The four critics who spoke today were Helen Cixous, Wolfgang Iser, Sigmund Freud and Edward SaId. We all have to post on our blog at some point in time the one essential thing about our critic(courtesy of the exam).

After a brief timeslot allowing for thoughts on the election(during which I voiced my general-but-hopefully-still-pertinent opposition to stupidity), we discussed the the importance to our lives of intellectual excitement and adventure, two of the main springboards for finding which are art and song.

We then went on to Matthew Arnold, who described poetry as "criticism of life", and felt that poetry as a substitute for religon. This naturally leads into intriguing discussions of what is or is not provided by religon in the first place, but if Arnold is talking about a feeling of the Sublime, or of something greater than ourselves and yet at the same time of ourselves, then I'd say just from my own experiance I tend to have such encounters through art rather than institutional religous avenues. But this is another story for another blog perhaps. But there was a quote from Nietzche today that I think ties into this in an interesting way : "Truth is a mobile army of metaphors."

We also have been assigned by Friday to come up with a touchstone piece of literature, for us. Or principly a passage that we find ourselves always coming back to and enlightened by. I see what I can find(or have already found rather).