The Act of Interpretation - Spring 2009 - Prof. Steve Evans

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

week 1 - classical precedents

13 Jan | Introduction to course.

(I) Overview of course and its place in the "core" sequence for the English major.

(II) In-class writing: Recipes for approaching unfamiliar texts (six steps). "The act of interpretation is like...."

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

(I) Hermeneut's Guide to Song: Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left by Andrew Bird. Lyrics from unofficial fan site. This live version from 2006 handles the frame narrative differently. So does this club version from 2005. Pretty hilarious a capella version by The Carleton Singing Knights. "Amateur" visual interpretation of the studio track. • In-class markups submitted.

(II) A series of linked binaries we'll work with all semester: presence/absence, part/whole, manifest/latent (Freud), plot/story (Russian Formalists), explicit cues/imagined worlds. Click here for blurry whiteboard shot.

(II bis) Definitions of hermeneutics and semiotics.

(III) The canonical narrative tempos: ellipse, summary, scene, stetch, and pause. Click here for another blurry whiteboard shot.

(IV) Remarks on opening pages of Proust. The frequentative ("for a long time") and the singular ("one day," "one time"). Linear temporality and simultaneity. On reading and dreaming. Calculated ambiguities of our narrator. Gothic cathedral architecture: uniting two scales, the massive, the detail.

(V) Gorgias as exemplary "sophist." What's persuasive (seductive) versus what's true. Plato's argument with the sophists. Pattern and eloquence.

week 2 - classical precedents

20 Jan | Norton: Plato, "Republic" (49-80), "Phaedrus" (81-85). Critical Terms: "Representation" by WJT Mitchell. Proust 8-48.

(I) Reading check: Relative to Mitchell's claim that there is "no representation without taxation," how would you describe the "cost" of mimesis? • Among the answers: loss of immediacy, of originality, of control.

(II) Review of concepts from Thursday: hermeneutics, semiotics.

(III) The problem of representation or "mimesis" (also sometimes "imitation"). Monkey see monkey do. Language as capacity, and destiny. Plato's representation of Socrates's critique of representation. Ironies and paradoxes abound. What censorship preserves. If you could "turn off" mimesis, would you? Would language survive? Dreams? Clothes? You wear clothes, and are the kind of person who wears such clothes (e.g. a representation to others, who interpret you). An aside on jeans, James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause), and appropriate costumes for college, air travel, and casinos.

(IV) Formula for mimesis: "W says let X stand for Y to Z in situation A." W=sender, X=sign, Y=thing signified, Z=receiver, A=historically determinate situation. A variation on Mitchell's diamond: axis of representation linking "dab of paint" to "stone," and axis of communication linking "maker" to "beholder" (see Critical Terms 12). Whiteboard here.

(V) C.S. Peirce on three basis kinds of sign. The ICON (sign resembles thing signified), the INDEX (sign is a "trace"—caused by, existentially connected to, or pointing toward—the thing signified), and SYMBOL (sign is arbitarily linked to thing signified by custom and convention, as with all linguistic signs). A decent overview of the categories can be read on-line here. Our whiteboard here. Aside on onomatopoeia and "the cat's meow."

(VI) Plato's "Ion" and the question of "what literature can know" (alternatively: "what knowledge can literature accommodate"). Nietzsche's witticism that "Christianity is Platonism for the masses." Removing truth to the supra-sensible. The magnetic stone and the iron rings. God(s) > Muse(s) > Poet [Homer] > Rhapsode [Ion] > Audience. Tynnichus of Chalcis, the one-hit wonder.

(VII) Socrate's assault on the cultural foundations of his society (pantheism, the Homeric legacy). How to delay getting killed long enough to make one's point. Socratic method: elenchus and maieutics.

22 Jan | Norton: Aristotle, "Poetics" and "Rhetoric" (86-121). Critical Terms: "Rhetoric" by Stanley Fish. Proust 8-48. Proust 48-100.

(I) Student questions based on (i.) readings to date and (ii.) lectures and class-discussion to date, most of them concerning Proust (how and why to read him, what to make of style, range of reference, ambiguities of characterization) and Plato (why he chose the "dialog" form, what to make of the Socratic method of conducting arguments, what consequences follow from the rejection of writing in the Phaedrus, what problems emerge when programs of "cultural revolution"—like the one sketched in the education sections of the Republic—are actually implemented).

