What is Tradition?

This is a lecture on the subject of tradition in literature. While it does deal with the approach to the tradition taken by T.S. Eliot and the Modernists, it considers the topic more broadly and makes some distinctions that help understand, among other things, how tradition differs from mere chronology, let alone the relativistic concept of history.

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[bradley]

Your lectures are a treasure trove of insights and knowledge. Absolutely brilliant!!!
Thank you!

[夏风-ry]

The fourth class, I will follow the whole courses. Thank you so much!

[dicksonmukisa]

We've been blessed, and nurtured by the best.

[nathanwoodsy]

Hello Dr. Masson,

Somewhat of a side note, but I've heard you mention before that you are skeptical of the general claim Bloom put forth in his "The Anxiety of Influence."

While I'm sympathetic to your case, I find it difficult not to side with Goethe when he remarked later in life how immensely grateful he was that as a German, he did not have to contend early in his career with Shakespeare, going so far as to say had he been confronted with his work early on as a dramatist he never would have started on his path.

All that to say, could the rejection of tradition also spring from a reasonable albeit cowardly tapping out when confronted with the full weight of past achievements, something past generations were spared to a much greater degree, but which our technology has brought full force to our awareness?

[andreyrussian]

Reminds to me it is like theological criticism of canon by heretics. As if canon and church are not one thing but mixture of many different things,

[czarquetzal]

Although I am Kantian, I still consider T. S. Elliott's concept of tradition, which, in his case the advocacy of literary modernism, questionable. How can a difficult poem such as " Waste Land" transmit ethicqls norms if the text is nom-didactic? Even If I successfully understand the unity of the text despite of its paradoxical complexity, does it asaure that it automatically mak me e a good man? I doubt that.

[jimsteele]

I haven’t thought about the movie Dead poets Society in a long time but it seems I remember the teacher does not teach the realists and is an imbalance toward the romantic and of course it ends in destruction once again, romanticism always lead the destruction. At the same time some romanticism is good even necessary for the individual.

[khadija.bukhari]

21:36 Why should religion not be the subject that should interest a critic? Don't critic see from all points of view ?