Trick or Treat?

Class notes 19 September

Lewd - Doty explains as church origins: from the laity/lay person - not on the inside like the priests
Vulgar = common
Trickster is always lewd, obscene, vulgar, shameless
Ch 3 - Ellen "Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide" 1. ambiguous/anamalous 2. deceiver/trick player 3. shape shifter - "Odyssey" - Menelaus & Proteus 4. Situation inverter - but always moving towards beneficent 5. messenger/imitator of gods 6. Sacred & lewd bricoleur - i.e. When life gives you a bunch of penises... (pg. 37)
Hedgehog and the Fox: Hedgehog as a unified whole (Plato), Fox as multiplier (Aristotle) - other foxes - Shakespeare, John Keats (negative capability), James Joyce (Finnegans Wake as "huge arena of illuminated particulars"
Trickster hates to be domesticated - not homely, always moving away from the home
Inversions of sacred in Middle Ages - Saturnalia, Feast of Fools, Abbeys of Misrule, Charivaris, Mass of the Ass
Desecrate: de-sacre-tize (laughter disempowers)
Ch 12 - Kory "Inhabiting the Space between discourse & story in Trickster narratives" - how tricksters are deconstructors but how does one define a trickster as being undefinable?
Coyote and Road Runner: "pass-through mechanism" Roadrunner as artist paints a tunnel on the canyon wall. He can "pass-through" but the Coyote cannot. The artist is beyond the physical laws that restrain/define the common.
Can a Hedgehog ever read a Fox text and "pass-through" unscathed?
homo ludens - men at play
Oscar Wilde as trickster - decay of the art of lying
forget "leth" - to tell the truth is to be a-lethes

posted by Charity @ 1:27 PM