(II) Reading aids: the "synopsis" at the back of Swann's Way, and to a lesser extent the footnotes; the excellent critical introductions in "the brick." The importance of marking up the texts you're reading—even if it violates an old taboo against writing in books. Marginalia: your own, and those marks and notes left behind by unknown persons.

(III) Take-home assignment:

Between now and Tuesday, I'd like you to locate three scenes of "message exchange" in the pages of Proust you've read so far.

For each scene, identify as many of the terms of our "formula" for representation (extrapolated from WJT Mitchell) as you can and briefly comment upon the "fate" of the message. Was it interpreted as the sender seems to have intended? Did it get misinterpreted? Did it go astray?

The formula, you'll recall, goes:

W [sender] says let X [sign] stand for Y [thing signified] to Z [receiver] in A [a determinate situation]

Please submit your work electronically (in the body of an e-mail or as an attachment using "doc," "rtf," or "pdf" formats—at this time I cannot open "docx") by 11:59pm on Monday night, January 26th.

week 3 - classical precedents

27 Jan | Norton: Aristotle, "Poetics" and "Rhetoric" (86-121). Critical Terms: "Writing" by Barbara Johnson (39-49). Proust 100-150.

(I) Reading check: In his essay on "Rhetoric," Stanley Fish describes a perennial conflict between philosophers (such as Plato) and sophists (such as Gorgias), between "serious men" and "rhetorical men." Briefly describe each of these antagonistic positions, then indicate which side of the dispute you favor.

(II) Scenes of message exchange in Swann's Way. A class discussion based on the take-home assignment due yesterday.

(III) Plato, Aristotle, and Horace. Three basic "stances" in literary studies.

• Plato: the philosophical, epistemological, political, and existential stakes of representation; the problem of "truth"; the standpoint of reception.
• Aristotle: formal or structural analysis; reduction of surface complexity to underlying "deep structures;" standpoint of reception.
• Horace: know-how based on actual practice; the standpoint of production.

(IV) Key terms from Aristotle's Poetics. The literary representation of people in action. Greek tragedy as object of analysis, but terms transfer well across different media. The basic six: muthos (plot), ethos (character), dianoia ("thinking-through"), opsis (spectacle), melopoeia (music, sound), and lexis (language, diction). Three others: peripeteia (turn, reversal), anagnorisis (recognition), and catharsis. Whiteboard image here.

(V) Aside on concept of "recognition" in Aristotle, in Hegel ("the struggle to the death for recognition"), and in Proust. Our selves are signs for others to interpret, to recognize and misrecognize. The example of Swann as a complex sign assiduously studied, imitated, emulated, and, ultimately, rejected, by the narrator. The best possible outcome for a "person like me" in a "society like this one." Anti-semitism as paradigm for all racism and persecution of minorities. The Dreyfus Affair.

(VI) Proust-related links. The petit bleu. The magic lantern.

29 Jan | Norton: Horace, "Ars Poetica" (121-135). Critical Terms: "Writing" by Barbara Johnson (39-49). Proust 150-200. • Recommended: Entry on "Rhetoric" in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism electronic database.

(I) Reading check on one of the following:

• Describe the different experiences that Proust's narrator associates with the two "ways" along which the family took its walks in Combray.
• Describe the scene in which Proust's narrator first catches a glimpse of Gilberte Swann and connect it to the first time you formed a crush on someone.

(II) Reading Stanley Fish (link requires log-in) on "Rhetoric" (see also the headnote to Fish's contribution to "the brick"). Identifying and employing the available means of persuasion. An aside on "ethos, pathos, and logos" in which Johnny Depp makes a cameo appearance. The hazards of name-dropping? Roll call, with links to our syllabus: J.L. Austin (week 5), Roland Barthes (week 9), Mikhail Bakhtin (week 10), Fredric Jameson (week 12), Iser and Jauss (week 8), feminist theorists (weeks 13-14). Most important of all, in this context, Nietzsche (week 7). The structure of Fish's essay. Identifying the writer's project. Finding the nucleus of the argument.

(III) Aristotle's categories from the Poetics (muthos, ethos, dianoia, opsis, melopoeia, lexis) reviewed and applied to Proust and other objects of cultural analysis.

(IV) Assignment (due in hardcopy on Tuesday). Prepare, in the manner that best suits your thinking, three sheets of reading notes (one side of a standard-sized piece of paper each) on, respectively, Plato, Aristotle, and Horace.

week 4 - what is language?

