1. In Byron's thirty months from arrival in Venice to a statement in September 1818, he apparently slept with 250 women, 24 of whom he could name. During this period he produced multiple works of significance, including Manfred and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage? In close reading of his poetry, would it be possible to find references or stylistic choices stemming from such prolific sexual activity, especially regarding the women he remembered?
2. For that matter, why does Johnson keep using Byron as a favorable comparison to several of the subjects of these brilliant essays? Johnson's central thesis is that intellectuals are dangerous in that they provide advice to the masses which is not usually well-thought out but because of their reputation becomes too influential for its own good...and worse, do not practice their preachings if their modes of living, habits with alcohol and illegal drugs, financial situations, and relationships with women are any indication. Byron was, as question one should prove, promiscuous with a record Boswell would have envied and meddled in politics far more than 99% of other poets...and gets a mostly free pass from Johnson. Could it be because unlike Shelley, Tolstoy, Brecht, and others, Byron lived a life of few pretensions and even more minute hypocrisy, or does Johnson have a personal regard for Byron which colors his opinion, much as some of the other essays seem too beyond the purely factual?
(This question is not meant to overly criticize Johnson, whose writings I admire and were discovered at the right time...after a year of Freshman Honors Seminars with Wendy and Sox, it was like breathing the cool mountaintop air of New Mexico to read about history and society from a standpoint miles away from liberalism.)
3. Why did the nineteenth-century dramatists usually publish their plays before attempting stage versions? The only writer for whom this might make sense is George Bernard Shaw thanks to the singular prefaces, but as many teachers and writers of screenwriting advice books have told me, there's no point writing something meant for performance and doing anything with it but try to get it performed. Expecting someone to read a public script and deciding, "Hmmm, I'll perform this!" is unrealistic.
4. In the chapter on Brecht, Johnson describes 1950-1975 being years of fundamental change for Western theatre thanks to the rise of well-financed, independent, and ambitious national companies (with state business but NOT artistic control). In Johnson's words, they performed "not only the classics but 'significant' new plays from an international repertoire." Combined with the very first sentence of the Brecht essay--"Those who want to influence men's minds have long recognized that the theatre is the most powerful medium through which to make the attempt."--I wonder...What classics were chosen, how were they presented in combination with new plays, and what did the selections convey to the audiences artistically, socially, and ideologically? And what were the motives of the company directors making the choices?
5. "Very few people emerged with any credit from the events of May 1968." How did the literary community, a group of artists whose work was based on self-expression and personal freedom, respond to the Paris uprising and its aftereffects? And why, as Johnson said, did Raymond Aron become "an outstanding exception?" Here may be one of the best test cases for Johnson's assertion of the hypocrisy of the intellectual...but a grand comparison is needed.
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