CLASS
LOG
Whenever possible, I'll jot down some notes on the discussion(s) we had in class on a given day. If I forget something that you think is of importance, please note it in your on-line journal.
Demystifying the "mystory" (Text Book 240-48). • The middle voice: neither active nor passive. • Reflexivity: taking subject as object, or as means to get at object. • Breaking with a metaphor we live by: the self as container. • Rather, the self as pretext and open-question. • Sherman Alexie and the category "American Indian." • Identification and "extimacy." • The Moebius strip of internal/external. • Mis-recognition as starting point. • Not a paper, a text. • Pretext, intertext, text. • Self as mobile archive. • Taking Barthes's form as template. • The fragment, the figure. • Belongs to a larger "discourse." • Figure, pose, topic. • Every fragment/figure comprises title, heading, argument, and articulated body. • Figures are themselves made of fragments. • An non-exhaustive catalog. • The pleasures, and perils, of non-narrative structure. • Persona and impersonation. • Here's how the lover of literature talks. • An alternative metaphor, the conduct guide: "how to act like you love literature" (whether or not you do). • Jennifer's example: "Watch where you're going" (title), "engrossed" (heading), "the lover of literature becomes absorbed in the text to the detriment of her awareness of the physical environment," several "takes" on this (body). • The rituals of reading. • Pink socks and teabags. • Background din: don't mind me, I'm just reading. • Dan's example: "Just in case" (title), "bringing a book into spaces not made for reading" (heading), "the lover of literature carries her text with her, even into situations where reading seems implausible, in order to ward of harm, including the harms of boredom and distraction" (argument). • Same example, but with an emphasis on "display": "In the crook of my arm" (title), "to be recognized" (heading), "the book is a talisman and an identification card that the lover of literature displays in order to be recognized as such" (argument). • Draw on the whole range of the experience: the lover's discourse consists largely of lament—and the lover of literature's?
Exhortation to happiness (largely unheeded). • Barthes's 1966 "Structural Analysis of Narratives," concluded. • Functions integrate up to Actions (and actants), which integrate up to the Narrative plane. • Beyond that—the world, about which narratology does not claim competence. • Who's speaking? • "I'm dead." • Dickinson, Poe. • Ishmael, narrator of Moby Dick. • Author, narrator, character.• Giving and receiving: addresser — addressee. • Hazards of conflating author and narrator, especially in poetry. • The distinction between personal (first and second person; I and you) and impersonal (third person; he/she/it) narration (BR 282-85) . • Cases where impersonal can be "transposed" into personal (see BR 284). • The relationship between camera and character in film: taking it too literally (The Lady in the Lake). • Unlimited vs. restricted narrators. • The "tax" in syntax and "dystaxia" (BR 288). • Return to the plot/story distinction (manifest/latent, histoire/discours). • Story sequence: d-e-f-g-h-i-j. • Plot sequence: g-d-i-j. • Dystaxia plus ellipsis of e, f, g. • Linguistic dystaxia: the negative particle ne in French; the verb in German. • Filmic dystaxia: Memento. • The narrative tempos revisited: ellipsis (story unit not narrated), summary (story > plot), scene (story = plot), stretch (story < plot), and pause (narration proceeds while story is arrested). • Barthes on "catalystic and elliptic power" (BR 291). • "He had a good meal" (as handled by Proust). • The kind of statement one wouldn't have understood a week ago: the "progressive upward integration of its functional units" (BR 291). • Failures of "progressive upward integration": "Movie! Yoohoo.... Movie! We're over here" (homage to Mystery Science Theater 3000). • Non-narrative genres, including much modern and contemporary poetry. • The fragment in A Lover's Discourse: impeding "progressive upward integration" as deliberate strategy. • Starting and stopping. • Topic change: comparing versions of Sleeping Beauty. • Coover's innovation: moves from "impersonal" to "personal" narration. • Subjective points of view for princess, prince, crone, etc. • Was the ogress necessary? • Bettelheim and Prose. • Reading the fairy tale as allegory of sexual maturation. • "How could a prick be phallic?"
