Week 8

Week 8 brings Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job into focus (for Blake students). This is an extraordinary series of etchings which expresses the heart of Blake’s revisioning of Christianity from a religion controlled by human morality (Good and Evil) to a religion open to the mystery of creation. How Blake achieves this is the subject of our exploration and we will be going next week to the Art Gallery of NSW to see Blake’s original engravings. Through a story of pain and torment Blake transformed a pious, joyless Job into a rollicking musician, as can be seen in the contrast between the first and last plates of the series:

In our other units this week we have our indigenous students on campus for their second residential. With them we are exploring the Language of Politics and Drama in Twentieth Century Literature: Orwell and Pinter are two authors on the agenda. On campus Twentieth Century Lit. also moves to Language and Politics with George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and 1984 as key texts for this coming week. In Australian Literature we move into 21st Century poets (Aitken, Bellear, Davies, Frankland, Kinsella, Ryan, Moreton,Watson– explore all these links!) and also begin preparing for drama presentations at the end of semester. In Clemente Mission Australia we are in the midst of Tim Winton and Kate Chopin and the question of what are the essential differences between poetry and prose.
Enjoy your week
MG