Dr. Scott J Masson is a Professor of English literature. The videos on this channel are derived from several different sources: 1. His university courses, which cover among other things, Classical literature, Shakespeare, the Bible as Literature, the writing of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, fantasy literature, seventeenth-century literature, and literary theory. 2. His public lectures on topics of general relevance, often on matters that could generally be categorized under Christian apologetics. 3. Television appearances. 4. Radio debates. 5. Paideia Today, a popular form of Classical education looking at the great books of Western Civilization (together with Dr. Bill Friesen) 6. Occasional sermons.
Dr. Masson, have you ever read "Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age" by Fr. Seraphim Rose? Many of the things you say remind me of Fr. Seraphim.
I saw in the comments in a previous video that you got into a car accident. I hope you get better. You are one of the few Humanities professors that is pushing back against the hard postmodern bent of so many English professors. Before coming across your work I thought liberal arts departments were beyond saving, now I know that there are some in the field working hard to save it from consuming itself.
There aren’t that many, and the academy is trying to insure that there are none going forward. This channel is trying to keep the flame of learning alive by passing knowledge on, in a small way, to the next generation.
I read the (Romanized) Butler translation of the Iliad last year. I just picked up the Rouse translation. I plan on reading all of the works you covered in this podcast. I already read Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight & The Idylls of the King. Thank you for this! I'm 1/3 of the way through the Iliad re-read right now. This translation is much easier. I'll pick up the Lattimore translation later. Along with the Bible I will definitely be reading Homer over and over again. This is wonderful! Thank you so much. Blessings in Christ. 🙏☦️
One argument I have had against post humanism is "why do we feel guilty when animals don't" The fact that we can have remorse for our enemy beyond that of simple chemical responses is what separates us from nature.
Reminded me of a reddit comment I came across recently, that was defending an abusing aggressive parent with the argument of “ don’t see anyone as merely good or evil, they’re just a person“ this could go wrong in a lot of scenarios as you can expect. In Arabic there’s the word “بصيرة” [Baseerah] which means vision literally but also implies the idea of the eye of the mind.A person could be blind physically but still have their mind vision and the opposite is correct. I suppose my SUBJECTIVE Islamic education provided me with way more inclusive language that I am greatly grateful for. ^edited to fix some punctuations:)
20 fast-moving minutes of Bloom here from 30 years ago this year (in defence of his The Western Canon, 1994). ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-S9ieF7LVbyI.html
Bloom always ‘lamented’ the replacing of the finest elements of the canon (such as Shakespeare himself ultimately) in core curriculum subjects especially, with more morally and culturally-motivated concerns above ones with competing literary merit. He made predictions that over the years came true. He stood up for what he believed to be right, and had millions of people behind him. He shouldered an enormous amount of abuse too. As a writer, very few have ever given more of themselves than he (an easy aspect to criticise). And he defended the ‘Western canon’ purely in terms of literary merit. I never heard him suggest that cultural studies should not exist. I never heard him say that great art does not have cultural or moral intention or merit. I find this kind of reformulation of Bloom, after his death in particular, as being ‘more of a comic than a critic’ to be nothing but an attempted ‘reorganisation’ of his absolutely undestroyable powers. If you want or need to pick up on his own slighting, slight with some (at least amusing?) wither and save us your ill-informed exaggerations please.
I was critical of what I read of Bloom while he was alive, for your information. And that’s while being an admirer and supporter of what he was against. I just don’t regard what he was ‘for’ to be a very good representation of the great books he championed. Oscar Wilde’s “Art for art’s sake” is pretty weak sauce.
The stimulus-response psychology ( Behaviorism) treats human like dogs and other lower forms of animals. It is the " scientific" counterpart of Post-Structuralism and Post-Humanism, which treat the subject ( human beings) as decentered.
Are the values being attributed to the relation of the people of the time and Prometheus actually like that? Was he really bad because fire and subsequently bronze and iron are used among of many things, for people to kill each other?