13 APRIL — TUESDAY (in progress)
Illustrations to accompany a joke told in class (courtesy of Rosalie Sullivan):
Ceci n'est pas une peep
Revision of requirements concerning third paper on "Sleeping Beauty" variations. • Note: We'll do prewriting for this paper, but not the paper itself. • Handout of chart for analyzing major actors and actions in differing versions of "Sleeping Beauty." • Resumption of work on Barthes's "Structural Analysis of Narrative." • The trouble with theory. • Who is this for? • Staging intellectual prestige. • Can't it be said more simply? • Unfamiliar references. • Slow: reader working. • Taking up Barthes's terminology again: cardinal functions (nuclei) and catalyzers; indices and informants. • Misleading connotation of term "catalyzer." • Points of risk (cardinal functions), points of safety (catalyzers). • Cardinal or nuclear function = either/or decisions; the branching path. • Analogy to life: "same old shit, different day" (=catalyzer). • Indices require interpretation (what kind of person does that? stands there? wears that?). • Interpretation required to reach signified. • Informants by contrast are explicit, immediately significant: "ready-made knowledge." • Dusk, a certain neighborhood in L.A. (informant): What's that guy doing there? (index). • Example from Pretty Woman (Erin). • Example from About Schmidt (Steve). • Clothing (or haircut, or watch) as "index." • Link to "informational level" as discussed in the "Third Meaning" essay. • Being (indices) and doing (functions).
Discussion of ideology continued from Thursday. • Brief history of Louis Althusser, French Marxist. • Kavanagh on Althusser's conception of ideology (CT 310, first full paragraph). • Ideology not just thought; rather thoughts embedded in actions and practices: going to church, bending to pray; going to the mall, reaching for the credit card. • Ecstasy of the consumer religion: "Priceless." • Individual subject. • The ideology of "individualism." • Subject-positions: slots in a system, awaiting occupants. • Interpellation: "hey you!" • Barthes's "mythology" as a form of ideology critique. • "Up in Michigan": rape and the inviolability of the body. • Body as private property. • Dan's question: are there known societies in which rape does not occur? • The Marquis de Sade's strange challenge to the French Revolution: make free access to other bodies a constitutional right (see "Frenchmen, One More Effort!"). • Pornographic literature's contribution to modern life: sadism (de Sade) and masochism (Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs). • Eric on the film They Live. • Structuralist sunglasses: Consume, Obey. • The ever-generative allegory of the cave: from Plato to the Matrix. • Turn to Roland Barthes's "Structural Analysis of Narrative." • An instance of the kind of theoretical discourse English 271 (The Act of Interpretation) will foreground. • Sentence and discourse. • Surface chaos, deep structure: the reduction of "paroles" to "langue." • Levels of analysis and "integration up." • Poe's purloined letter: certain methods of looking prevent one from finding. • The levels: linguistic, function, action, narration. • Units of content > functions > sequences (where ">" means "bundle together to form") • Four types of function: cardinal functions (nuclei) and catalyzers; indices and informants. • Chronicle of a death foretold: the shoelace, the staircase, the water fountain, the construction site. • Cardinal functions and genre: all events in the horror film reduce to "get killed." • All advertisements to "buy this." • Le Divorce: inability to absorb tragic cardinal functions (pregnant poet's suicide attempt) into comedic plot. • Handout detailing thirty-one "functions" identified in Russian fairy tales by Vladimir Propp in 1928. • Acts and actants (characters). • Narration: the donor and recipient of the discourse.
Classes for fall 2004: some options. • Ideas for new courses the English Department should offer. • Comparative mythology; popular fiction; cultural criticism (as writing workshop). • Continuing with a reading of "Up in Michigan." • Gendered experience and reading practices. • First approach to the concept of "ideology." • James Kavanagh's essay in Critical Terms. • Louis Althusser's distinction between "repressive state apparatuses" (RSAs) and "ideological state apparatuses" (ISAs). • A cop on every corner, a t.v. in every bar. • First graph of the ISAs: family, religion, media, etc. • Literature as an "ISA."
Discussion of drafted papers on the use of metaphor in poetry. • A first look at "Up in Michigan." • Indeterminacy and the "interpretable." • Three models: Frank Kermode, Susan Sontag, Umberto Eco (TB 207-210). • A matter of some urgency to us: what transpired between Liz and Jim? • Close reading of paragraph 31 (and environs).
