Tag: Comedy
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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June 23, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. To all the “honest drinkers” – as Rabelais would have it – congratulations! We made it to the final post in this series on Rabelais. Hopefully the various connections have enriched your experience of what is often considered difficult reading. Today’s blog concludes …
June 16, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. For me, reading Rabelais was slow going. Crawling through the text, however, brought moments of joy as I saw strains of other, later works. The past few blogs attempted to highlight some of those connections as a way to bridge the gap between …
June 9, 2023 Thanks to Chad Greene, a 2023 Fellow in Ideas recipient, for today’s blog. Depending on your concentrations, perhaps you have read enough about probability and statistics to dissuade you from playing the types of lotteries states tend to sponsor, such as MegaMillions or Powerball. But, in my own reading of one of …
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June 2, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Last week’s blog (https://hmu.edu/2023-5-26-reading-rabelais-part-ii/) concluded with a suggested connection between Book Two of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and Monty Python skits. We cannot stop at the end of Book Two, however. Moving into Book Three, we find a lengthy discussion between Pantagruel and …
May 19, 2023 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. I remember my first experience with Chaucer. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, I tried reading his stories in the original Middle English and was very disoriented. Of course, I had a lot of footnotes to rely on, but these also overwhelmed …
December 17, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Schumann’s “Humoreske” Dvorzak’s “Humoresques” Schumann’s “Humoreske” involves all emotions – sometimes more than one at a time. It wonderfully demonstrates humor’s power to draw from all emotions. Likewise, Dvorzak moves from one emotion to the next without pause. Dvorzak’s music has some consistency …
October 8, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. During the 90s, Seinfeld garnered a huge viewership. In an attempt to bring the classics to the present, our recent Quarterly Discussion drew connections between Seinfeld and Aristotle’s Poetics. We also tried to discover keys to the sitcom’s great appeal. Considering the characters’ …
October 1, 2021 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Aristotle’s Poetics begins with a separation of art forms, such as literature, music, dance, and theater. He calls these imitative forms and says, “the imitation is produced by rhythm, language, or ‘harmony,’ either singly or combined.” The idea of harmony intrigues me, especially …
May 3, 2019 Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post. Last week, I had the opportunity to discuss Molière’s play Tartuffe in a couple of Quarterly Discussions. First of all, I have to admit that I love this play, so my notes may not be altogether unbiased. Having said that, I think that …
