The Act of Interpretation - Fall 2007 - Prof. Steve Evans

Reading Syllabus • Subject to change; check back frequently. Current week here.

week 1 - classical precedents

2 Sept | Introduction to course.

Log: Some anecdotes of interpretation gone awry. Best of plans (misread). Mimesis, representation. Eco's definition of a sign: something one can lie with. Frogs don't paint flies. Giving and taking orders (the imperative). Exchanging vows (performatives). Utterances embedded in contexts. Hierarchies, conflicts. Huck Finn in High School: a clash of literacies. The erotic as incitement to interpret (jealousy too). Hermes, god of messages. Medical hermeneutics (symptoms), and forensics (the corpse, the clues). A mix up at the pharmacy: a suppository taken through the nose? • A first entry in our Hermeneut's Guide to Song: Keep the Car Running by Arcade Fire. Who is speaking? To whom? The pronoun "It." Supplement: Foo Fighters cover, courtesy of Stereogum.

4 Sept | Norton: Gorgias (29-33, on-line); Plato, "Ion" (35-48; on-line). Proust, Swann's Way (3-9).

Log: The hermeneutic circle: from text to interpretation (and back), from part to whole (and back). From words on a page to a world in your head. Interpretation as translation, more or less "faithful." And interpretation as "staging." Example of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. The "frame." • Further analysis of "Keep the Car Running." Who is speaking? to whom? what is the situation? Segue to "Undo" by Björk (live version here). The musical "rhetoric": samples, harps, solo/choral voice work. Sounding good on shitty equipment. • A first glance at Proust: falling asleep with a book; the bedrooms one has woken up in; the "undone" self of sleep, reading, memory. With a brief aside on Gorgias (whom we'll carry over on Tuesday). Shifting the tempo of reading: losing impatience.

week 2 - classical precedents

11 Sept | Norton: Plato, "Republic" (49-80), "Phaedrus" (81-85). Proust 8-48. Writing assignment due in class: an essay of no more than 800 words interpreting the word "it" in Arcade Fire's "Keep the Car Running" and Björk's "Undo" (please submit marked up lyric sheets with hard copy).

Log: Plato's "Ion," "Republic," and "Phaedrus." Three standpoints: Plato (conceptual, truth-testing, existential), Aristotle (formalist, structuralist), Horace (the practice, not merely the reception and analysis, of poetry). Situating ourselves relative to such models. The Platonic concept of mimesis. What does literature "know"? Ion the airhead. And Tynnichus the one-hit wonder. Socrates as critic of irrational authority, and as authoritarian censor. The unforced force of the better argument? Or a bit of rhetorical bullying? Reason as a force corrosive of accepted cultural practices. Nietzsche: Christianity as "Platonism for the masses." God is good, god in one. Against the multiplicity and multifarious nature of the Greek gods. The many ironies of Plato's presentation of Socrates. The face-to-face practice of dialectic, the unruly disseminations of writing. Using metaphors and allegories to discredit poets and poetry. The magnet and the rings (in Ion), the cave (Republic). The "break-up" with poetry: reluctantly taking leave of the lover who is bad for you.

13 Sept | Norton: Aristotle, "Poetics" and "Rhetoric" (86-121). Proust 48-100.

Log: Hermeneut's Guide to Song > It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) by Bob Dylan, selected by Jessica. Generational connotations. Most important stanza? Shorter, stanza-concluding lines reminiscent of Sapphics. End rhymes and anaphora. The president's two bodies (Bush and the pretzel). Structure: (3+1) x 5. In-class mark-ups handed in. While it lasts: O Superman by Laurie Anderson (another address to the mother). Carol Reed's film Odd Man Out (another bleeding protagonist). • The "overture" to Remembrance of Things Past, part one of "Combray." The architectural metaphor: Gothic cathedral. The musical metaphor: opera or symphony. The maternal voice, as it reads aloud the first novel the narrator has ever heard, selected for him by his grandmother. The moment with the madeleine crumbs softened in tea. Involuntary memory, as it differs from voluntary. • Little lesson in French literature: Flaubert's search for the right word (compared to Balzac's frenzied productivity), the symbolists from Baudelaire to Mallarmé. • Losing impatience, continued: Is the person you love ever boring? Appreciation not compulsory in literary study, though comprehension is. Wasted time, and its redemption through art. Nietzsche's "eternal return." • The madeleine in your life? A pot roast dinner, an old advertisement, a song, a scent, the "NPR voice." For Steve, this past spring: a Mister Softee ice-cream. • A first quick run-through of the central concepts in Aristotle's Poetics. Plato on Homer and the epic, Aristotle on Sophocles and tragedy. Muthos, ethos, dianoia, lexis, opsis, melopoeia. More about which Tuesday.

week 3 - classical precedents

18 Sept | Norton: Aristotle, "Poetics" and "Rhetoric" (86-121). Proust 100-150. An mp3 file of this class session is available upon request.