Class visit by poet and cultural journalist Joshua Clover. • Discussion of his poem "Royal" from Madonna Anno Domini (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1997). • Generating frames of interpretation: establishing contexts and intertexts. • Graff on "determinacy" and "indeterminacy" (Critical Terms). • Some proposed intertexts: William Gibson's Neuromancer (Tommy), Ezra Pound's "In a station of the metro" (Eric), Kafka's "Before the Law" (Ian). • Some proposed contexts: neurological, televisual, sexual, theological, juridical, social hierarchical, pedagogical, others. • The nature/culture binary. • The "Royal"....: Wedding, Suite, We, Treatment, etc. • Metonymy and metaphor once more. • Paid by the word: writing for money. • The story of Jane Dark. • Journalism, or dishonesty rewarded. • Recipe for perpetual employment: clean copy turned in before deadline with a clever take. • Moving product. • Inciting readers to throw a brick through the window at Spin? No problem. • Teaching and journalism.
Discussion of revision process: one thing you improved, one thing still bothering you. • The Groundhog Day model of revision. • Multiplying solutions within time and page-count constraints. • Queneau's "Exercises in Style" as another model. • Complex metaphorical patterns continued: reading aloud and discussion of "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (handout). • Marking out difficult words. • Terza rima. • Focus on sections one, four, and five.
Complex metaphorical patterns continued: reading aloud and discussion of "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich (handout). • Drafts of paper one returned. • General comments. • Overview of MLA formatting for citing titles in texts.
Noticing and interpreting complex metaphorical patterns: reading aloud and discussion of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens (Text Book).
SPRING BREAK
Informal survey on pre-break fatigue levels. • Assessing the draft of paper one: working through the detailed rubric (handout). • Difficulty of evaluating one's own writing. • Importance thereof.
Reviewing the task proposed for first paper: bringing a theoretical framework to bear on three texts. • Can there be a "literal" text? • Writing for one another. • The favor of analysis. • Barthes on "Flaubert and the Sentence" (BR 296-304). • Not the Flaubert of Madame Bovary, nor the Flaubert of Bouvard and Pecuchet. • Nor the Dictionary of Received Ideas. • Devilish idea for a writing project. • Common to them all: Flaubert's mania for "correction." • Precellence. • In praise of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). • Flaubert the secular saint martyred to the writing process. • Flaubert's two crosses: lexical repetition (300) and transitions (301). • Every sentence a poem. • A sentence as every bit as objective as a thing in the world. • Infinite revision. • In praise of Flaubert's Letters (translated by Francis Steegmuller). • Metaphors for the writing process (a web, a journey, a maze, a hole, a manicure, childbirth, driving, fishing, assembling a contraption). • Metaphors for finished product: the organic and the mechanical (Williams's "machine made of words"). • The helpful things teacher's say: arrogant and pretentious, overwritten, use fewer big words, imagine an eighth grader as your reader. • Shift to poetic metaphor. • Atwood's "You Fit Into Me" (TB 90). • Ouch. • Surfacing of unexpected trait. • Robert Francis's "Pitcher" (89-90). • Transposition of categories: pitcher = poet. • On not "seeing" the connection: figurative language and the cues for allegorical interpretation. • I'll stay with the literal. • Errant, arrant. • Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Spring" (92-93). • Apostrophe and personification: an uncharitable address to April. • "Not only underground are the brains of men / Eaten by maggots." • Declining to procreate.
Pitch for Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (Friday, 100 Neville, 4pm). • Silent movies in general: the Meliès Brother's 1902 short Voyage to the Moon (Eric), D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (Ian). • In praise of the "third meaning" papers. • Sample riddles: fear (Jenni), electricity (Eric), a hotplate (Michael), a dryer (Dusty), insomnia (Eileen). • That puzzled look. • Identifying keywords in manifest text and searching for patterns, possible connections that "point toward" allegorical meaning. • How the text reads after its been "solved." • The remainder: that portion of the manifest text that doesn't "go up" to the allegorical level. • Audiotext: Billie Holiday singing the Lew Brown composition "Comes Love" (c. 1956). • Remember Frank O'Hara's "Day Lady Died"? • Where's this love coming from? • Outside the subject. • Judith Butler on "Desire." • Rehearsing Plato's parable in the Symposium: the charioteer, the noble steed and the ignoble steed. • The "driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him" (qtd. on 371). • The immortal ~ the mortal; the soul ~ the body. • "The fall into embodiment." • Lack, loss. • All shook up, feverish, etc.: why this set of figures for desire and not others? • Binaries: active ~ passive, reason ~ matter, desirous ~ desired, mastery ~ masterability. • Butler's question: is there any reason that one set of traits is assigned to "femininity" and another to "masculinity"? • Mixing it up. • About Butler's book Gender Trouble: a constructivist, performative account of how we wear our "gender." • The analogy to drag. • A not very good explanation of "Desire and the Costs of Linguistic Recognition" (esp. CT 378-380). • Kafka's parable "Before the Law." • Not much of an anecdote: a guy, a door, a doorman, some subroutines. • This-worldly and other-worldly interpretations. • "The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ears..." (TB 132). • Curious inability to do the simplest thing: Louis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel. • Announcement of English Department prize deadlines: March 19th. • Bonus track: Judith Butler Theory Trading Card.
