First day of our two-minute critic presentations today, I feel thankful to have been second. Longinus in between Samuel Johnson and Michel Foucault, followed by Julia Kristeva. It was a very informative four minutes.

The rest of the class was spent discussing the idea of innocence, particularly the change(or is it a change?) from innocence to experiance, which so much of the literary landscape in concerned with. It provides a rather thorny(and I use this word deliberately)paradox, because we lose what we once had when we first learn to read, and then we end up--hopefully-- back where we started when we learn how to comprehend anagogy(or the Sublime, as Longinus would call it). Which lead into the last lines from TS Eliot's Four Quartets, and also the beginning of that same poem which contains the description of peering into a rose garden. Gardens, particularly rose gardens in the West, have associations with innocence.

We also noted the dialogue between Sancho Panza and the false squire on page 536 of Don Quixote, where Sancho defends Don Quixote by describing him as rather child-like --"He's simple and innocent. He has no malice."--. This is interesting, given how earlier in the novel Don Quixote describes Sancho as simple and child-like, and goes to show once again how these two characters come to comprehend the world and each other differently because of literature(the influence of it, and the need to embody it).

We also discussed briefly Frye's discussion of the apocolyptic world, and the Romantic world, and the world in which we live. In the world in which we live most everything is dead, the Romantic world most things are living but not all, and in the apocalyptic world everything is alive because everything is metaphor. Or something like that.