3 Feb | Norton: Saussure (956-977). Critical Terms: "Structure" by John Carlos Rowe. Proust 200-250.

(I) Reading check: When Saussure refers to the "arbitrariness" of the linguistic sign, what does he mean?

(II) Quick review of Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, before starting our new chapter on the question "What is language?" The linguists (Saussure, Jakobson) respond. Structural linguistics.

(IIIa) Saussure's definition of the sign. Signifier (phonic, graphic)~signified (conceptual). Bracketing the referent. Arbitrary (in Peirce: symbol) versus motivated (in Peirce: icon, index).

(IIIb) Paradigm(atic) and syntagm(atic). Linguistic example: I never said I love you. Substitutable terms: "always" for "never," "meant" for "said," and so on. Flaubert's work of revision. Example from fashion system: outfit (syntagm), wardrobe (paradigm). Paradigmatic clusters of terms linked through family resemblance (a fuzzy or indefinite set). Antonyms as well as synonyms.

(V) Coda on "Swann in Love." Swann (subject) and Odette (object). Is the desire described in these pages specifically masculine? heterosexual? Jealousy as hermeneutic project. The aesthetic as supplement to the erotic: Swann's association of Odette with painting (Botticelli's Zipporah), music (Vinteuil's "little phrase"). On habit—and its interruption (Swann's inability to locate Odette, page 235 and following).

5 Feb | Norton: Jakobson (1254-1269). Critical Terms: "Structure" by John Carlos Rowe. Proust 250-300.

(I) Reading check - Fashion two or three questions that have emerged for you in the process of reading this week's assigned texts.

(II) Class discussion based on student questions. Saussure: status of "the referent"; the linear nature of the sign; the wavy diagram & the "cut" that "links" signified thought to signifying material (signifier); review of paradigm/syntagm.

(III) Jakobson on the six "functions" (see in-class handout). Expressive, conative, referential, phatic, metalingual, and poetic. "Sets toward" the sender, receiver, situation or state, channel, code, and messaage (respectively).

(IV) Preview of upcoming paper. Apply the basic categories and concepts from Aristotle's Poetics to a cultural artefact of your choice. First step: Think about what you'll choose for an object of analysis.

week 5 - what is language?

10 Feb | Norton: Levi-Strauss (1415-1427); Austin (1427-1442). Critical Terms: "Figurative Language" by Thomas McLaughlin. Proust 300-350.

(I) Reading prompt. Choose one of the two brief passages below to identify and comment upon.

• "My hypothesis, if correct would oblige us to recognize that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery" (1423).
• "When I say 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' I do not describe the christening ceremony, I actually perform the christening; and when I say, 'I do' (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it" (1432).

(II) Discussion based on prompt responses. Slavery, marriage: same difference? Claude Levi-Strauss's "writing lesson." Compare enslavement thesis to Frederick Douglas anecdote at close of Johnson's essay on "Writing" (week three). Austin on the difference between demonstative utterances and performative utterances. Review (for those who were in class on Thursday) of Jakobson's six functions. Not very helpful whiteboard shot here.

(III) Paradigm and syntagm, metaphor and metonymy. Jakobson's "Two aspects of language..." essay. Paradigmatic axis of similarity and substitution; syntagmatic axis of combination and predication. Review: outfit (syntagm), closet or dresser (paradigm); sentence (syntagm). Jakobson's "cabin" example (1266). Whiteboard shot here.

(IV) McLaughlin on "Figurative Language," specifically the list of "figures of speech" on 82-84. Metaphor, personification (aka prosopopoeia, fr. Gk. "prosopon" face, and "poeia" to make), apostrophe, simile, metonymy. Metonyms: Crown and cross; swoosh, golden arch, swastika.

12 Feb | CLASS CANCELLED — Norton: Austin (1427-1442); Heidegger (1118-1135). Critical Terms: "Figurative Language" by Thomas McLaughlin. Proust 350-400.

week 6 - what is hermeneutics?

17 Feb | Norton: Heidegger (1118-1135). Critical Terms: "Interpretation" by Stephen Mailloux. Proust 400-444.

(I) Full attendance!

(II) Reading check: Briefly contrast Heidegger's approach to the question "what is language" to the theorists we've previously read; what makes his approach distinctive?

(III) Discussion based on in-class writing. Whiteboards here and here.

