Over coffee in the morning, when it is light enough by sunlight, I typically do some morning reading for the Theory of Literature course I'm following from the Yale website, taught by Professor Paul Fry.
I started the course a couple months ago before we left for France (I even had one of the lectures downloaded to my iPad so I could listen to it on the plane).
The course is magnificent. It has changed the way I think about not only art, but the entire world, although I am still only on the tenth lecture. I have been moving through it slowly, taking extremely detailed notes, and then rewriting them later.
Although I didn't do so at first, I now faithfully do all the assigned readings before listening to the next lecture. For a while, that meant using Google to find PDF's online of the assigned essays, if available, but a couple weeks ago I finally bought the textbook, The Critical Tradition, on Amazon.
It's a very large anthology of essays covering the history of criticism starting in Antiquity and going all the way to contemporary times. Most of the assigned readings for Fry's course are from later in the book, but, having felt so much joy in what I learned so far from Fry, and inspired by wanting to learn as much as possible about the subject in general, I decided to read the entire book from the beginning, even if it took a year (which it probably will).
This morning I made my way through a few pages of the included passage rom Plato's Republic, which is included as the first essay in the anthology. It is the section Plato famously describes poets and artists as imitators who are "thrice removed" from truth.
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