“When I asked my Freshman Seminar Reading-Poetry-Like-We-Mean-It students to ‘spread poetry and a conversation about poetry on campus and enliven spaces, places, and people with poetry,’ they created all kinds of amazing, inventive interactions and things —for instance, these wonderful ‘ad-verse-tisements’ that student Eliza Mecklenburg created to ‘advertise’ poems by William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson.”
Storm Scene in The Tempest, Raphaella Yang, Digital Drawing• Robert Gerst, Digital Editing•”Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies,” Vocal by Alfred Deller
Professor Albert Lafarge passes along this note from Literary Traditions student Raphaella Yang:
Icon of St. George, Musuem of the Icons, Venice, Italy
“After I read what happened to the ship at sea in Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” Raphaella Yang writes, “I began imagining…how the storm, the thunder, the lightning, the fire, the waves and human cries would shake dramatically. The scene reminded me of the sinking ship in Titanic and the shipwreck in Life of Pi. But in The Tempest, resentful Prospero compels the storm and Ariel raises it. All that happens seems due to the force of nature, but Prospero has plotted all and left no clue save the freshness of mariners’ garments.
Handwritten Gospel Manuscript, St. John Theological Monastery, Patmos, Greece
I remembered ‘the hand’ of divine instruction so common in art I saw in my Early Christianity and Byzantine art course. In my digital drawing, Prospero’s hand secretly conducts from the top right corner.”
The hand she incorporates into her drawing? She discovered it in a 1829 painting by John White Abbot.
“Prospero Commanding Ariel,” oil on panel, John White Abbot, 1829
Sevanna Kilman, Apollo Beside The Laurel Tree, Digital Drawing (1902 x 1080 pixels)
Professor Albert Lafarge reports that this digital sketch that Literary Traditions student Sevanna Kilman created depicts how Kilman interprets a moment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
“Apollo still lusts after Daphne even after she has turned into a tree, “Sevanna Kilman writes. “He says to the tree he will never forget about her or his love for the woman the tree once was…Beside the laurel tree, he looks outward towards the sunrise as lovers do while the sun rises from the hilltop.”
Daphne and Apollo, Antonio del Pollaiolo, 1470-1480
But Apollo’s emotion isn’t mutual love, Kilman judges. For that reason, the semi-human Daphne so customarily central to representations of this moment has, in Kilman’s digital sketch, already transformed into a tree. It happened as quickly as a sketch, Kilman adds.
“Students in my Literary Traditions sections,” Professor Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta writes, “may create an original work of art that interprets a text we read.” Like Penelope weaving a shroud for Odysseus’s father, Caroline Fortin depicted Homer’s Hades in the singular needlepoint above.
Caroline Fortin explains:
Homer’s depiction of the underworld in The Odyssey is . . . fascinating and descriptive, culturally accepted as the archetypal vision of the ancient afterlife. In my own interpretation, I have chosen to represent the underworld through the traditional craft of needlepoint.
At first look, there is a disparity between this soft, traditionally feminine medium and the idea of what is essentially hell. With my project and medium I wanted. . . viewers to reconsider what they might, at first, see as a deep dark realm, something to be feared.
In today’s culture, we tend to view the afterlife as an unknown, or something to be apprehended. In ancient Greek culture, however, the afterlife was seen as a familiar place; it was, essentially, just a step into the next life. For this reason, many heroes in mythology are challenged to contact the dead, or even to venture into the underworld itself. It is for this reason as well that Odysseus was able to make his brave journey into the realm of the dead, for though some aspects came as a shock, he could somewhat expect what was to come.
Penelope Unraveling Her Work At Night (1886), Silk embroidered with silk thread, Dora Wheeler
I wanted to portray that cultural familiarity through my work of needlepoint. Though the images depicted may be frightening or off-putting at first glance, the scene of the afterlife is something that need not necessarily be feared. Through the use of a traditional, somewhat “comforting” medium, I wanted to challenge the viewer to see this scene as something that can be considering normal, and even comforting.
Most conceptions of embroidery are of a grandmother writing down an age-old quote, or depicting a scene that would be meaningful to the family. I do both here in a slightly untraditional way; I used embroidery to portray a scene meaningful to a culture and a people, and I physically depicted a story for anyone who walks by to see.
One of my biggest takeaways from this project is the appreciation for The Odyssey that I gained. I will admit that I hated The Odyssey— reading it in high school and again in college was, at first, a massive chore. But spending so much quality time with the text and picking and choosing what elements would be important to represent really made me appreciate and recognize the beautiful and complex world building within the story.
I also gained an appreciation for storytelling in that era; the names and characters to be memorized even within just Book XI (“The Kingdom of the Dead”) are numerous and complicated, and I became downright impressed with the skills of bards and poets of the day.
Through the hours I spent listening to music and meditating on this scene while working, I thought about song and story as entertainment both then and now, and how the nature of humanity has not changed much. Both in our curiosity about the world and the way we choose to interpret, share, and bask in it, people have always had a unique way of envisioning the world around us, and the wonderment and community of humanity seems timeless.
I found comfort in the fact that I was representing the very same story that people have represented for thousands of years, but in my own personal way.
Virginitee is greet perfeccioun, And continence eek with devocioun. But Crist, that of perfeccioun is welle, Bad nat every wight he sholde go selle Al that he hadde, and gyve it to the poore, And in swich wise folwe hym and his foore He spak to hem that wolde lyve parfitly And lordynges, by youre leve, that am nat I. I wol bistowe the flour of myn age In the actes and in fruyt of mariage.
…rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, ‘God, I love you’ and looked to the sky and really meant it. ‘I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.'”
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958). Read it here.