Overview of four remaining class meetings before "spring" break. • Sappho's Fragment 31 ("Phanetai moi"). • The desiring subject in distress. • Multiple translations, multiple voicings. • The figuration of eros. • Is desire qualitatively different for men and women? • Struck dumb and blind, made mute, feverish, set to trembling, nearly dead: must be love! • Sapphic triangle: female (desiring), male (rival), female (desired). • Homosocial triangle: male (desiring), male (rival), female (desired). • Judith Butler's essay on "Desire" (a warning). • The vast archive of desirous expression that is American pop music. • "Our song." • How to be tender while screaming: the paradoxes of the hardcore ballad. • Aside on the transmission of Sappho's texts: a future in which the only thing that remains of "Hey Ya" is Ben's version of the lyrics. • Mailloux: to interpret is to translate. • And vice-versa. • From the anecdote to the parable. • When the manifest text cues us to other levels of meaning: parable, allegory. • Analogy to metaphoric "trait-swapping" between entities or actions. • Mailloux's texts: Book of Daniel, two Dickinson poems, a scene from Huckleberry Finn, and a lengthy discussion of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty between the US and USSR. • Dan's passage: "What I hope to demonstrate is that theories of interpretation function not so much as constraints on reading as resources for arguing" (128). • The persuasive force of a gun barrel—or microwaves productive of unsubtle burning beneath the skin. • Interpretations "can have no grounding outside of rhetorical exchanges taking place within institutional and cultural politics" (133). • The "sower of seeds" in The Gospel of Mark. • Transposition to another level. • Manifest text: sower, seeds, field, birds. • Allegorical text: Jesus, his words, kinds of auditors, Satan. • Esoteric (insider) vs. exoteric (outsider) meaning. • From the known (agriculture) to the unknown (terms of potential salvation). • Surrealist metaphor: producing strangeness within and by means of the known.
Anecdote of the bathrobe. • Something worth desiring for Valentine's Day? • Reports on learning to spot the "obtuse meaning" (exercise two). • Eureka: I've found it! • The obvious and the obtuse, the studium and punctum (Camera Lucida). • The desire to know and desire as such. • Freud the reader of texts (dreams, symptoms, jokes). • Manifest and latent texts, revisited. • Is Freud (still) valid? • The case against (Ian, Star, others). • Freud the scientist and Freud the writer. • Who's the boss: self-preserving rational ego or "the unconcious"? • Which side are you on? • Ever fallen in love with someone (you shouldn't've fallen in love with)? • The forces at work in dream creation according to Freud: condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy), overdetermination, representational constraints, and the censorship (delegate of the ego overseeing the dreamwork). • Overdetermination and the analogy to political candidacy: many forces, some of which contradict one another, must converge. • Example of Bush's social base: working-class church-going social conservatives, rich amoralists, hands-off libertarians, etc. • The Freudian text is polyvalent and polysemous, the outcome of many conflicting forces. • Reduction to a single meaning not the point.
