace," "space for play."-Trans.]

the mental process by which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating it to the body of ideas he or she already possesses.

This polarity cannot come into its own in the the aesthetics of Idealism, which conceives of beauty as something fundamentally undivided (and thus excludes anything polarized). Nonetheless, in Hegel this polarity announces itself as clearly as possible within the limits of Idealism. We quote from his Vorlesungen zur Philosophie der Geschichte [Lectures on the Philosophy of History: "Images were known of old. In those early days piety required them for worship, but it could do without beautiful images. Such images might even be disturbing. In every beautiful image, there is also something external-although, insofar as the image is beautiful its spirit still speaks to the human being. But religious worship, being no more than a spiritless torpor of the soul, is directed at a thing . ... Fine art arose, .. in the church ... ,though art has now gone beyond the ecclesiastical principle." Likewise, the following passage from the Vorlesu1'lgen iJber die Asthetik [Lectures on Aesthetics] indicates that Hegel sensed a problem here: "We are beyond the stage of venerating works of art as divine and as objects deserving our worship. Today the impression they produce is of a more reflective kind, and the emotions they arouse require a more stringent test.)' [Benjamin's note. The German Idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) accepted the chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1818. His lectures on aesthetics and the philosophy of history (delivered 1820-1829) were later published by his editors, with the text based mainly on notes taken by his students.-Trans.]

In film, the technological reproducibility of the product is not an externally imposed condition of its mass dissemination, as it is, say, in literature or painting. The technological reproducibility of films is based directly all the technology of their production. This not only makes possible the mass dissemination of films in the most direct way, but actually enforces it. It does so because the process of producing a film is so costly that an individual who could afford to buy a painting, for example, could not afford to buy a master print of a film. It was calculated in 1927 that, in order to make a profit, a major film needed to reach an audience of nine million. Of course, the advent of sound film [in that year] initially caused a movement in the opposite direction: its audience was restricted by language boundaries. And that coincided with the emphasis placed on national interests by fascism. But it is less important to note this setback (which in any case was mitigated by dubbing) than to observe its connection with fascism. The simultaneity of the two phenomena results from the economic crisis. The same disorders which led, in the world at large) to an attempt to maintain existing property relations by brute force induced film capital, under the threat of crisis, to speed up the development of sound film. Its introduction brought temporary relief, not only because sound film attracted the masses back into the cinema but also because it consolidated new capital from the electricity industry with that of film. Thus, considered from the outside, sound film promoted national interests; but seen from the inside, it helped internationalize film production even more than before. [Benjamin's note. By "the economic crisis," Benjamin refers to the devastating consequences, in the United States and Europe, of the stock market crash of October 1929.-Trans.]

The French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) was a central figure in the Symbolist movement, which sought an incantatory language divorced from all referential function.

Applying Kant's idea of the pure and disinterested existence of the work of art, the French philosopher Victor Cousin made use of the phrase I 'art /pour l'art ("art for art's sake") in his 1818 lecture "Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien" ("On the True, the Beautiful, and the Good"). The idea was later given currency by writers such as Theophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Baudelaire.

This occurs because, according to Benjamin, the tendency for developments in the media has been to bring objects and experiences closer to us. Think, for example, of the Mona Lisa. Before it was possible to take a picture of this painting and circulate that picture around the world we would have to travel to the Louvre to see it. Benjamin is trying to get at the differences between these experiences.

Arguably, social media today is a further development of this tendency because, not only does it bring media we consume closer to us through our phones and computers, but we also now assume we can directly interact with this media in various ways. For instance, we can tweet at celebrities and manipulate and broadcast our versions of songs on TikTok.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin

"Einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag." At stake in Benjamin's formulation is an interweaving not just of time and space--einmalige Erscheinung, literally "one-time appearance"-but of far and near, eine Ferne suggesting both "a distance" in space or time and "something remote," however near it (the distance, or distant thing, that appears) may be.

Alois Riegl (1858-1905} was an Austrian art historian who argued that different formal orderings of art emerge as expressions of different historical epochs. He is the author of Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Questions of Style: Toward a History of Ornament; 1893) and Die spatromische Kunst-Industrie nach den Funden in Osterreich-Ungarn (1901). The latter has been translated by Rolf Winkes as Late Roman Art Industry (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneidet; 1985), Franz Wickhoff (1853-1909), also an Austrian art historian, is the author of Die Wiener Genesis (The Vienna Genesis; 1895), a study of the sumptuously illuminated, early sixth-century A.D. copy of the biblical book of Genesis preserved in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_School_of_Art_History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Genesis

Abel Gance, "Le Temps de l'imagc est venu!" (It Is Time for the Image!), in Leon Pierre-Quint, Germaine Dulac, Lionel Landry, and Abel L'Al't cinematographique, vol. 2 (Paris, 1927), pp. 94-96. [Benjamin's note.]

