Notes April 5

Fredrick Turner in Class Today!

• His blog: pretty cool so check it out
• Relationship between myth and epic
• myths- describe ways of gods for a tribe or a clan
• epic- justifies the ways of the gods for a city of many clans and tribes
• mythic shape similar to sentence structure
• task of epic
• get ppl together who are not related to each other and make a city together
• bring all the different myths of ppl together to make a big story that is the shared property of big groups of people
• epics are pretty much the same 
• epic storyteller
• creation myth
• world named into being
• hero myth- nature of
• miraculous birth
• blazes a new trail
• represent everyone while still be the extraordinary
• capable of transcendence
• quest/journey
• kinship trials
• descent into underworld
• understanding of animal state
• shaman with animal heads
• animal=unknowing
• human=knowing=mortal
• founding of the city
• history of the people
• definitions of fundamental values
• celebration of new means of communications
• Beast Man/Natural Man
• transformation into
• relationship between beast side and human side after the transformation
• Gilgamesh
• Odysseus & Polyfemus
• must keep hold of human nature to understand animal nature
• battle between
• Beowulf
• can be found in many different cultures
• The Fall
• fall from animality (innocence) into humanity (knowledge & mortality)
• Genesis (which is a epic)
• Paradise Lost - Milton
• claims to justify the ways of god to man
• Judicial review almost
• was knowledge taken freely?
• does this influence the justice of the punishment (mortality)
• Freedom- is there freedom
• Epics define freedom and question its presence
• Epics need cosmology where freedom is possible
• symbol of the branch
• freedom has to be possible because of the branchy system of cosmology
• Must be a documentation of the universe, including humans
• genealogy of freedom
• Fate
• how can fate and freedom coexist?
• freedom stories are always somewhat about fate
• knowledge of fate presupposes a world of freedom
• Freedom= knowledge of fate
• Epic Hero
• defining characteristic he at some point knows his fate
• Does knowledge merit death?
• or vice versa?
• has to understand and analyze the nature of death
• that is why heroes often go into the Underworld
• knowledge is cumulative
• knowledge becomes self knowledge
• knowledge of limits
• big limit is death
• every hero encounters this moment of realization
• ability to imagine the world where we are not
• not a case of punishment but payment for a purchase
• death=knowledge
• were we forced to "buy" that knowledge
• were humans programed with curiosity to cause the trade
• Gods show the experiment of having no limits
• omnipotent, omnipresent, and eternal
• can't know knowledge because have no limits
• no freedom possible
• beyond his comprehension
• creation epic
• ignorant until creates world
• has no limits so can have no knowledge
• second life
• meaning of the return from the Underworld
• starts when choosing to gain knowledge
• making of the bargain freely makes us not mind the price of death
• death is the prize of going through ordeal of coming to know
• knowledge of the unknown
• How we go to be human is the big story
• epics are those stories
• epics bridge myth to history to psychology
• Questions
• Wanderer- personal relationship 
• Odysseus identified with
• Una Po Kiwh pawn
• Mayan Papavu
• play ball with the lords of the death and win
• Prince Hal
• Henry V
• dark 
• sacrificial story (Falstaff)
• Hamlet
• stop thinking- let be 
• revenge
• Dante
• great strength in submission
• Modern epics
• Lady Gaga
• epic structure contains themes
• Lord of the Rings
• some computer games
• archetypes 
• Dungeon and Dragons
• Resurgence of epics 
• cultural movement
• Atlas Shrugged
• creation stories are attempt to understand the universe
• many different descriptions of any way the world is created
• understand reality through stories
• science is a way we tell our "stories" 
• telling the varying levels of truth
• death of animals
• Keats- Ode to Nightingale
• collective life
• doesn't know it is going to die
• doesn't have that knowledge
• doesn't have past, present, future, language, story
• special significance to various ends of us
• time has been generated into something richer and deeper than it is with animals
• end of time in relation to epics
• they don't deal with end time or apocalypse
• epic is about life
• absence of incest in humans
• about the problems of healthy reproducing species
• distraction of true part of epics
• Penelope & Temelous
• bad situation
• Odysseus has to come back or else be buried to end his era and regulate Penelope's role
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