Colloquium III

For those who are curious or who'd like to get a head start ordering/finding/reading books, I've begun posting information about our fall Colloquium III course on the wiki. Feel free to go check it out, and let me know if you have any questions.

Summer Film Series @ ND: 8/13-8/15

I just received a brochure in the mail the other day reminding me of the 2009 Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival. The mainstage production will be Twelfth Night, which runs the last two weeks of August. Also worth mentioning, though, is the film series they are running at the same time. If you'd like an excuse to watch some good films that will, among other things, prep you for Colloquium III (they all treat some aspect of 16th- and 17th-century England), go check out Twelfth Night (with Ben Kingsley and Helena Bonham Carter), Stage Beauty (with Claire Danes and Billy Crudup) or Shakespeare in Love (with Joseph Fiennes...think Luther....and Gwyneth Paltrow).

Career options - free online seminar

Starting and Building a Career in the Nonprofit World

Tuesday, April 21, at 12 noon, U.S. Eastern time

http://philanthropy.com/live/2009/04/career/chat.php3

College students preparing to graduate this spring are facing extraordinary uncertainty about their career prospects. Not only is the job market tight, but they also confront increased competition from experienced nonprofit workers who have been laid off and businesspeople who want to change careers.

So what can new graduates do to land their first professional job? How can they stand out in a crowd of more experienced applicants? What should a college senior be doing now to prepare for a future career in the nonprofit world? And how can people who have been working for a few years for charities and foundations make the most of their opportunities?

Join us on Tuesday, April 21, as we explore these questions and others.

Related Articles

• Rethinking Nonprofit Jobs (11/13/2008)
• A Handbook on How to Start a Nonprofit Career (9/4/2008)

Digi-topia?

Here's a thought: Does the internet and the many online spaces/forums it provides (I'm thinking especially of SecondLife) offer utopic domains....digi-topias?? Is the internet a true commonwealth? Perhaps more of a capitalist/commonwealth hybrid (especially given how much money changes hands...or digi-hands...online)?

Food for thought for tomorrow's discussion on Thomas More.

Images of the Carnivalesque

One possible thread we might follow in our discussion of Bakhtin's notion of medieval folk humor (the carnivalesque) is how Erasmus's The Praise of Folly (according to Bakhtin, a literary example of "high " intellectual, collective laughter) compares to any visual representations of folly or carnival during the period. Something that came to mind is Pieter Bruegel the elder's Netherlandish Proverbs (1559, see above) in which Bruegel paints over one hundred scenes of common proverbs on one canvas. The result is a kind of symbolic chaos. Wikipedia offers an overview of the various proverbs-come-alive, with details explaining each scene. Bruegel's The Wedding Dance (1566, the one in our HUST classroom on the back wall by the windows) might also help us think about the relationship between carnival, satire, the Reformation and early Renaissance humanist thought. How do you think Bakhtin would interpret the paintings? Erasmus?

Performing Folly

I was struck in this recent reading of Erasmus's The Praise of Folly by the emphasis on theatricality. Shakespeare's famous line from As You Like It "all the world's a stage," seems fitting here with all of the many references to life as a show...something we "put on" for the sake of our audience (one another). It is especially complicated by the fact that Folly is herself a performer of sorts: an actor on a stage (almost pulpit-like in Holbein's image in your Norton). This emphasizes (ready for this?) the many rings of identity and selfhood. So, is Erasmus suggesting that Folly is but a performance, or is it that having Folly act her part emphasizes the distance between appearance and reality? Also, what would the implications of "life as performance" be for someone like Erasmus: humanist, priest/scholar, traveler, trans-European national (Dutch, yet spoke Latin and lived all over Europe during his adult life)? And, lastly, if Folly is an actor, does that increase the level of Erasmus's satire, or make it, well...true in its fiction? A satire of a satire of a satire? Whoa...my head is spinning.

Literary Portraits

As you complete your reading this week, don't forget to check out the Castiglione Resource page on the wiki. On it, I've linked to the very useful work-in-progress begun by the Castiglione "wiki note-takers". You'll also see a few questions I posted regarding the theme of Renaissance portraiture:

• What is the purpose of the portrait?
  
• Can you ever really capture the "true" essence of a person?
  
• What techniques to painters use? writers?
  
• Why might "portraiture" be an appropriate theme for thinking about the connections between Renaissance cultural thought, painting, and literature?