questions for April 12th

Posted on April 11, 2007

a reminder:

We won't start King Lear until next Tuesday (April 17th); we'll finish up Angel Heart this Thursday, especially in relation to Rene Girard's theory of the "surrogate" or "sacrificial victim" (whose relevance to Angel Heart just started to come into focus at the end of class on Tuesday).

So, for Thursday's class.
1. If you didn't watch the film, you still have a chance (it's on reserve in the Library / Media-Resources).
2. If you don't feel you have any grasp on Girard's theory, re-read "Oedipus and the Surrogate Victim"; and think about the implications for an understanding of Angel Heart specifically but, more generally, for a new way of conceptualizing our notions of religion and religious ritual as relevant to the Jewish and Christian traditions (that is, how are notions of "sacrifice" and "surrogate victimhood" relevant to these traditions?). I asked you about this in one of the discussion questions for Tuesday, and we'll definitely come back to this on Thursday.
3. READ: "Death of Satan" (e-reserve reading, from a book of the same title--also on reserve--by Andrew Delbanco). Ask yourself what he means by the "death of Satan" (an interesting claim in relation to Angel Heart where Satan is very much not dead).

So, the questions; do ONE:

1. We'll start with this question, and, time permitting, end with it (in between you may have changed your mind): what exactly constitutes the "tragedy" of Angel Heart? You can just answer however you see fit, though implicitly you are saying something about what constitutes tragedy in general (so think about the implications of your response for our study as a whole). You might ask yourself if Angel Heart is "tragic" in the way Macbeth is tragic. Or, since so much of tragedy (as an art of story-telling) depends on how the story ends, ask yourself about the relation between the end of the story (for example, Mickey Rourke's character's plaintive "I know who I am"--ring any bells with Memento?--and the possibilities of seeing the story as a tragedy? Does it matter "who" we think is saying this line ... Harold or Johhny?

2. In The Birth of Tragedy (pp. 49-50 in our text), Nietzsche distinguishes between Aryan (including ancient Greek) notions of "sacrilege" and Semitic (that is, biblical) notions of sacrilege, embodied especially in the "myth of the Fall" (Adam and Eve's definitely, but perhaps also Satan's fall). He doesn't address this directly, but we might note that biblical notions of the fall eventually come to be understood in terms of "evil" (as embodied in a character named Satan; note that the snake in the story of the fall in Genesis 3 is NOT necessarily Satan in disguise, no matter what Milton's grand Paradise Lost might say). The Greeks certainly thought in terms of "bad things happen," but they didn't as a rule ascribe this to the malevolent intent of an "evil" being operating at some cosmic level. So does that Jewish / Christian notion of "evil" affect tragedies that include that notion of evil (such as Macbeth and Angel Heart)? If so, how or why?