Gance (1889-1981) was a French film director whose epic films J'accuse (1919), La Roue (1922), and Napoleon (1927) made innovative use of such devices as superimposition, rapid intercutting, and split screen.-Trans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Gance

This is a key term for this essay, and Benjamin continually defines what he mean by this throughout.

From Oxford Languages: the most perfect or typical example of a quality or class. "he was the quintessence of political professionalism"

The process of printing from a flat surface treated so as to repel the ink except where it is required for printing. This comes before photography.

Benjamin was writing in a period when it wasn't common to discuss art and politics as related to each other. He is saying that tendency leaves art open to be manipulated by "fascists" who would engage in social control of populations. In fact, Hitler's Germany--which Benjamin fled--deployed art and movie making to disseminate propaganda. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/leni-riefenstahl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

Benjamin is saying that Marxism, in general, has not dealt with what art produced by workers would look like or sound like after the Marxist revolution where capitalists are thrown out of power and the workers take over and form a classless society. He is writing in 1935, so this is not true any longer, but this gets at one of his central questions: how does the ability for regular people to produce and reproduce art--through the invention of the photography camera--change power dynamics? How does it empower regular people to make and unmake images? How does this change how these images make meaning?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prognostic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epnuZRQpy7Q

SUPERSTRUCTURE (Marx): the ideologies that dominate a particular era, all that "men say, imagine, conceive," including such things as "politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc." (Marx and Engels, German Ideology 47). For Marx, the superstructure is generally dependent on the modes of production that dominate in a given period. https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/marxism/terms/superstructure.html

https://www.britannica.com/topic/proletariat

Karl Marx (1818-1883) analyzed the capitalist mode of production in Das Kapital (3 vols., 1867, 1885, 1895), which was carried to completion by his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820-1895).

Madame Claire de Duras, nee Kersaint (1778-1828), the wife of Duc Amedee de Duras, field marshal under Louis XVIII, was the author of two novels, Ourika (1823) and Edouard (1825). She presided over a brilliant saIon in Paris. Benjamin cites Madame de Duras in the original French.

This interesting because here you are implying that sound quality-or details about the sound of any given music recording--is more important than, say, listening to music with a big group of people.

This is interesting because mainstream rap and hip hop has, historically, been hostile to queer culture.

Great examples

Interesting connection

This is a very interesting connection.

This is interesting. Why has privacy become such an integral part of our listening experience?

This is a very interesting connection because this song is directly inspired by the disco movement.

This is interesting. Could you say more about how these devices structure your relationship to public spaces and city life?

Interesting connection

Interesting observation

Very interesting.

Cool!

This is an interesting conneciton.

This is an interesting point about how media technology has increasingly allowed people to manipulate content.

This presents an interesting alternative to the private experience described by Alt and Krukowski.

These are very good summaries of these essays. How would you compare them?

Interesting connections here

Think about this in the context of how Hughes discusses authority in his essay.

Interesting point: so, we need to think carefully about context when it comes to the choice of how we listen to music.

Very interesting. I haven't thought of this connection before.

Great connection

Interesting point.

This is interesting. I don't know much about the relationship between music and gaming.

Interesting.

Can you think of ways these two ideas are related?

These are interesting points. You do a nice job of explaining the relevance of this story for today.

Yes, I think this is where Melville wants our focus to be.

This is a good way to put this technique

Important points

Very interesting points.

Interesting point.

Interesting. say more about this.

Interesting points here

This is interesting. Say more about this point.

This is an important point.

Great points

Great point

Great choice of words

Yes, he is a complex character.

Important point

So, what is your take on this situation?

Say more about this. Why?

Say more about this.

But what about Benito Cereno?

Interesting points.

Very important points.

This is a really interesting take on the story.

This is a very important point.

Very interesting points.

Interesting take. I'm wondering if you could say more about your sympathy for Benito since he was engaged in such a morally bad activity. Do you see him as caught up in a bad system?

I'm not sure what you mean here.

Say more about this. What are the two sides?

Interesting. I hadn't considered this.

Good point.

Yes, good and important points.

Good points

I'm not sure what you mean here.

An important point

Good points.

Good point.

Excellent assessment

This is a really interesting observation

Interesting points

Good point

How does this change your experience?

Great point

Interesting criticism of the podcast.

Great point

Great example!

Interesting

Great points.

Why do you agree?