Foundations of Literary Analysis - Fall 2005 - Prof. Steve Evans

Reading Syllabus • Subject to change; check back frequently • click here for current week

week one

7 September - Wednesday

Log: Introduction to course and to one another. • Objects of attention and evaluation (songs, films, poems, novels, etc.). • Should the English Department be abolished? • Secondary proficiency in a foreign language: a debate about its value. • Other languages in the room? • The project of extending your literacy. • The pop song and the poem. • The literacy you possess already, and the literacy the English Major asks of you. • Hermeneutics (study of interpretation) & semiotics (study of signs).

9 September - Friday

Text Book (TB) 02-12 Story and Storyteller
Critical Terms (CT) 225-232 Culture by Stephen Greenblatt
Hand out: entry on "Culture" from Raymond Williams's Keywords

Assignment: Position paper, printed hard copy due Monday in class: At present, in order to earn a Bachelors Degree in English at the University of Maine, students must demonstrate "intermediate proficiency" in a language other than English. In eight hundred (800) words or less, argue either for the maintenance of this requirement or for its abolition.

Log: Quiz covering readings in Pratt/Labov, Williams, and Greenblatt. • Discussion of quiz. • Williams and the concept of multi-layered, historically-compounded "keywords." • Movements in time and across languages. • Language as an echo chamber. • For instance, "truth." • Is all truth relative? • Not for Plato and the Christian tradition. • Nietzsche's challenge to timelessness of truth. • Kinds of truth, and the disciplines. • A fundamental question: are there things that literature, and only literature, "knows"? • The boundary between ordinary and literary discourse. • All literature has a linguistic foundation, but is it reducible to that basis? • Pratt's sociolinguistic work in Boston. • Who authors our language? • Speakers continuously reshape and revise the lexicon. • Of bubblers, packies, and things "all stove in." • Genre and authorship: straight outta Comptom—right to the mall food court. • Greenblatt's assertion that great literary works are "contexts unto themselves." • Practical issues: marking up texts, creating working conditions in which concentrated thought is possible, reading and rereading. • Scholarship, from the Latin word for "free time" (schole).

12 September - Monday

TB 12-18 The Literary Anecdote
CT 429-446 In Place of an Afterword by Frank Lentricchia

Log: In advance of a more sustained discussion of Lentricchia on Wednesday, voicing and discussion of Wallace Stevens's poem "Anecdote of the Jar." • In Andy's voice, then in Kathy's, and finally in Rachel's. • Vocal quality as what remains after phonemic information has been extracted. • To read aloud is to interpret: that is, to choose between competing possibilities (of pronunciation, for example). • What the poet wrote, and what we readers read. • Substitution of "I" for "it" in lines three and nine. • The question of who does the thinking and talking in a human subject: the ego and/or the unconscious? • Do we always say what we mean, or mean what we say? • Preliminary observations and mark-up of "Anecdote": Tennessee, slovenly, "of a port in air," dominion. • Turning to Pratt, Labov, and the six features common to all narratives (according to them): abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and coda. • Commencement (abstract) and conclusion (coda) of narrative temporality (story time). • The journalistic elements: who, what, when, where (orientation). • Disturbance of the scene set (complicating action), and the elmination of that disturbance (resolution). • Evaluation: persuading the auditor or reader to remain in story time with you. • Warding off the ever-threatening "so what." • Examples from film, ordinary life, and literature. • Very brief discussion of two literary anecdotes: Brent Staples's "Blake," and "Ordnance" by Walter Benjamin. • Honing initial argument: the six features may not always be present, but their absence is itself notable (absent presence).