Apologies for being unclear. I guess I can’t condensed all the questions I have but what I wanted to understand about where you depart from is: Is it safe to say Prometheus was seen by the contemporaries of those days as a bad actor or were those values of good and bad forced upon by later people? Or another way of saying it. Are we missing the point of mythical thinking role had on those people? And so another point could be for the question: if we’re engineering our psyche through a different language and a different standpoint, is it safe to say that the story of Prometheus we are repeating, could be a significantly different one from what it was originally conceived? And therefore not really connected to the time line?
@czarquetzal8344 circumstances have kept me from writing as much as I would like. I have published a monograph but my thoughts have developed considerably since then.
@@LitProf the trend now is to revive older methods. I've heard of New Aestheticism. I don't know if I will include that in my Literary Criticism classes since it's a mere rehash of Beardsley's philosophy.
Dr I am waiting for your new lectures, I already rewatched some because I noted some things in my notebook and went back to your videos where I heard them the first time. Also great editing
Dear reader: if you happen to be in search of education on orientalist and Edward Said I would not recommend this video due to the lecturer saying that calling is n0t real g 3 nocy dl is such an unfair oversimplification and then I didnt finish the last bit bc he started talking about how Africa needs to acknowledge the good things that European colonisation brought. This is so funny tho bc he حط السم فالعسل as he is praising Said for being a moderate that wouldn’t stand modern leftists the whole video. This is the same as the white washing of the image of MLK as any of his values that don’t fit the current narrative (emphasising that he was nonviolent when he did condone it in resistance, on,y showing the I have a dream speech and none of the other more radical ones.) Beware.
Scott, what does "hamartia" really mean? a tragic flaw (inside the character) or a tragic error (mistake in action) or this word can be interpretated in both ways? Some people say Oedipus' hamartia was killing his father and marrying his mother without knowing it and others say his hamartia was his pride or anger. I get confused.
It is used in archery to describe missing the mark. It becomes one of the four words used for ‘sin’ in the New Testament. In Oedipus, it is closer to an error in judgement than a moral failure, though the result of that error in judgment is an infamous moral transgression.
I haven’t read it but trust the individuals who wrote in it. It’s one of the great scandals of our time that this falsehood was propagated and remains credible.
"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us" - St. Anthony
Thanks for the lecture! Found your channel while searching for info on John Donne. Recently been diving into the English Metaphysical and Romantic poets. Also slowly conducting a survey of the more mainstream aspects of modern/postmodern thought after several years of investigating what I now know to be referred to as the 'western esoteric tradition'. Your generously sharing your work is greatly appreciated Dr. Masson ❤🔥
My mission is to preserve and hopefully extend knowledge of the Western great books. The universities have moved strongly away from this so RU-vid allows a work-around of sorts. Glad you have found it helpful!
You smack your lips too much and meander around points. Incredibly obnoxious. Say what needs to be said succinctly and stop rolling your spit around in your mouth.
These lectures have been a great resource! There's so much literature I never got to read in highschool, in part because I dropped out, but now I am catching up. I just picked up Orwell's 1984 and animal farm and saw you had these lectures online. It almost feels wrong not paying a tuition fee for the education you provide here. Dostoyevski, Tolstoy and Nietzsche are next on my list, just in case you feel like creating a curriculum and teaching a class on their works in the coming year lol. Thanks Dr. Masson!
I remember how puzzled I was when I was forced to engage with this topic when preparing for my BA thesis in Latin American literature (University of Warsaw, Poland). I just couldn’t understand why it was relevant, but the teacher seemed to idolize Haraway (and Foucault, Derrida etc). She didn’t accept any of my ideas because they weren’t political and I had to change the topic several times. I ended up writing about so called ecocritism because it was far more tolerable than feminism (everyone else in my group chose the latter). Literature is one of my biggest interests but when you want to study it nowadays it’s not really about analyzing and interpreting books with a humanistic approach, it’s all cultural marxism- you have to criticize and rebel against something. This is why I didn’t continue my studies and don’t think I ever will, which makes your channel a huge blessing.
Sir how are you? Nowadays I am going to translate preface into my mother tongue Pashto after completing sir Philip Sidney 's criticism The Defence of Poesie and Milton s Areopagitica
