Litblog: The World Literature Blog

I think the national flags on some of the wiki pages need to go. The modern flag of communist China has little to do with the China of Li Po, and although the modern Union Jack (1801) is close to the original Union flag of England (1606), it's not the same, and even that flag wouldn't be representative of pre-Jacobean British literature (e.g., Chaucer). My point is that flags change over time, whereas the linguistic and cultural contexts of the literature we've been reading are part of a larger, more unshakeable canon.

Take this as an opportunity to find some appropriate substitutes. If the 1801 Union Jack doesn't adequately represent Milton and his predecessors, what does?

Even though we're not reading Rabelais, I've made a page for him on the Wiki so you can get some sense of why he's such an important Renaissance counterpoint to the kinds of classicism we've been talking about. He's also a great deal of fun.

Dr. Smith

Fascinating piece on new Homer paintings from antiquity here.

Can someone find something a bit more authoritative and detailed than the CNN link on this and put it on the Homer page?

Dr. Smith

Anybody watching the Torino opening ceremonies? Let's find some allusions to Vergil or Dante!


10:55 EST: It's Venus! She's everywhere! A significant addition to the ceremonies, given the fact that she's the mother of the mythological founder of Rome, Aeneas--though Bob Costas didn't think to mention this.

But there's more . . . .














Here's what they're thinking of--Botticelli's Birth of Venus. The painting is actually based on a literary source--a passage from a poem called the Stanze, by the great Renaissance Italian humanist, Poliziano. We'll talk about this painting when we begin looking at Renaissance literature.





No Dante? Did I miss it? The Ferrari doing donuts was pretty cool. But, alas, this doesn't have much to do with world literature . . . .

Any world lit sightings in your own lives?

Some of you who were in Honors 150 have been registering under the old collective 150 userid, and I've been deleting these--I want everyone to have his or her own id. So if you registered under the old id, e-mail me and I'll send you a new invitation e-mail (each e-mail only works once).

Also, Blogger has been having problems this weekend. Just keep checking back if you're unable to access the page.

Here's a NY Times review of a new book on Helen. DB will like the subtitle. Can someone add this to the bibliography? The book, that is--perhaps with a link to the review in brackets immediately following?

I'll send out e-mail invitations to everyone's Longwood account tonight. You should then be able to register and create your own threads, in addition to posting comments. Let's use this thread to figure out what we're going to do here. Here are a few of my thoughts:

• Remember that the World Lit Wiki, in conjunction with the new Litblog, constitute 25% of your final grade for this course, so let's try to put some energy into the thing. In addition to using the blog space to exchange ideas about the readings, let's use it to talk about how we can do something really useful with the World Lit Wiki.
• As for discussing the literature, let's try to be constructive rather than flippant. This would be a really good place to post questions about things we didn't have time to get to in class, or questions about points of significant confusion.
• Here's an idea that just popped into my head: How about using this place to feature world literature "news"? There's a blog called News on the Rialto that does something like this for Shakespeare. Could we do something similar for world literature?