Writing assignment due in class: Briefly respond to one of these two prompts. (1) What would be the equivalent of Proust's "madeleine" in your experience? or (2) Taking Proust's opening pages as your model, briefly evoke the bedrooms in which you have woken.

Log: Hermeneut's Guide to Song > "Honey & the Moon" by Joseph Arthur (video here), selected by Michaela. Genre, timbre. A kernel or "nucleus" to the song: stanza, line, word. Weighing the candidates. The lyric utterance: I + you ± desire/affect. Soliciting identification of reader/listener. Whereas the novel: proper names, social relations, the past tense. I like / I don't like: backing it up. Bad lines? • Central concepts within the Poetics. Mimesis: of people in action. Muthos, or plot. Ethos, or character. Dianoia, or "thinking" ("reasoning" perhaps too narrow a term). • Next in importance: Lexis, or the words, the language, used by characters and author (sometimes given as "diction," but "lexis" need not be elevated). • Digression on lexis, or who will educate the educators? Steve's lesson in the verb "to feel," as in the phrase: "I'm feeling these pants." Not to mention, "to smell," and "to sweat." (Thanks everyone.) • Back to Aristotle: Opsis, or spectacle. Special effects, but also, more humbly, but just as decisively, the mise-en-scene or putting before our eyes. Catharsis solicited by opsis not as good, according to A., as catharsis solicited by sequence of actions (plot). Melopoeia (to make song): first meaning = music (accompaniment, soundtrack), but the entire soundscape might equally fall under this heading (esp. in film). Hearing a match flare in a David Lynch film. • Two other important concepts: peripetia (reversal) and anagnorisis (recognition). Art as the means for producing sudden insights (in characters, in audiences), not just passively recording the real. Anagnoris and dianoia: not just thinking, but a change in one's thinking. • Aristotle's authority grounded in his familiarity with the genres he discusses (tragedy, epic poetry). • General comments on first mini-essays: Two near-synonyms for "vague": polysemous, ambiguous. Review MLA protocols for indicating "Titles" and the Works they appear in ("Undo" from Björk's Vespertine, e.g.). When calling attention to a word, for instance the word "it," best option is to use quotation marks. Eliminating errors (esp. patterns of error) enables argument and/or interpretation to be viewed more clearly. Intellectual self-defense. On the whole, a good batch.

20 Sept | Norton: Horace, "Ars Poetica" (121-135); Longinus, "On Sublimity" (135-154). Proust 150-200. An mp3 file of this class session is available upon request.

Log (in process): No song today. • Closing our first chapter, on classical precedents to literary theory and criticism. • Preview of next chapter: What is language? The leap into modernity. • Revisiting, and revising with first-hand knowledge, the distinctions proposed on 11 September: Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, as individual writers, as archetypal "standpoints." Ethico-existential philosopher, formalist-structuralist critic, seasoned and skillful writer. • Greek (Plato, Aristotle) ~ Roman (Horace). Reception (Plato, Aristotle) ~ Production (Horace). What is it (good) for? (Plato) ~ What is it / How is it made? (Aristotle, Horace). Ought (Plato) ~is (Aristotle, Horace). • Horace on the laborious acquisition of literary skill, where some innate talent is already present. Contrast to Plato's poet, mere instrument of the Muse's whim. • Giving pleasure. • An aside on the relationship between manifest "plot" and latent "story." Usually asymmetrical (exception, "real time"). In epic poetry (twenty years), in staged drama (a fate day or two). • The role of mimesis in the manufacture of human subjectivity (in all three writers). Primary identifications. On James Dean and the jeans you're wearing. • A transition in Proust: from "Combray" to the novel-within-a-novel, "Swann in Love." • Summarizing Proust: "I become a writer." • Scenes of reading: the opening few pages, the melodrama of the goodnight kiss (maternal voice, first novel), afternoons reading in the garden (85-89). A paragraph aloud. Sentence rhythms, themes and digressions. • Swann's mimetic hold over narrator's life. The scandalous and fascinating Odette (first seen as the "dame en rose" or lady in pink). Her daughter Gilberte. A vulgar gesture through the hawthornes. A sort of declaration of love. "Along the way by Swann's." • Practical advice on concentration while reading, strategies for annotation (mark-up), crystallizing notes.

week 4 - what is language?

