BASC70304 - Two Philosophical Essayists, Stunning: W. H. Auden's The Dyer's Hand and William H. Gass's On Being Blue

Course Description

Instructor Claudia Traudt.  W.H. Auden’s masterful 1962 essay collection The Dyer’s Hand is profoundly personally steeped and revealing – in his intercourse with and making of art, in his engagement with the nature of things -as his title, echoing Shakespeare’s great outcrying Sonnet 111(…and almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand…) suggests. Consider alone that phrase – “like the dyer’s hand” – what all it may image, summon, connect, engender. In his slender 1975 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William H. Gass does just that: considers all (or damn-near all); the essay images; summons; connects; engenders in revery on and analysis of “on being blue.”  Auden’s essays on art and literature here are classical and several, including many drawn from his Oxford Professor of Poetry lectures: “Making, Knowing and Judging,” “The Dyer’s Hand,” “Two Bestiaries,” “The Well of Narcissus.”  William H. Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry is single. And iconoclastic: MADE of art, it is stringently, penetratingly philosophical and analytical. A work of philosophy, it accomplishes via the means of art: image, senses, emotions, mind-with-body; memory-imagination-experience-deduction-projection in amalgam, connection-building. Both texts thrill, challenge, illumine. Course code: BASC70304 Philosophy