Lecture nights: Austen on film

About a month ago Hillsdale College hosted a series of lectures on Jane Austen and the movies.

In the first, James Bowman gives an overview of the history of Austen adaptations for the screen. He is a longtime critic at The New Criterion, and though I’ve enjoyed his writing for many years, I’d never before heard him speak. He is as judicious and perceptive a critic as you could hope to find. If you take the time to watch, don’t abandon it before you hear his opinion of Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 adaptation of Emma!

In a second lecture, Peter Leithart speaks on ‘Jane Austen and Morality’. Although Leithart is a good judge of cinema (his book on Malick’s The Tree of Life is very worthwhile), his remarks apply as much to the books as to any film adaptations.

A final lecture brings us Whit Stillman speaking on his own experiences adapting Jane Austen for the screen. His is a more diffuse and, if you want, rambling approach, but I found it interesting to hear some stories about the creation of his marvellous Austen adaptation Love & Friendship (which I picked as one of my favourite films of the 2010s), not to mention the ways in which Austen’s books influenced his other films. Recommended especially to admirers of Stillman.

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There was also a fourth lecture in the series, in which Lorraine Murphy spoke on “The Life and Work of Jane Austen”. It sounded to me like an introductory lecture, so I skipped it, but, to judge by those I did see, I may have missed something good by doing so.

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For the record, I think the best screen adaptations of Austen are, roughly in order, the 1995 Pride and Prejudice mini-series with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, the Sense and Sensibility adapted by Ang Lee and Emma Thompson, the 1996 Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, and, coming last simply because it adapts a minor work, Whit Stillman’s aforementioned Love & Friendship. And I am right.

Arvo Pärt on music and life

In the reading about Arvo Pärt that I have done over the years, the most memorable and insightful bits are almost invariably those spoken or written by Pärt himself. I was very pleased, therefore, to find video of a short address which he gave, in English, when he received an honorary doctorate from St Vladimir’s Seminary in 2014. It does not disappoint.

 

Lecture night(s): At Notre Dame

A couple of weeks ago the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame held their annual fall conference, this year on the theme “You Are Beauty: Exploring the Catholic Imagination”.

I wasn’t able to be there, and neither, I expect, were you, but they’ve just published a set of the lectures to their YouTube channel, and quite a number of them look intriguing. Roger Scruton was there, Mary Ann Glendon, Alasdair MacIntyre, Daniel Mahoney. Here is a list of the featured presentations, with links to the videos. Where to begin? Right here, of course:

Lecture night: psychology and politics

Jonathan Haidt is an unusually interesting academic. He is a psychologist who has in recent years turned his attention to matters of public import, and has especially emerged as an advocate of greater “viewpoint diversity” in the academy. To that end, he has founded Heterodox Academy, a forum for highlighting findings that run counter to received opinion in academic disciplines, particularly in the social sciences.

Earlier this month he gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Assocation. His lecture is entitled “What’s Happening to Our Country? How Psychology Can Respond to Political Polarization, Incivility and Intolerance”, and in it he considers a number of long-term polarizing trends in American society and what to do about them.

He’s an engaging speaker. If you’re interested in understanding the Trump phenomenon, or fancy the thought of seeing a crowd of left-wing academics called out for bias by one of their own guild, this lecture might be for you. If you’re of conservative temperament, you might be pleasantly surprised to hear that an eminent academic considers you anything other than roadkill on the upward way of enlightenment. As he says in the lecture, every healthy society needs a party of order and stability as well as a party of change and progress. It sounds sensible to me (except the bit about change and progress). The lecture is about 50 minutes long, once the introductions are over.

If you enjoy this talk, you might also enjoy a TED talk he gave on the respective moral motivations of liberals and conservatives.

Lecture night: He said, she said

The history of the Reformation in England has been of special interest to me since I read Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, in which he challenged the received (though not universally so) account of the docility with which the English people embraced Anglicanism in the sixteenth century. Since then there have been many books published exploring the condition of non-conformists, both Catholic and Protestant, in England, and the oppression and violence they endured from the state.

This freshly considered history has begun to spill into related disciplines, including Shakespeare studies. Although Shakespeare’s own religious views are a matter of dispute, there is at least circumstantial evidence connecting him with Catholic recusancy: among other things, his mother’s family were well-known recusants, and his daughter was also cited for recusancy.

Some have now undertaken to re-read Shakespeare’s plays in the light of this new understanding of the historical context in which he wrote. Do the plays have anything to tell us about the Catholic experience during the Elizabethan period?

Here are are two lectures addressed to this question, both delivered at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture a few years ago. The first, by Peter Holland, answers in the negative: in his view, there is no convincing evidence that Shakespeare was a Catholic and nothing in his plays to suggest that he was concerned about the plight of Catholics in England. He’s a very distinguished Shakespearian, and it’s an excellent lecture.

Opposing him is Clare Asquith, author of Shadowplay, a book which argues that Shakespeare, rather like an Elizabethan Shostakovich, laced his plays with veiled criticisms of the state, especially for its handling of religion, and that Shakespeare was deeply concerned with the suffering of Catholic recusants. She proposes a kind of “code” for understanding the references to religious and political controversy that Shakespeare’s audience would have understood, but which were artfully framed so as to maintain plausible deniability — this is the same “code” of which Peter Holland is critical in his lecture.

Taken together, these two lectures are very interesting. Holland’s skepticism is salutary, but I do think that Asquith makes some good points about his failure to adequately integrate the post-Duffy history into his reading of Shakespeare, and some of the passages she proposes as examples of Shakespearean subterfuge are quite fascinating. On the other hand, when hunting for subtleties it is hard to know when or if a trail has dried up, and Asquith runs the risk of imagining evidence where none exists.

(There are two other lectures from the same Notre Dame series: one by Joseph Pearce and one by John Finnis. Both argue that the evidence supports the view that Shakespeare was himself a Catholic. Pearce focuses on biographical and historical data, while Finnis’ approach is textual, concentrated in this lecture on Richard III. If you should want to hear them all, the order in which they were delivered is: Pearce, Holland, Finnis, Asquith.)

Lecture night: Educating the heart

My favourite pastime on YouTube is to watch news anchors making mistakes, but my second favourite is to listen to lectures. There are many excellent lectures posted from all manner of venues. I could listen to something interesting nearly every night, if I had the leisure. It occurs to me that I might post some of the more interesting of these lectures here.

For today, here is a lecture by Fr Andrew Cuneo, an Orthodox priest, broadly on the topic of education, and broadly based on C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man. Fr Cuneo is the first Oxford graduate to have done his doctoral degree on C.S. Lewis, so he knows his subject, but he wears his learning lightly. It’s a very thoughtful lecture.

Incidentally, I rarely sit and actually watch these lectures; I listen to them while I commute to and from work. (I usually use a simple tool to reduce the videos to audio only.)