25 Sept | Norton: Saussure (956-977). Proust 200-250 (not necessary to bring Proust to class). Assignment: Three sheets of notes (one side each) on, respectively, Plato, Aristotle, and Horace. Hardcopies (but not originals!) due in class.

Log: The Hermeneut's Guide to Song. "Faster Horses" by Tom T. Hall, selected by Karla. Mark-ups and in-class discussion. The cowboy and the poet: Socrates and Ion. Circuits of patriarchal "wisdom." The song's existence refutes the speaker's abdication of writing? Enigma: "something cold and shiny / laying by my head." Coercive vs. persuasive means. • The note-taking exercise. Value of a marked-up text. Difficulty deciding what to leave out. Collected in class. • Taking up the question, "What is language." Ferdinand de Saussure's consequential response. First principles: the sign can be analyzed into two aspects: signifier and signified. As distinct, but intimately connected, as two sides of a single sheet of paper. The link between signifier and signified is "arbitrary" (the result of social convention). As is the link between the sign and its real-world referent. • Two axes: of selection (the paradigmatic axis) and of combination (the syntagmatic axis). Paradigm and syntagm (silent "g"s). The sentence (or other bounded utterance) as one example, the outfit you're wearing today as another. Outfit=syntagm, Closet/Wardrobe=paradigm. • A science of signs (semiology), to which linguistics would contribute. • On Thursday, continuing Saussure, bringing Jakobson in as well. "Structuralism" as an approach.

27 Sept | Norton: Jakobson (1254-1269). Proust 250-300. Bring both books.

Log (in process): The Hermeneut's Guide to Song. "Still Crazy After All These Years" by Paul Simon, selected by Lisa. • Saussure, continued from Tuesday. Signifier, signified, sign, signification. Tricky but important distinction between "signification" and "value." Semantic fields as indefinite, associatively-linked sets. The paradigmatic axis (selection) and the syntagmatic axis (combination). Still crazy after all these beers: i.e., substitutions can be based on signifier as well as signified. Basis for Jakobson's remarks on metaphor and metonymy (a few typos aside, this discussion is worth reading). Little lesson in metonymy and synecdoche. The watch on Johnny Depp's wrist (in an advertisement). • Handout: Jakobson's Six Functions. • Assignment (due in class on Tuesday): Offer your "advice to a novice hermeneut" on how best to approach the mark-up stage of interpreting a song lyric. We're the editorial board, you're passing along the knowledge gained over the past month to a newcomer.

week 5 - what is language?

02 Oct | Norton: Levi-Strauss (1415-1427); Austin (1427-1442). Proust 300-350. Assignment (due in class): "Advice to a Novice Hermeneut on Marking Up a Lyric Sheet" (keep it short: no more than a page or two—500 to 800 words).

Log: Remarks on note-taking practices. Summary, direct quotation, diagram and outline, prioritizing based on importance. Annotate the text, make stand-alone notes, annotate those notes. • Another attempt at drawing the distinction between "signification" and "value" in Sausure. Films whose plots now seem implausible because a cell phone would have solved a character's problem. Content of the call (=signification), means of making call (=value). Digression on the cell phone in 24 (quotidian miracle, the instrument—along with torture—upon which Bauer most relies). • Roman Jakobson on the six functions at play in all message exchange (handout): Addressee (emotive), message (poetic), addresser (conative), context (referential), contact (phatic), code (metalingual). Remarks on each function. The "set toward" a given function. Foregrounding and backgrounding. The Facebook "poke" as pure case of phatic function. Codes within codes: embedding, layering. In this course, a common code (American English), a specialized one (literary theory). Weaving back and forth. Pedagogy has a "set toward" the addressee (student)—or at least it should! The utterance "tonight." In many variations. Stable "signification" (see Saussure), variable meanings dependent upon performance, context, pacing, tone, etc. • Levi-Strauss's "A Writing Lesson." Field-work as opposed to laboratory work (anthropology vs. linguistics). L-S's thesis: Written language as instrument of domination. Path-following, map-making: not writing? The low comedic aspects of L-S's "episode." The chief's "mimesis" of writing. An inventory of exchangeable items. Background on Tristes tropiques. That excerpts in "the brick" have other contexts.

