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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