19 Feb | Norton: Schleiermacher (610-626). Critical Terms: "Interpretation" by Stephen Mailloux. Proust 400-444.

(I) Reading check: Briefly summarize the distinctive positions of the five theorists we've read on the question, what is language.

(II) Discussion based on reading check responses. Whiteboard here. Choosing up sides.

(III) Remarks on Scheiermacher's treatise on hermeneutics. Whiteboard here.

(IV) Last questions about Aristotle paper due on Tuesday.

week 7 - what is hermeneutics?

24 Feb | Norton: Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying..." (870-884). Critical Terms: "Intention" by Annabel Patterson. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chapters 1 & 2. Aristotle Paper due in hard-copy and electronic format.

(I) In-class writing: "True Confessions" about the Aristotle paper; how'd it get written, what about the process worked, what might it be better to do differently next time? (Not to be read and scored until after the papers are graded.)

(III) Lightning tour of Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying" essay. We'll return to it the first day after the break.

26 Feb | Norton: Poulet (1317-1333). Critical Terms: "Determinacy/Indeterminacy" by Gerald Graff. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chapters 1 & 2.

(I) Adieu to Proust: Reading quiz and conversation.

(II) Freud Advisory: The opening chapter of Interpretation of Dreams is perhaps the only dull part of the entire volume. I do recommend that you read it, but will not hold you responsible for that portion of the text in reading checks, writing assignments, or the final exam.

—SPRING BREAK—

week 8 - what is hermeneutics?

17 Mar | Norton: Iser (1670-1682). Critical Terms: "Desire" by Judith Butler. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 3.

(I) Reading check: The "secret of dreams" revealed to Sigm. Freud?

(II) Introduction to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Other texts by Freud in the UMaine curriculum: Dora, Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents. Prejudices (in the sense of Schleiermacher's "foreknowledge") that frame our encounter with Freud. A radical shift in theory of human subjectivity: from Cogito ergo sum to Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. The unconscious (Es/It) as black sun around which ego (Ich/I) orbits. The split subject, out of synch with its truth. Freud and Socrates. Psychoanalysis as dialogic practice; and as dangerous game of eluding social censorship. Who talks, who listens? Can analysis ever end? What constitutes cure? "A dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (repressed or suppressed) wish." Wunsch (German), Wish (English), désir (French). Is it really always the Other who's weird (i.e. who desires?).

19 Mar | Norton: Jauss (1547-1565). Critical Terms: "Unconscious" by Françoise Meltzer. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 4.

(I) Reading check: "When we read as we ought...." (Poulet).

(II) Review of Freud discussion on Tuesday. Psychoanalysis as a means of taking one's life seriously. Ucs as "black sun," or, less ominously, an ocean that the ego needs to learn not to master, but to surf. Lacan as "the French Freud." Occupying the analyst's slot in the dialogic structure that Freud violated in originating.

(III) The act of interpretation according to Wolfgang Iser. Gaps, blanks, vacancies, negations. The wandering viewpoint. Foreground and background. Can texts guide our interpretative processes? Can readers be said to read the "same" text? Heraclitean flux (hermeneutic anarchy), or something more or less construable in common?

week 9 - what is an author?

24 Mar | Norton: Gramsci (1135-1144); recommended: Sartre (1333-1350). Critical Terms: "Author" by Donald A. Pease. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 5.

(I) Reading check: "All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals."

(II) Digression on fall 2009 course offerings in English & the advising process.

(III) Review of Iser on four main perspectives "intertwined" in the reading process: narrator (author-as-narrator, implied author); characters (protagonists, minor characters; compare Aristotle's ethos); plot (compare Aristotle's muthos); reader (fictitious; explicit position ascribed, implicit attitude adopted). The "wandering viewpoint" (Norton 1677).

(IV) On Gramsci. Who is "recognized" as an intellectual? Dominant and dominated classes. Traditionally, intellectuals can be characterized as the dominated fraction of the dominant class (Pierre Bourdie). Gramsci's distinction between traditional and "organic" intellectuals. Institutionally accredited vs. organic to a movement, moment, or situation. Traditional intellectuals have a stake in reproducing the status quo; organic intellectuals in transforming it. Example of civil rights struggle in the U.S.

26 Mar | Norton: Barthes (1466-1470), Foucault (1622-1636). Critical Terms: "Author" by Donald A. Pease. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 5.

(I) Reading check: Describe the "raw materials" that go into the production of a dream according to Freud.

