The end of "On Beauty"

- The end "grabs at the crux of what the future is for English studies" - that a lot of classes are going to become multimedia classes

- What do you think of the Department of English as an institutional thing? - In my opinion, English Departments are still necessary! Until writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Virginia Woolf, and Shakespeare lose the credibility attached to their names, and until books like In Memoriam, The Iliad, and Moby Dick are not necessary to know as an adult, English Departments are still necessary. Even when those names and novels become outmoded, the work those people produced will always be reference points and incredible resources for people who need them. The classics will begin to include contemporary 21st Century material, but it'll always build on previous material. I can see publishing dying off and going completely online before I see English Departments getting cancelled en masse.

- What does it mean to be an intellectual? Pages 226: Claire talks about loving Warren, never having known someone like him, but considers herself the victim of a female psychological disorder. "She was a woman still controlled by the traumas of her girlhood.... she felt one thing and did another. She was a stranger to herself." In her conversation with Zora about beauty and landscapes, the beauty she talks about is politically suspect (a political reification, where you turn something into an object - a term from Marx's Capital).

- This novel is a lot about taking women as objects: Kiki is fat, Claire is thin. Zadie Smith hates the objectification of women and beauty. She also hates that beauty can't be talked about anymore, especially on the Left. Howard immerses herself in theories of un-beauty, of going against celebrating genius and beauty, but when two women who he thinks are good-looking come onto him he drops his pants. Zora, who believes Howard's theories and spouts it, too, questions the beauty of the landscape - that it is uncorrupted, that there aren't laborers working there, that industrialization isn't making it ugly just beyond the landscape. When Claire brings up Virgil, Zora stops listening. Claire has read Plato, Virgil, Baudelaire, etc, and Zora and Howard are trained in the latest literary theory and are aware of the working poor. What is an intellectual, then??

- Poor people as the playthings of radical intellectuals - page 418, when Carl tells Zora what he knows about Chantelle Williams and Monty Kipps, and accusing her of using him as an experiment she expected favors from. His ticket to a life is gone. "You got your college degrees, but you don't even live right."

- On Levi's stealing the painting from Kipps' office: he's an idiot. He's a stupid 16-year-old with a lot of screwed-up theories. THEN he suggests his mother isn't black for marrying a white man. He has a point when he asks Kiki wha her part is in helping the poor climb economically when she pays her housekeeper $4 per hour - he says she wouldn't do that if the woman was American instead of Haitian.

- The last 2 pages: What has happened to Beauty?

Howard's children still hate him, a lot, but they are still talking to him. He goes downtown to give his lecture, the job-talk of his life. What is beauty on the last two pages?