Pitch for the New Writing Series (view video clip here). • Reading the Eiffel Tower. • Architecture as sign. • Analogy to World Trade Center towers. • Barthes on the "myths" of urban 20th-century capitalist France. • Dr. Itard and Victor. • Insertion into a symbolic order. • The animal and the human: failures to translate. • Outcasts of the symbolic: social death visited upon the living. • Review of terms from Thursday: sign (signifier/signified) and referent. • Again with the elephants. • Dichotic cognitive processing of linguistic vs. non-linguistic noises. • Signifiers in unfamiliar languages. • My trouble with Portuguese. • The deflating tire and the first phoneme in the word "Steve." • Signifiers only exist within code frameworks (such as a given language). • Tommy on binary code. • Noises bundled into phonemes (audible signifiers). • Marks bundled into graphemes (visible signifiers). • The signified qua "concept" or "mental image." • "Motivation": the name that makes your pet look like itself to you. • Peirce on the iconic (sign resembles referent), the symbolic, and the indexical. • Two instances of arbitrariness: relationship between signifier and signified, relationship between sign and referent. • Roger Brown's thesis: signs refer to "categories," not to things. • The symbolic and the real. • The remainder. • The referent as "x." • Metaphor as process in which traits gets transferred between categories. • The "foot of the mountain." • Metaphors, living and dead. • The sun and a lemon: round, yellow, hurts eyes. • The "paradigmatic axis" revisited: families of associated meaning. • Arresting one's reading. • Herrick's "Delight in Disorder." • The syntagm (outfit) here includes an unlaced shoestring. • Pulled-together people hard to have crushes on. • Herrick's chain of substitutions: in poetry as in dress as in eros as in morals. • Anarchism vs. puritanism. • Kinds of figurative language to be familiar with (see McGlaughlin 83): oxymoron ("wild civility"), metaphor, metonymy, personification (prosopopoeia), apostophe. • Can non-figurative language exist? Literally?
Barthes's
Writing Degree Zero. • Small history of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism.
• Key works: What Is Literature (essay to which Barthes is responding),
Being and Nothingness (philosophical tract), Nausea (novel). • The
intellectual as celebrity. • Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. •
Resistance to the German occupation of France in WW2. • Barthes on
the difference between poetry and prose. • Ordinary speech and ornamental
speech. • Orality and print. • The mysterious origins of language.
• Did syntax precede lexis? • And other unanswered questions.
• Barthes on the word as "dwelling place" in modern poetry.
• Browning's "My Last Duchess" and e.e. cummings's grasshopper
poem. • First of several mentions of Ferdinand de Saussure, founder
of modern linguistics. • The paradigmatic axis (selection, association,
substitution) and the syntagmatic axis (combination). • The outfit
you are wearing today (syntagm) vs. the closet/dresser in which your other
clothes presently rest (paradigm). • The sentence you just spoke
(syntagm). • Paradigmatic axis: field and families of semantically-related
signs. • Freudian "free association." • Syntax as
mechanism for constraining meaning. • Polysemy = many meanings. •
Barthes on wrestling as a spectacle of total and immediate legibility.
• Zero ambiguity (wrestling) and maximal ambiguity (poetry). •
Barthes on the "third meaning." Film still of the fascist bowman
and his quiver-bearer. • History written from the standpoint of the
victor. • Symbols are susceptible to more than one interpretation:
the bow & arrow as sign of dominance, virility, precision or of regression,
barbarism, silliness? • William Tell. • A sign of the Hitler-Stalin
pact? Depends on whether you see, with Michael, the bear in the upper
left. • Levels of analysis: (I) informational / communicative meanings;
(II) symbolic meanings: (a) referential, (b) diegetic, (c) authorial,
and (d) historical; (III) obtuse meanings (obstinate, excessive, singular).
• I might not be able to describe it, but I can point to it. •
The unconscious system operating within and against the intentional message.
• The sign: signifier (slice of sound) and signified (concept). •
Two sides of a single sheet of paper. • C.S. Peirce's classification
of three relationships between signs and referents: the icon (sign resembles
referent), the symbol (sign is linked to referent by arbitrary but binding
convention: all linguistic signs are "symbols" in this sense),
and the index (sign is linked to referent as effect is to cause, or trace
is to body). • Film noir index: The smoldering cigarette in an empty
room. • Representation and "mimesis." • Aristotle
and Plato on the primary of "mimesis" in human cognitive and
affective development. • WJT Mitchell's diagram (Critical Terms 12).
• Axis of communication: maker/addresser <---> beholder/addressee.
• Axis of representation: dab of paint/sign <---> stone/referent.
• Sign detection test (from semiotician Umberto Eco): can you lie
with it?
System of
concepts so far: culture (Greenblatt) and narrative (Hillis Miller); the
quickly forgotten Frank Lentricchia and his modeling of hermeneutic practice.