04 Oct | Norton: Heidegger (1118-1135). Proust 350-400.

Log: Extensive review of Jakobson's "six functions." New material: Austin on "performative" dimension of language. Reference to what is "the case" is one possibility of language use. But bringing about "the case" is another. How to do things with words? The humor in the piece. Quite a different tone than we've been accustomed to. Generalissimo Stalin's new ship. "I divorce you."

week 6 - what is hermeneutics?

09 Oct | Fall Break - no class.

11 Oct | Norton: Schleiermacher (610-626). Proust 400-450. An mp3 file of this class session is available upon request.

Log: On Heidegger's "Language." Not, "we speak language," but "language speaks us." Similarity to Saussure—and deep-rooted differences, too. A challenge to theology? Indebtedness to Nietzsche. Mini-lecture on existentialism (the priority of existence over essence). Doing without the hypothesis of (one or more) god(s). Language as world-making, and world-disclosing. Heidegger's politics. The general problem of relating bodies of work to historical individuals. • Segue to Schleiermacher ("veil-maker"). To interpret is to translate. A Sappho poem. In Greek, in translation. Accidents of transmission. The primacy of desire. Bringing Greek texts back into intellectual circulation: German scholarship in the 19th-century. The secret of Schleiermacher's success in attracting an audience. • Remarks on Proust. The larger project. The Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation, and Lydia Davis's. The boldness of retitling the work Remembrance of Things Past. What is "opaque" in this text. What transferable? Belonging to, or being excluded, from a clique, for instance. The narrator's "apprenticeship" to signs (Gilles Deleuze). Overlapping sign-systems: erotic, social, sensual, aesthetic. The arts in Proust: painting (Elstir), writing (Bergotte), acting (Berma), composing (Vinteuil).

week 7 - what is hermeneutics?

16 Oct | Norton: Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying..." (870-884). Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 1.

Log: Hermeneut's Guide to Song. "Alice" by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, selected by Steve. Two versions of the lyrics. Many forms of liquidity. And stringiness (tracing, writing, skating). "Arithmetic, arithmatock." Murder, madness, desire: the usual. Intertext: Lewis Carroll. • Remaining with the name: Proust. Hearing Gilberte's name (410-11). Hearing Gilbert pronounce the narrator's name (420). Obsessing over Swann's name (429). The many names by which Odette is known. • Relation to one's own name. Being "given" a name. Taking it up. That one's already taken ("Jenny"). What one answers to ("Katie"). Signatures. The name of one's first crush. What is true of people, also true of places. The name of a city one desires to visit. • Transition to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The lesson of chapter one: we're seldom the first person to comment on a phenomenon, so read up. Centrality of desire. The "dream" as such, and as allegory of "text." More to come on Thursday. • A few words on Schleiermacher. Reminder of his context. The best dozen pages on hermeneutics ever written? Working through Steve's strange handout. Thesis 9: "Exposition [Auslegung] is an art." Synonyms for "auslegung": exegesis, construction, interpretation. The "grammatical" and the "psychological" components. Roughly analogous to language and authorship. The manner in which a writer makes the language her own. Melville's intoxicated prose. Shakespeare's English. Knowing a body of work: Poe, Kubrick, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Austen. Strange fact that we organize our culture by author's names (looking ahead to Barthes and Foucault).

