Art -vs- Polemic

Here's a video clip to a song by Canadian musician: Sarah Slean with "Lucky Me." The lyrics address the dialectic set up in our course, but in an artistic, rather than polemical, manner.

Update: here is a link to a discussion on Sarah Slean's homepage about the dialectic in the song. Note how the dialectic in her lyrics is artistic rather than polemic. (My thanks to "Anonymous" for hard work transcribing the lyrics in the comments here.)

Lecture Slides

The course lecture slides are available online, here. They are numbered in sequence that they were delivered: and note that some slide sets span two or three lectures.

Last Pair of Essays

A very useful, and markedly dialectical, engagement with the Dawkins position vis a vis politics or religion as the real cause of particular local conflicts is in this article on HuffingtonPost from science journalist Robert Wright: Why the "New Atheists" are Right-Wing on Foreign Policy.

Brick Lane

The film version of Brick Lane was released in North American theatres last year, June 20th, 2008.

For Monday

Our Kingdom Come text and the two remaining course essays are on our schedule for Monday. And might I trouble us all to read this very short blog post ahead of lecture: I'd like us to discuss pertinencies to the Waid & Ross comic.

The blog post is by eminent American literary scholar Stanley Fish. And a note that although the subject is two particular politicians, there is no partisan aspect to the piece.