• Today's focus: the author (Pease), value/evaluation (Herrnstein
Smith), and the canon (Guillory). • Close working through of Herrnstein
Smith pages 181-182: modes of evaluation (a) in composition of work, (b)
in reception of work, (c) in "making something" of the work,
(d) in explicit verbal judgments of the work, (e) in institutionalized
or otherwise "sanctioned" forms of judgments about the work.
• Examples from everyday experience. • The book a friend lends
you. • A "thick" account of evaluative practices, similar
to Goffman's analysis of character contests. • DIGRESSIONS: Barthes
on style (Writing Degree Zero): the trace the body leaves on otherwise
abstract material that is language. • "Hey Ya" and the
author-function (copyright and royalties). • The Brothers Grimm:
folk culture, transcription and transmission, eventual global dissemination.
• Literacy and the literary (Guillory). • Canons: inclusion
and exclusion, orthodoxy and heresy. • The Catholic Church as cultural
critic: The Simpsons, Mel Gibson's film about Christ. • The books
one is (or should be) ashamed not to have read: an informal survey. •
Woody Allen's Zelig: what happens to people who don't read Moby Dick.
• The destruction of Sappho's lyric poems. • James Joyce's Ulysses:
inextinguishable, now. • But initially burnt at the docks by postal
officials. • Fahrenheit 451. • Replaceable texts and unique
texts. • Obscenity trials and the fame of infamy: Joyce, Henry Miller,
Allen Ginsberg. • On reading more than one book: monotheism as monotextuality. •
Value generated by scarcity. • Possibility of a post-scarcity evaluative
practice? • The school as institutional matrix of value generation.
• The syllabus, the curriculum. • Recent changes in the UMaine
English Major. • Prescribed content (surveys) vs. prescribed methods
(this class, Eng 271). • Role of the school in reproduction of social
hierarchies. • The handoff between generations. • Contexts
for John Donne's "The Canonization" (qtd. in Guillory). •
Manuscripts circulated at court vs. printed texts widely circulated (but
not necessarily widely read). • Is the canon outdated? Eric's critique
of the modernist canon as passé. • Is the canon repetitive?
Ian's structuralist account of basic schema underlying majority of cnaonical
texts. • For next time: Formulate some questions based on your reading
of Barthes's "The Third Meaning," and Writing Degree Zero.
Goffman's concept of character contests as laid out in Text Book 42-44 and enacted in Nicholas Ray's film Rebel without a Cause. • The struggle for recognition and its effects on identity formation. • The "stream of little losses and gains." • The "residue" left by the outcomes of prior contests: "the outcomes that have been usual" for us carried on our faces, in our posture and gestures. • Inheriting the reputation of a family member. • The play of the gaze in social space. • Who looks at whom, how, and for how long. • Self as text, self as "staged." • Readers one helps along, readers one repels. • Contests that are "contagious": the recent brawl at Ushuaia. • Intimate contests: Roland Barthes on "making a scene" (Barthes Reader 446-451). • "See, you had to have the last word" (Dusty). • Anecdotes about other contests: among students, at work, with family, between friends and lovers. • No win situations. • The social semiotics of high school. • Some abiding categories: jock, druggie, narc, suck up, geek, gay, slut, "necker," etc. • Relations between the camps. • Crossing over. • Class divisions, contradictory social codes, and double binds. • Being suspected of something. • Clip from Rebel without a Cause (first day of class through "chicken" fight at Planetarium). • Breakfast: family dynamics. • the new kid and the first day. • Planetarium existentialism: "what does he know about man alone" (asks Plato). • Displacement upwards: penetrating the tire. • Keeping and losing one's cool. • Reframing: fight or game? • Back at home: the father on his knees. • Father + apron + cleaning up after woman, etc. • Nick Ray's cast of cold war characters: bewildered son, attention-starved daughter, the phallic mother, the authoritarian father, the liberal father, the kid who shoots kittens. • Turn to Barthes on the "obvious" and the "obtuse" meanings of the filmic image. • Reminder about first response paper: due Tuesday.