18 Oct | Norton: Poulet (1317-1333). Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 2.

Log: Focus on Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying" and Freud. • Nietzsche: No "truth," only interpretations. With the Sophists, contra Socrates. Paragraph beginning "As a means for the preservation of the individual..." (875). A talent for dissimulation. Implausibility of a human "drive for truth." See also Oscar Wilde's "Decay of Lying." • Link to Freud: "human beings allow themselves to be lied to in dreams every night" (875). Mimesis, again. And vanity. How many times have you dissembled already today? "It's early yet." • Nietzsche's assault on Platonic forms, on categories, on universality. And on religious systems that assign to a transcendent term (God in the monotheisms) the role of truth. Existentialism, again. • The correspondence theory of truth. Concepts and objects, and the relationships between them. In linguistic terms: subject and predicate. • If reality is a set of singular, unique, and unrepeatable phenomena—what then? Thought (or reason or language) does not so much discover patterns as impose them. Identity thinking. Paragraph beginning "Let us consider in particular how concepts are formed..." (877). "Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent" (877). The "leaf" example (but—leaf of a tree or leaf of a book?). The cognitive system's reliance upon categorical perception. Survival value of identifying sources of threat, food, sex. The "stereotype" in everyday experience. • Paragraph beginning, "What, then, is truth?" (878). A "mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms...." What English majors are good at! From "concept" to "metaphor." Aside on metonymy: the boy holding his girlfriend's purse in public. Contagious femininity. A mobile army: as with Levi-Strauss, an understanding of how domination and communication are intertwined. The will to power. • A continuity in the projects of Nietzsche and Freud: unseating, unsettling the perceived primacy of the conscious ego, the "individual," the Cartesian "cogito" (I think). A Copernican revolution. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. More introductory remarks. Note on the word "wish." German wunsch a bit lustier, less sublimated. Not something noble Tinkerbell can help you with. The plaque Freud envisions for himself at end of chapter two. A few thoughts on pretentiousness. The delicate balance between disclosure and concealment in Freud's book. Vienna, 1900: not the most "relaxed" of environments. Dreams "express" inconvenient (to the ego) and inapppriate (to society) desires. • A common occurrence when first staring this book: forgetting all one's dreams. Preferable to dealing with them!

week 8 - what is hermeneutics?

23 Oct | Norton: Poulet (1317-1333), Iser (1670-1682). Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 3. • Upon reading these words, e-mail Steve on FC to tell him you've done so. (A test of the log broadcasting system.) • Assignment due in class: Submit two hard copies of your 300-word entry on a song of your choice for potential inclusion in The Hermeneut's Guide to Song. Entries of less than 290 or more than 310 words will not be considered, nor will entries containing typographical errors. Identifying information about the song, song writer, performer, album, record company, and year should appear on a separate line above the body of the entry and is not calculated in the word count.

Log: Divvying up the editorial work for the Hermeneut's Guide to Song. • The divided subject in Freud (It/i). Farewell to the Popeye theory of the self ("I am what I am"). The Cartesian formula: "Cogito, ergo sum." My meaning is identical to my consciousness (of that meaning). And the Freudian: "Woll Es war, soll Ich werden" (loosely: "where It was, the I will end up"). Note the absence of a present tense. • A first "specimen" of Freud's dreaming: Irma's injection. Manifest content (text of dream) and latent content ("dream thoughts"). Shuttling between levels. • General remarks on dream experiences. The test of your own introspection. • Who Irma stands for. First glance at "overdetermination." • Poulet's lyrical account of the reading process. Rimbaud's "Je est un autre" ("I is an other"). Really reading. Links back to Proust. • Speaking of wish-fulfilment: "Have a good weekend."

25 Oct | Norton: Jauss (1547-1565). Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 4.

Log: Freud, reviewed and continued. • If the sender is (It/i) and the receiver, too, communication just got more interesting. Thus, a Freudian revision of Jakobsonian "functions." • Psychoanalysis, like Socratic elenchus, is dialogic. The flow of discourse, and cash. Peculiarity of the first psychoanalyst's practice: no one to listen to him. • Karla's observation: It/i similar to Sd/Sr (Saussure's formula for the sign). • Kettle logic. How the unconscious "reasons." Suspending the principle of non-contradiction. • Revising the initial formula: "a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish." • Dialectic of expression and censorship. In dream production, in text production. How much truth can I bring you to recognize—without you killing me (Socrates, Freud). • Listening to women? • Unfortunate book cover: keep the water colors away from stoned people. The word "seminal." And the unfortunate suggestion that dreams have standardized meanings (Jung's error). For Freud, the meaning of a dream is specific to the subject who produced it. To argue otherwise is to seek to short-circuit or avoid the interpretative process. Which can be nice, too: fortune-telling, horoscopes. The relief of finding one's "fate" outside oneself. • Homage to R.R. Rocklin, MD, who formerly owned Steve's copy of the hardcover. Many signs of ownership, only one of having read. Poulet on "closed books." Signifiers, sold by the yard for film shoots. The book-spine wallpaper at the UMS office in downtown Bangor: the image of books, though not the reality. • On Iser, to whom we'll return: manifest and latent texts, from another angle. The asymmetry between plot (manifest content) and story (latent content). Attending to ("theme"), attending from ("background"). The concept of "negation," with which we'll begin on Thursday.

week 9 - what is an author?