(II) Recent and indifferent materials + infantile (childhood) materials + somatic materials. Dream of a 21st birthday. The subject comprised of conflicting "agencies" (dreamwork, censorship). Secondary revision and the forgetting of dreams. Is every element interpretable? Paranoia as critical strategy.

(III) What is the consequence of Freud's theory of the subject for our thinking about the category of "the author"? Issues of intentionality.

week 10 - what is an author?

31 Mar | Norton: Bakhtin (1186-1220). Critical Terms: "Discourse" by Paul A. Bové. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 6.

(I) Reading check: "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing."

(II) The author-function, according to Foucault. Whiteboard.

2 Apr | Norton: Gilbert & Gubar (2023-2035). Critical Terms: "Discourse" by Paul A. Bové. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 6.

(I) Hermeneut's Guide to Song: "Heirloom" by Bjork. Whiteboard.

(II) The dreamwork. Whiteboards (left, right).

week 11 - identities and interpretations in conflict

7 Apr | Norton: Hegel, "The Master Slave Dialectic" (630-36); Marx & Engels (759-789). Critical Terms: "Ideology" by James H. Kavanagh. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 7.

(I) Reading check: "The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own."

(II) Discussion of Bakhtin. Heterglossia: "other tongues". The dialogic nature of the novel, as opposed to the monologic nature of poetry. Multiplicity of language; Bakhtin witnessed firsthand the sudden morphing of his native language, from
Czarist to Bolshevik.

(III) Hegel. Hegel as the moment in history when truth became historical rather than immutable. Left Hegelians (Marx, Engels, etc) versus Right Hegelians (theological Hegelianism). Multiple translations of the word "geist": ghost, spirit,
consciousness, mind, etc. The "struggle to the death" of consciousness.Whiteboard.

(IV) Addendum. Script of Seinfeld episode on "hand."

*Thanks for Corey for items II & III!

9 Apr | Norton: Lacan, "The Mirror Stage..." (1278-1285); Althusser, "from Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1483-1509). Critical Terms: "Ideology" by James H. Kavanagh. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chap. 7.

(I) Reading check: What does Freud mean when he calls a dream element "overdetermined"? What are the consequences of "overdetermination" for dream interpretation?

(II) Is it ever not creepy to tell a person you dreamt about him or her? Pace The Dream of Evan and Chan.

(III) Discussion of "overdetermination" and the Freudian description of the "dream-work" more generally.

(IV) As dream is to individual, so ideology is to social groups? Knowing the answer to two questions: "who am I" and "what happens to people like me."

(V) Connecting Hegel's "master-slave dialectic" to Marx & Engel's description of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between capital and labor. Whiteboard.

week 12 - identities and interpretations in conflict

14 Apr | Norton: Jameson (1932-1975). Critical Terms: "Gender" by Myra Jehlen.

(I) Reading check: What is ideology?

(II) Review of Freud in advance of papers. Source materials (recent & indifferent material from the dream day, infantile and childhood materials, somatic inputs) and primary processes (condensation, displacement, considerations of representability).

(III) Hegel-Marx-Lacan-Althusser. On the problem of "recognition." The finish line of freedom for Hegel: full reciprocal recognition. Hobbes vs. Hegel. Ideology as systematic misrecognition generated within a structure of domination. Gender as test case: the misrecognition of "women" within a patriarchal structure. The identity-conferring function of ideology: "who am I? what happens to people like me? who are you? oh, one of them." Categorical perception.

(IV) Lacan's "mirror phase." Jubilant, anticipatory, assumption of an image (mis)recognized as oneself. Orients the subject in a fictional direction, "alienates" it from its existential substance. For Lacan, we're all "wannabees." Whiteboards for III and IV.

16 Apr | Norton: Wollstonecraft (582-94); de Staël, "On Women Writers" (604-610); Woolf (1017-1030). Critical Terms: "Gender" by Myra Jehlen.

week 13 - identities and interpretations in conflict

21 Apr | Norton: de Beauvoir (1403-1415); Rich (1759-1781). Freud paper due, in electronic form, preferably before class and no later than 11:59pm.

23 Apr | Norton: Wittig (2014-21); Kolodny (2143-54).

week 14 - identities and interpretations in conflict

28 Apr | Norton: Spivak (2193-2208); Haraway (2266-99).

30 Apr | Norton: Sedgwick, "Epistemology..." (2438-45); Butler (2485-2502).

finals week

Cumulative Final Exam.