14 September - Wednesday

TB 19-29 The Short Story
Begin reading Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

Log: Preview of passage identification quiz scheduled for Friday. • On Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style (and Barbara Wright's heroic translation thereof). • The day's focus: Frank Lentricchia's account of "Someone Reading." • Axiom: reading is rereading. • Digression on Joyce's Ulysses. • Lentricchia's essay: its project, structure, and subject matter. • Difficulties and resistances. • Apprenticeship to the discursive universe of literary studies. • This is how people talk there. • Consult Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, etc. • Unfamiliar words, terms, and phrases, among them: prolepsis, the modern literary theory of aesthetic autonomy, "structure unstructured yet still, somehow, structured" (437). • (Addendum: perhaps we can consider Frank Gehry's architectural designs, for instance at Bilbao, as a manifestation of what Lentricchia is getting at?) • Autonomy = auto- (self) + nomos (law). • Brief review of "art for art's sake" and "formalisms" of various stripes. • Proleptic = anticipated, flashed forward. • The politics of language: class, colonialism, region. • Axiom: to interpret is to assign a text to one or more contexts. • The contexts mentioned by Lentricchia: poem itself ) corpus ) period & movement ) national literature ) national politics of imperialism. • Does Lentricchia's essay provide a persuasive interpretation of "Anecdote of the Jar"? • Does it show you things about the poem that had either not occurred to you, or that you had observed but not consciously articulated? • Or did it further obscure this already enigmatic poem? • Lentricchia intends his reading of one poem to demonstrate general principles governing the reading of all poems, indeed of all reading whatsoever. • Are you persuaded?

16 September - Friday

TB 19-29 The Short Story
CT 66-79 Narrative by J. Hillis Miller
Quiz: Identification of passages by author (texts drawn from TB, CT, Exercises in Style, and handout from first day)

Log: After the passage identification quiz, we reviewed the stories by Kate Chopin, William Carlos Williams, and Grace Paley in Text Book. • Synopses and discuss of each story in turn. • Williams and the "savage brat." • Paley's narrator and her struggle to craft a story at once believable and enjoyable to her ailing father. • First discussion of Hillis Miller. • The phenomenon of "repeat viewing." • Examples from everyday life.

19 September - Monday

TB 29-57 Character and Confrontation
CT 39-49 Writing by Barbara Johnson

On Monday afternoon a videotape of Rebel Without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray; 1955) will be placed on reserve at the Media Resource Center at the Fogler Library (2nd floor). I recommend that you view it prior to class on Wednesday, 28 September. (Naturally, if you'd prefer to rent or borrow it and watch at home at your leisure, feel free to do so.) A detailed synopsis of the film is available here.

Log: Review of J. Hillis Miller's essay on "Narrative." • Why stories? Why the same stories? Why new ones? • Orderly and predictable symbolic universe, in contrast to "real life" (where autonomy and predictability can be in short supply). • A child's relationship to stories, and ours. • Play it again. • Conversation about some of the "repeat viewing" class members did over the weekend. • Religion as provider of fundamental stories. • A partial turn to "literature" in wake of Enlightenment. • Wallac Stevens's idea of poetry as "supreme fiction." • Close look at Hillis Miller's central claims, made on p75 following the poems. • Comparison of Hillis Miller's universalizing claim and the competing claim made by Pratt-Labov. • Situation - Reversal - Revelation; Prosopoeia or personification; Nuclear figure, complex word,or trope. • Attention to the medium of language. • Prosopon (Gk. face), poeisis (Gk. to make). • Nuclear figure likened to the "complex words" of Raymond Williams ("Culture" handout).

