Class Summary for 10/13/09

Assignments: Read the Book of Susannah (1637), read the poem on Rio's blog.

• Dialectic arguments combined with tradition.
• The old stories are the best stories.
• Plotz's problem?
• He applies a modern sensibility to a book of stories.
• Moses
• Superman? Superman comes from a destroyed people (Jews) and leads humanity.
• Moses is an archetype, he's paradigmatic.
• His name means to be "drawn from the waters".
  
• Lord Raglan 
• The 22 points of the typical hero story.
• Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
• Once again, stories are important.
• The Israelites were just as cruel to their slaves as anyone else.
• They also didn't intermarry.
• "Go Down Moses"
• Louis Armstrong
• Paul Robeson 
• Ralph Stanley, "Take Your Shoes off Moses"
• Iconoclasm - rejection of religious icons as heretical.
• "God cannot be made into an image!"
• Passage where Moses sees God's backside: Exodus 33:23