Circulation
of Gide's journals in English translation. • In the background: Barthes
on Gide, Pease on the author. • To the foreground: the distinction
between fabula/syuzhet as borrowed from the Russian Formalists by film
theorist David Bordwell. • Fabula = story = latent content vs. Syuzhet
= plot = manifest content. • The imaginative construction of the
story from explicit cues/clues at the level of plot. • Groundhog
Day as test case: returning to story elements not fully realized in earlier
articulations of the plot. • Review of Labov and Pratt. • "Orientation"
is never exhaustive. • Presupposed contexts, things too obvious to
state. • Three anecdotes by John Cage (audiotexts): maniacal mechanical
pen, anechoic chamber, self-destructing jukebox. • Proof that there
is no such thing as silence. • Ramifications for music. • The
one-minute constraint ("running time"). • Small history
of Freud and his interpretation of dreams. • Manifest dream content
and latent dream thoughts. • Dream of the cancelled class. •
The unconscious as what is outside of language. • Implausibility
of "meaning what one says." • Censorship: not saying what
we think and desire as the price of continued social interaction. •
The dream you recently had. • The persons in a dream: are they all
you? • The other one desires. • The two times: story time vs.
plot time. • "Running time." • First poem by Frank
O'Hara: "Lana Turner Has Collapsed" (audiotext). • Ephemerality
of fame. • Disorientation. • Identification: "we love you,
get up!" • "The Day Lady Died" (handout; in-class
performance). • Foreign words, names. • On Mal Waldron's becoming
a great pianist—twice. • Billie Holiday/Lady Day. • Baudelaire's
injunction: the modern artist can reach the eternal only by means of the
ephemeral. • The poem not necessarily governed by narrative conventions.
• Resumé of David Lynch's career in television and film: from
Eraserhead to Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks (TV), The Straight Story, Lost Highway,
Mulholland Drive, etc. • Lynch's debt to the surrealist film of Buñuel
and others. • The canonical narrative "speeds" or "tempos":
ellipsis (parts of story not treated by plot), summary (story is abbreviated
in plot), scene (story and plot roughly equivalent and synchronized),
stretch (plot time outlasts story time), pause (plot moves while story
is arrested). • Imposing narrative forms where they don't occur "naturally":
dreams, non-narrative poetry, life, concepts (cf. Pease's narrative about
"the author"). • Glaspell's play Trifles. • Relation
between story and plot. • What counts as evidence: what to read for?
• Gender and interpretation. • The manifest text as cue and
as clue. • Looking ahead to Goffman: quotidian struggles for recognition.
Advertisements for David Bordwell's analysis of classical Hollywood film (handout) and for Aristotle's Poetics. • Looking ahead to Erving Goffman & the film Rebel without a Cause. • Mimesis, mimicry, imitating and identifying in order to learn (Aristotle). • Intellectual discourse: handling author names, characterizing projects, reproducing arguments, evaluating soundness of judgments and claims. • Synopsizing plots. • Official language and vernacular variants. • Power differentials. • Who talks how, to whom, and why? • "I'm the kind of person who talks this way." • Review of Labov-Pratt on basic constituents of all narratives: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, coda. • Can there by "degrees" of universality: what is the "reach" of this claim, this pattern? • Sampling some of the plot resolutions class members have encountered recently. • Death, marriage. • Whether or not to be faithful (to the Hollywood plot): Lost in Translation. • Diminution of plot, increased focus on character. • More Aristotle: on moving you to fear and pity. • Figures of identification: wanting to be x, wanting to belong to the same group that x belongs to, wanting to have what x has (thing), wanting to have what x has (powers, capabilities). • Assuming one's identity in part through commodity consumption. • Monotheism as "mass marketing." • Looking ahead to Freud: a dream is the representation of a wish or desire in its realized state. • Focus on Hillis Miller: page 75, paragraph beginning: "Both of these miniscule narratives…." • Three indispensable elements: plot, personification, patterning. • Trope = Greek for "turn," hence "turn of phrase." • Prosopopoeia: prosopon (Greek: face), poiesis (Greek: to make). • Personification as "putting a face to" something. • For the weekend: identify and synopsize three plots in your on-line journal: one plot should come from film or television, one from your personal experience, one from the news.