21 September - Wednesday

TB 29-57 Character and Confrontation
CT 23-38 Structure by John Carlos Rowe

Log: Notice of a terminology quiz projected for Monday, 26 September. • First up: Barbara Johnson's essay on "Writing." • The Saussurean theory of the sign and the emergence of modern linguistics (Johnson 40-41). • Precedents in antiquity and theology. • The "Adamic" theory of language: words referring to things. • Saussure's bracketing of the referent. • Sign: signified / signifier. • The arbitrary joining of meaning to matter, sense to sound. • And a second axis of arbitrariness: sign to referent. • Looking ahead to Roger Brown's thesis that words refer to categories, not directly to things. • Graphic medium: marks on a surface. • At what point do they become signifiers?• Phonetic medium: sound waves originating with the speaker as decoded by the listener. • Listening to Larry Eigner speak. • Breanne's laryngitis. • Two signifieds intersecting same signifier: tear (noun) /tear (verb). • To voice is to interpret. • Two signifiers for one signified: homonymy and synonymy. • The logic of "supplementarity" detailed on p45. • Hierarchical binaries: speech (+) / writing (-), for instance. And within a patriarchal social formation: male (+ / female (-). • Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's thesis that gender domination is the foundation of all other forms. • Small lesson on Socrates, Plato, and the relationship between speech and writing. • Turn to Erving Goffman and "character contests." • Elaboration of Hegel's scenario of the "struggle to the death for recognition." • Masters and slaves. • Incident along the footpath, and all the zero-sum contests that take the same form. • The domestic sphere as scene for character contests: parents/children. • The erotic sphere. • Postponed Esslin until Friday: pay attention to terms he adapts from Aristotle's "Poetics" to discuss commercials.

23 September - Friday

TB 29-57 Character and Confrontation
CT 23-38 Structure by John Carlos Rowe

Log: Further discussion of Goffman's concept of "character contests." • Rules of eye contact, path-finding and path-claiming. • Zero sum games, competing for limited resources such as space, time, attention. • Examples from everyday life. • Turn to Esslin on Aristotle. • The six features common to all successful dramatic narratives according to Aristotle: muthos, ethos, dianoia, opsis, lexis, and melopoeia. • The first three are primary and concerned with "object" of mimesis. • Second three are secondary, though still essential. Opsis concerns the "manner" of mimesis. Lexis and melopoeia are "media" of mimesis. • Peripeteia defined and discussed. • Deus ex machine defined and discussed.

26 September - Monday

CT 105-117 Author by Donald Pease
TB 29-57 Character and Confrontation
David Bordwell, "Classical Hollywood Cinema" (handout)

First Paper due 5 October

Choose a literary or cinematic narrative of some length and subject it to an analysis using the concepts and categories we've discussed in the first month of this class (Labov and Pratt's six common elements, Hillis Miller's more elaborate account of narrative universals, the distinction between plot and story, manifest versus latent content, Aristotle's terminology as used in Esslin, Goffman's concept of character contests, Bordwell's structuralist analysis of films, etc.).

It is up to you, first, to determine which theoretical framework (or blend of elements from different frameworks) best accounts for the actual operations of the narrative you've selected and, second, to make a convincing case for the superiority of the method of analysis you've chosen over competing models.

A successful paper will make an interesting choice of the object to be analyzed, demonstrate a firm and detailed grasp of the categories and concepts employed in the analysis of that object as well as a critical attitude toward them, and sustain its analysis in a consistent and well-structured manner throughout the length of the paper.

Format: a paper not to exceed 2000 words in MLA format, using 10-12 point font, double spacing, and one-inch margins.

Log: Review of terms prepared in advance of the quiz, including: coda, prosopopoeia, panegyric, melopoeia, manifest/latent, semiotics, polysemy, binaries, hierarchical binaries, trope, axiom, supplemenent, aesthetic autonomy. • Thirty minutes spent on quiz. • Preview of first paper assigment. • No time to discuss lovely diagram synopsizing Pease's history of the "author." Reserved for further discussion Friday.

28 September - Wednesday

Discussion of Bordwell & Pease
Rebel Without a Cause, dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955 (on reserve at Fogler)

Log: Further elaboration on first paper. • Discussion of Bordwell's essay, which completes our initial survey of narratological theories. • Fabula (story, latent content) and syuzhet (plot, manifest content). • Dual track: heterosexual romance + other sphere of action. • Problem-solving and deadlines. • Two meanings of montage: a restricted one synonymous with "summary" (see below); a more general one, based on the French montrer or to show. Any cutting together of two images that results in a "third meaning." • Composition: sequences and punctuation. • The canonical narrative tempos: ellipsis, summary, scene, stretch, and pause. • Unity of time, space, and action: from Aristotle to Hollywood. • Examples: Groundhog Day, Queneau's Exercises, North by Northwest, The Lady in the Lake, others.

