If Shakespeare were alive today, would he write for television? Cantor and Kristol discuss the medium of TV. Paul Cantor explains what can we learn about contemporary America from our popular TV shows. Conversation
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This lecture analyzes Yeats as the poet of a Post-Nietzschean world, having rejected any vision of eternity and embraced human life as a series of historical cycles of creation and destruction; the lecture looks at the opposition between art and life in Yeats’s works and shows how he tries—but ultimately fails—to transcend it. Lecture
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The introductory lecture in Prof. Cantor’s course “Myths of Creation.” It explains the importance of creation myths in Western civilization; it lays out the classical and biblical traditions of creation; and outlines the readings in the course and its focus on the Romantic creation myth, which seeks to overturn in gnostic fashion the values of traditional creation myths. Lecture
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Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) treated as a gnostic creation myth, in which what is created is the book itself, by a mysterious god or gods, who, like the Romantic demiurges, cannot create a decent world for their creatures. Accepting Nietzsche’s idea of the Death of God, Beckett creates a story in which the novelist dies midway, leaving his characters to fend for themselves in the absurd world he leaves behind him. Lecture
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A study of Wagner’s Ring Cycle as a Romantic creation myth, analyzing how it tells the story of an initial harmony with nature, a fall from that unity into the power struggles of civilization, and Wagner’s hope for an apocalypse that would allow for the triumph of love in the world. Lecture
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Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! comically subverts the ideology of the standard American flying saucer movies of the 1950s. They celebrated the federal government as the American people’s savior, portraying a military-scientific elite dealing effectively with extraterrestrial threats to the US. Burton’s film debunks elites and suggests that a motley assortment of ordinary people would be more successful in dealing with an invasion from Mars. Chapter 4
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The introduction to Part Two of The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, “Maverick Creators and Maverick Heroes” Introduction
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This chapter analyzes the television series Deadwood in terms of the philosophical concept of the state of nature. The show raises the question of whether a community should be ordered from the top down or from the bottom up. Deadwood goes to the heart of the central issue of the Western: is it possible to have order without law? Chapter 3
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This chapter shows that Gene Roddenberry’s experience writing for the television Western Have Gun—Will Travel introduced him to many of the motifs and themes he later developed in Star Trek. It thus provides a case study of the hidden connections between the Western and science fiction. It also uncovers the tension between elites and common people in the mythology of the Western. Chapter 2
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This chapter studies John Ford’s The Searchers against the background of Aeschylus’ trilogy, the Oresteia. As revenge tragedies, both works explore the thin line between barbarism and civilization. Ford portrays the tragedy of the isolated heroic figure who tries to bring order to the Wild West, and in the process must adopt some of the barbarism of the enemies he fights. Chapter 1
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The introduction to Part One of The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, “Freedom and Order in the Western” Introduction
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The introduction argues that analyzing pop culture may require modes of interpretation that differ from those often invoked in the world of high culture. The creative models often deployed in pop culture—multiple authorship and improvisation followed by feedback—do not necessarily result in inferior art. Introduction
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Shakespeare was looking in two directions when composing 1 Henry IV. He was looking back to Homer and the Iliad in order to view English history against the background of the classical heroic tradition. At the same time, he was looking at contemporary events in the court of Elizabeth. Essay
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