evening redness

These were for the second day (having read through and including the first Timothy Cavendish section). They are a bit less complete than I would have liked, which reflects me running out of time.

finish up list of themes from last time

• the human and its passing
  • see page 3
    • cf Foucault and Crusoe
  • page 6: assumptions about the human
  • 10: the question of civilization
    • it seems eternal, but it will not last
    • it is historical
    • and, it seems for Mitchell, cyclical
  • all forms of government bad (this is Nietzschean)
    • 61
    • all exploit
    • all are human constructions and shall pass
    • Foucault takes this from Nietzsche
    • both are antidotes to Hegel
    • see 62: Zarathustra
  • 76: times change and empires fall
  • 81: hankering for immortality
    • through authorship
    • will it work?
    • we will see something of it in the 1970s section
• chance
  • especially the references in the second part to croupiers, but also the fact of the way that Ewing and Autua meet, etc
  • chance stands opposed to necessity
  • necessity is a property of the eternal as opposed to the historical, but the two become confused
  • what is historical is, in theories contrary to the Hegelian, what is accidental
  • not that it happened on accident, but that what happens could have happened otherwise or could have not happened at all
• textuality
  • amanuensis (see page 45)

plural amanuenses, is a person employed to write or type what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another, and also refers to a person who signs a document on behalf of another under their authority. The term derives from a Latin expression made up of a suffix, -ensis, “belonging to”, and prefix, manu-, “hand”.

The word originated in ancient Rome, for a slave at his master’s personal service “within hand reach”, performing any command; later it was specifically applied to an intimately trusted servant (often a freedman) acting as a personal secretary.

• the issue here connects slavery to textuality as well as to the undecidable nature of the text
  • who writes it?
    • this is an issue in the second part
  • who completes it?
  • who reads it?
• see also 65: giving up share of authorship
  • cf “His Master’s Voice” on page 60
• see also the thematic links between Arys’s musical works and the rest of the text
  • page 52
  • untergehen: to die out or to go down fighting
• love
  • of all kinds, even amongst people who never know one another
• Romanticism
  • page 59 – 60
• this last related to the question of the new
  • are classics good?
  • should we try to overcome them?
  • can we, or are we always simply plagiarizing from the past?
  • see 83: daring ideas in old age

the problem of fiction and reality

• we know how we are “getting” the Adam Ewing section already
  • Robert Frobisher is reading it
  • we also know that Frobisher, who is no authority certainly, questions the authenticity of the journal
    • see 64
• so let’s ask two more questions
  • how are we “getting” the Robert Frobisher section?
    • see 111
    • see 120
  • how are we “getting” the Luisa Rey section?
    • see 156
• what is the implication of the latter?
  • if Luisa Rey (and Rufus Sixsmith) is fictional, does that mean that Robert Frobisher is fictional
  • if Robert Frobisher and Sixsmith are fictional, does that mean that

• see 119: Cloud Atlas Sextet
  • we know of its existence in the present before we know of its existence in the past
  • implies that Luisa has read more of the letters than we have

This entry was posted on 17 March 2013 at 22:43 and is filed under Teaching with tags Cloud Atlas, course materials, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.