30 Oct | Norton: Gramsci (1135-1144); recommended: Sartre (1333-1350). Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 5. Due in class: Revised entries for HGtS, taking into account (or not) editorial feedback received by peer. Attach original and print-out of editorial suggestions to final revision.

Log: The Hermeneut's Guide to Song: "Prove My Love" by the Violent Femmes; sel. by Steve. • Freud, review of chapters 2-4, preliminary discussion of chapter 5. • General questions about Freud, his practice, and legacy.

01 Nov | Norton: Barthes (1466-1470), Foucault (1622-1636). Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 6 (begin).

Log: Candy. • Hermeneut's Guide to Song: "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," lyrics by Lorenz Hart, perf. by Ella Fitzgerald; sel. by Steve. • Focus on Freud's analysis of the "dreamwork" (Traumarbeitung) in chapter six.

week 10 - what is an author?

06 Nov | Norton: Bakhtin (1186-1220); Gilbert & Gubar (2023-2035). Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 6 (complete).

Log: Brief wrap up of "what is hermeneutics" reading. • Gramsci on intellectual-function and function of intellectuals. Distinction between organic and traditional. Intellectuals as dominated fraction of the dominant class (traditional). Or as articulators of the crises and aspirations of a dominated group or movement (organic). Examples from the history of civil rights in U.S. MLK and Malcom X. • Hegemony (civil society, "spontaneous" consent) and domination (the State, coercion). • Forward to 1968-1969: Barthes and Foucault on authorship and the "author-function." Discourses signed and unsigned.

08 Nov | Norton: Bakhtin (1186-1220); Gilbert & Gubar (2023-2035), continued. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 7. Due in class: Dream analysis demonstrating grasp of basic principles of Freudian hermeneutics. No stipulated word count.

Log: Welcoming a visitor (prospective student). And introducing The Beggar (UMaine's undergraduate literary journal, which Jesse is helping edit this year). • A glimpse ahead to our final chapter, on "identities and interpretations in conflict." • Insights into the dream work and dream analysis upon completion of today's assignment. Examples of condensation and displacement. Scenes of rampant egotism—and humiliation. Whose wishes are these? • Acceding to authority and authorship: Gilbert & Gubar's account of how gender inflects (distorts) the process. Contrast to Bloom's masculinist account of Oedipal overcoming. Historical dimension to G&G's argument. There were women writing, but their work was "undone" by the canonizing process, until recently. • Some remarks preparatory to reading Hegel (for Tuesday). The master/slave dialectic & the struggle to the death for recognition.

week 11 - identities and interpretations in conflict

13 Nov | Norton: Hegel, "The Master Slave Dialectic" (630-36); Marx & Engels (759-789).

Log: How did we get here? A review of our work together so far this semester. • Hegel's dialectic of Lord and bondsman (master and slave). Everyday struggles for recognition ("hand"). Goffman's "character contests." The reversal by which "slave" emerges triumphant. Ironies of history. Transposition of Hegelian dynamic onto concrete historical materials in Marx & Engels. Capital and labor. The revolutionary aspect of capitalism: everything that is solid melts into air. Universalities—false, and true.

15 Nov | Norton: Lacan, "The Mirror Stage..." (1278-1285); Althusser, "from Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1483-1509). Recommended: Iser ix-50.

week 12 - identities and interpretations in conflict

20 Nov | Norton: Jameson (1932-1975).

Log: Passages for Review 1-3. Individual mark-ups, small group discussion, full class discussion. • On Althusser. Ideology constitutive of subjectivity. Digression on Lacan's "mirror phase." Jubilant assumption of misrecognized image. Back to Althusser. Many "ISAs" (p1489). The act of "interpellation." Recruiting individuals into subject-positions (which they "always already" were). The "hey you, yeah you" moment. How to know when you're being pulled over.

22 Nov | Thanksgiving Break - no class. Recommended: Iser 53-103.

week 13 - identities and interpretations in conflict

27 Nov | Norton: de Staël, "On Women Writers" (604-610); Woolf (1017-1030). Lecture will also touch on Jameson material left uncovered on 20 November.