Who is Roland Barthes? • For him, anything could be a sign. • Fashion, photography, cuisine, tourist traps, professional wrestling, and so on. • The "telling detail." • Fundamental distinction between "list" and "narrative." • Whitman, the Iliad. • "I like, I dislike." • On not liking Pollock. • Aside on Mona Lisa Smile (first of several). • Taste says: my body is not yours. • An occasion to practice tolerance. • Liberalism and the discourse of tolerance. • Killing a fly. • On not liking strawberries. • Acquired tastes: mastery of what's bad for you as rite of passage and display of mastery over the baser things. • Taste on the tongue (physical) and taste as "sign" of culture (metaphorical). • Can philosophy be lighthearted? • Hedonism and askesis in Barthes. • Paganism and Christianity: different approaches to the body and sexuality. • Secular consciousness and theological consciousness. • The desire to know, a species of desire as such? • Another mention of Proust. • Reading the sexuality of others. • Some books Roland Barthes never wrote. • The importance of the "project" in intellectual and artistic life. • The list of things to do. • Mathesis, Mimesis, and Semiosis. • Mathesis and the Motel 6 sense of "accommodate": what knowledge does literature "put up"? which disciplines crash there? • Mimesis: one dimensional language, pluri-dimensional "real. • Semiosis: signs and signifying practices. • Tackling the six components discernible in all narratives: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, coda. • At the movies: "abstract" (lights down), "coda" (lights up). • Framing the symbolic universe and starting the game of narration. • Interruption of "real" time. • Evaluation: warding off the statement, "so what?"
Opening exhortation on keeping the on-line reading journal. • The analogy between reading and dreaming: the evanescence of the text. • Marking your reading: the virtues of a heavily scored and annotated page. • Overview of Barthes, Pratt, and Greenblatt. • Barthes's insistence that we begin to think not one power (the king), not two powers (classes in struggle), but many powers. • His debt to Michel Foucault. • First focus on Stephen Greenblatt's article on "Culture. • Things to read for: the writer's overarching project; central theses and/or topics; family of concepts and terms; points of contention and consensus (with whom does the writer argue? agree?); key passages: nodal points where the text "tells all"; sense of audience (to whom is this discourse addressed?). • Barthes "address" to the College de France. • The various ways in which we (here and now) are not that audience (there and then). • A look at Greenblatt's opening paragraphs. • The necessity of synopsis. • First mention of "metonymy" and of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. • Tylor's definition of culture: "impossibly vague and encompassing" (225). • To quote is to consent to rewrite (Roland Barthes). • A definition must exclude something. • Do rocks "have" culture? • "Material culture." • Fundamental ambiguity within concept: elevated culture and common culture. • Things to do when you want people to know you "have" culture." • Activities, clothes, speech habits. • The British accent as heard by an American. • Distinguishing oneself. • Subsidized elitism (opera, The New Yorker) and market populism. • Culture common to a people or region. • The German concept of "geist" or "spirit. • Shared consciousness elaborated within a specific set of conditions. • Avoiding frostbite in Maine. • Can "culture" be our object of study? • Should the English and History (and Art, etc.) departments be dismantled in favor of a Department of Cultural Analysis? • Arguments for and against. • The "essay" (French essai: attempt, try) and the "paper." • Greenblatt on constraint and mobility; improvisation. • Can Greenblattians know when they've left one "culture" and entered another?" • The canon of "English Literature." • Small note on Barthes's distrust of "Literature with a capital L" and his valorization of "writing." • A now opaque date: May 1968 • Limited comparison to September 11. • Students and workers bring Paris to the brink of revolution. • Proximity—imagined, or real—to a moment of fundamental social and cultural transformation. • Reading in the absence of such a sense. • Greenblatt resumed: "culture" as instrument for assigning praise and blame • Lexical and terminological work: panegyric, apophatic, perspicuous / perspicacity.
Introduction to the course and to one another. • What should an English major know? • What it means to "analyze." • The hard sciences and the "difficult" ones. • Multiplicity of media and the distribution of contemporary attention. • Literary discourse and ordinary discourse. • A recurrent example: The Lord of the Rings. • If one wished to avoid it, could one? • The ubiquitous and the hidden. • The book and the film. • Translation across media with differing "reaches." • Gender, sexuality, and reception: "He's so hot." • A compensation for lost masculinity? • Ritual viewing of specific films (Big Lebowski, The Goonies, Boondock Saints, Pretty Woman). • Delegated experience, delegated speech. • Becoming articulate about complex experiences. • Language, the unmasterable.