30 September - Friday

Conclude your reading of Exercises in Style by Queneau
Plot synopsis preparatory to first paper due in class

Log: To Pease and the author, finally. • Historical development of the category. • Auctor > author > genius > critic > author reader (Barthes) > author function (Foucault) > foundational authors (Foucault). • Transition from monarchy and aristocracy to democracy. • Emergence of public spheres of debate. • And of a demand for "news." • "Representative" government. • The genius as distillation (and elevation) of author. • A different kind of "vertical" relationship. • The trickier end of our graph: Barthes & Foucault. • "Foundational" authors as return of the auctor concept?

3 October - Monday

TB 57-61 Representation and Its Complications
CT 11-22 Representation by W.J.T. Mitchell

Log: Focus on "Representation" by Mitchell. • Mimesis in Plato and Aristotle. • Representation (broad translation), imitation (narrower), mimicry (narrower still). • Learning by looking to, doing as (others do). • The axis of communication (maker-beholder) and the axis of representation (sign-referent). • Photography in the age of pixel manipulation. • Distorted representations. • Man Ray's photograph (Text Book 59) and Magritte's painting (Text Book 60). • Interpretation of elements and manner of framing. • First pass through e.e. cumming's "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" (TB 61). • Mimesis of a movement (verb) rather than a static entity (noun). • Modernist practices of representation.

5 October - Wednesday

Draft of first paper due in class
CT 177-185 Value/Evaluation by Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Log: More voicings of poem by e.e. cummings. • Return to Mitchell's essay on "Representation." • Peirce's categories of signs, organized by relationship of sign to referent. • Earlier than and distinct from Saussure's theory, which it supplements nicely. • Motivated signs and arbitrary signs. • Symbol: sign has arbitrary relationship to referent. • Icon: sign resembles referent. • Index: sign is existentially linked to referent, is caused by it, or proximate to it.

7 October - Friday - No Class

10 October - Monday - Fall Break - No Class

12 October - Wednesday

TB 63-72 The Linguistic Basis of Metaphor
TB 72-74 Metaphor in Three Poems
CT 80-90 Figurative Language by Thomas McLaughlin

Log: Discussion of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's account of "evaluation" (focused on Critical Terms 181-82). • And a preview of the logic of metaphor. • Let X stand for Y in circumstance Z. • The example of paper money. • The dollar store. • Exchange values and use values. • Composition and evaluation: the writer as critic. • The receiver of the text and the finite resource of attention. • The transformative performance of texts: remakes, translations, stagings, etc. • Informal but overt verbal judgments. • Institionalized forms of evaluation. • Does Herrnstein Smith adequately address issues of power / authority / censorship? • Roger Brown's theory of categorical reference (Text Book 63-72). • Dr. Itard and the Wild Child (Victor). • Words refer first to categories, which can then be applied to particular things. • Chairs, books.

14 October - Friday — a recording of this class session exists

TB 74-83 Metaphor and Dream
CT 147-62 Unconscious by Françoise Meltzer

Log: Review of Brown and his theory of "categorical" reference. • McLaughlin's essay on "figurative language." • Meaning in excess of the literal. • Meaning in excess of intention. • The use a "figure" is to take a risk. • Nike ad reproduced in Text Book 156. • Samson the first suicide bomber? • "Be a Marine." • Framing certain traits of category "in" and framing others "out." • Major "figures of speech" (McLaughlin 83-84): metaphor, personification, apostrophe, simile, metonymy. • The axis of substitution (metaphoric, paradigmatic) and the axis of combination (metonymic, syntagmatic). • Of crosses and crowns. • Changing topic: the "rubric" by which first papers are evaluated.

17 October - Monday

TB 83-87 Surrealist Metaphor
CT 147-62 Unconscious by Françoise Meltzer

Paper One returned with comments / rubrics.

Log: Freudian categories (Text Book 74-77). • Latent and manifest, dream work and work of intepretation, condensation, displacement, and "imagery." • Discussion of dream life. • Overview of Freud's major concerns and topics. • His "texts": symptoms, dreams, jokes. • "All dreams are the representation of a wish as though it were fulfilled." • Problems with that formulation. • Post-traumatic stress after World War I forced Freud to reconsider. • Discussion of first paper.