Log: Passages for review 4 to 6. Individual mark-ups, group discussion, plenary discussion. • Discussion of Jameson. Postmodernism, pastiche, and parody. The "nostalgia" mode. Society of consumers (and workers? citizens?). • The Political Unconscious. Convergence of two strains in our recent thinking, hermeneutics (act of interpretation) and ideology (subject formation, the desire for domination). The three horizons (or frames) of interpretation: work as symbolic act (individual work), as ideologeme (smallest unit of class struggle, "fighting words"), and as instance of cultural revolution (within determinate but unevenly developed modes of production). "Always historicize!" (1937). • Holding de Staël and Woolf for Thursday, apart from some introductory remarks—and Kasey's interesting anecdote from Thanksgiving. • Two assignments: (1) second entry to the Hermeneut's Guide to Song (same format, due electronically by class time on 6 December); (2) select three passages from our shared syllabus for presentation in the "passages for review" format we began using last Tuesday; due electronically by midnight on Monday, 3 December).

29 Nov | Norton: de Beauvoir (1403-1415); Rich (1759-1781). Recommended: Iser 107-159.

Log: Passages for review 7 to 9. Individual mark-ups, group discussion, plenary discussion. • Ideologies of gender: de Staël, Woolf, de Beauvoir, Rich. • Enduring patterns of domination and misrecognition. Are we after patriarchy (is it in the past tense)? • Links to previous discussions of ideology, recognition, access to authorship and the intellectual function. • Binaries: Either masculine (dominant, plus) or feminine (dominated, minus). Both masculine and feminine: Woolf's concept of androgyny. Neither masculine nor feminine (neuter, neutral). • Chloe liked Olivia. • Key concepts in Rich: compulsory heterosexuality, lesbian experience, the lesbian continuum. The eroticization of women's subordination (1770), through porn, pop culture (magazines, television).

week 14 - identities and interpretations in conflict

04 Dec | Norton: Wittig (2014-2021); Kolodny (2143-2154).

Log: The season's first substantial snow fall diminished our ranks. • About the final: You may expect one or more brief essay questions, a number of passages to be identified and discussed, and one pop song, of my selection, for you to analyze. Nothing unexpected, nothing new. • Some questions posed by students. What differentiates Barthes's account of authorship from Foucault's? What does Heidegger wish his concept of "dif-ference" to do? More generally, how does one prioritize among the many texts we've read as one prepares for the final. • "Speed drill" of passages for review 10-26 (as submitted by students). Rapid identification, looking for c(l)ues.

06 Dec | No class. Norton: Spivak (2193-2208); Haraway (2266-2299). Recommended: Iser 163-231. Assignment due electronically by class time: Second entry to Hermeneut's Guide to Song. Same format as first one.

week 15 - identities and interpretations in conflict

11 Dec | Norton: Sedgwick, "Epistemology..." (2438-2445); Butler (2485-2502).

Log: A broad question, and a narrow one, in preparation for the essay component of the final. How is ideology like a dream? Monique Wittig asserts that lesbians are not women: what does she mean? Individual, small group, and full group discussions. • Discussion of passages 59, 62, 63, 65-67.

Assignment: The last writing assignment of the semester will again take the form of a letter, this time addressed to the self you were on September 4th, 2007, the first day of our class. Imagine that you've been given the power to travel back in time and advise the self you were that day about the experience she or he was about to undertake in this class. What do you know now that might be of help to that earlier self? What should he or she be on the look-out for, not just in terms of the key questions and concepts introduced by the course, but also practical matters like how to keep up with reading, take notes, etc. Would you encourage that self to flee (drop the course) or stay? For what reasons? With what consequences? • There is no stipulated word count for this assignment, though I think it would be hard to complete in fewer than two or three pages. The writing should be error-free but need not be overly formal (as always, one should adopt the rhetoric best suited to one's addressee!). I will accept this letter any time between now and the day of the final examination (Tuesday), preferably in both electronic and printed form (but either one will do in a pinch).

13 Dec | Conclusions....

finals week

Tuesday 9:30-11:30 (B1) in usual room | Cumulative Final Exam. To consist of one or more brief essay questions, numerous passages for identification and discussion, and one pop song, of Professor Evans's chosing, for you to interpret.