19 October - Wednesday

TB 128-142 Hidden Meaning: Parables and Allegory
CT 369-386 Desire by Judith Butler

Log: Overview of revision process. • How to prepare your revision report. • Discussion of binaries governing the Meltzer and Butler essays on "unconscious" and "desire." Human~animal, conscious~unconscious (Freud), master~slave (Hegel), signified~signifier (Saussure), reason~desire. • The unconscious as social fact, as linguistic fact, as residue of animal infrastructure upon which "the human" is overlaid? • Plans for revision of first paper.

21 October - Friday

TB 128-142 Hidden Meaning: Parables and Allegory; focus on brief parables
CT 121-134 Interpretation by Steven Mailloux

24 October - Monday

TB 128-142 Hidden Meaning: Parables and Allegory; focus on brief parables
TB 128-142 Hidden Meaning: Parables and Allegory; focus on "A Night-Sea Journey"
CT 135-46 Intention by Annabel Patterson

Submit hardcopy of "revision report" in class.

26 October - Wednesday

TB 128-142 Hidden Meaning: Parables and Allegory; focus on "A Night-Sea Journey"
TB 87-94 Poetic Uses of Metaphor
CT 163-177 Determinacy/Indeterminacy by Gerald Graff

28 October - Friday

TB 87-94 Poetic Uses of Metaphor
Poetry Handout

31 October - Monday

TB 94-103 Metaphor as a Basis for Thought
TB 87-94 Poetic Uses of Metaphor
Poetry Handout

Final day to submit revision of paper one.

2 November - Wednesday

TB 94-103 Metaphor as a Basis for Thought
CT 203-222 Rhetoric by Stanley Fish
TB 87-94 Poetic Uses of Metaphor
Poetry Handout

4 November - Friday - No Class

TB 106-113 from AIDS and Its Metaphors

7 November - Monday

TB 113-128 Arguing with Metaphor: Analogy and Ideology
CT 306-321 Ideology by James H. Kavanagh

9 November - Wednesday

TB Transforming Texts (2): Sleeping Beauties

11 November - Friday

TB 162-176 Transforming Texts (2): Sleeping Beauties
TB 207-210 On Interpretation

14 November - Monday

TB 210 - 229 Bettelheim and Prose on "Sleeping Beauty"

16 November - Wednesday

Texts & Research: The Mystory

18 November - Friday

Texts & Research: The Mystory

21 November - Monday

Second Paper Due - Using the methods and concepts modeled over the past month of analyzing songs and poems, develop your own sustained analysis of one of the approved poems. Target length: no less than 1000, and no more than 2000, words. Due at the start of class.

23 November - Wednesday

No classs

25 November - Friday

No classs

28 November - Monday

TB 248-262 Materials on Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther
CT 263-273 Gender by Myra Jehlen

30 November - Wednesday

TB 262-274 Roland Barthes: The Fragment

2 December - Friday

TB 262-274 Roland Barthes: The Fragment
CT 274-287 Race by Kwame Anthony Appiah

5 December - Monday

TB 274-313 Fragments of Identification: A Guide
CT 288-305 Ethnicity by Werner Sollors

7 December - Wednesday

TB 274-313 Fragments of Identification: A Guide
Discussion of The Gleaners and I by Agnes Varda (on reserve at the Media Resource Center)

9 December - Friday

TB 274-313 Fragments of Identification: A Guide, focus on Eunice Lipton's "History of an Encounter: Alias Olympia" (282-291)
CT 406-427 Class by Daniel T. O'Hara

12 December - Monday

CT 354-369 Imperialism/Nationalism by Seamus Deane

14 December - Wednesday

CT 429-446 In Place of an Afterword—Someone Reading by Frank Letricchia

16 December - Friday

CT 429-446 In Place of an Afterword—Someone Reading by Frank Letricchia

19 December - Monday

Cumulative final examination, normal room, 1:30-3:30pm

Final Project and any revised projects due at exam