Sep 14 - Oct 12 Modernism - Form, Essence, Structure

Woolf, V. A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN

Bakhtin, Mikhail, "Discourse in the Novel" (genre and stratifying forces in language; social diversity of speech types or heteroglossia; embodied representation; dialogical opposition of unresolvable dialogues)

Formalism and New Criticism

Rivkin and Ryan, "Formalisms"

Brooks, Cleanth, "The Formalist Critics" (tensions in unity, symbolic devel., ironies resolved, ideal reader's central point of reference to study structure for meaning of the work; the New Criticism)

Structuralism and Linguistics

Culler, "The Linguistic Foundation" (langue, parole; structuralism)

De Saussure, F., "Course in General Linguistics" (sign, signified, signifier; arbitrary nature of the sign; synchrony-language state, and diachrony-evolution of lang; in lang. there are only differences…without positive value, for value of a term can be modified without meaning or sound being affected simply because a neighboring term has been modified: language is form and not a substance)

Jakobson, Roman, "Two Aspects of Language" (in manipulating these two kinds of connection - similarity and contiguity - in both their aspects - positional and semantic - selecting, combining, and ranking them - an indiv. exhibits personal style; rel. of similarity = metaphor; rel. of contiguity = metonymy)

Levi-Strauss, C., "The Structural Study of Myth" (mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution; mediating structures work through chains: two opp. terms with no intermediary always tend to be replaced by two equivalent terms which do admit of a third as mediator; then one of the polar terms and one of the mediator terms become replaced by a new triad; this dialectic of mediator chains throws light on entire parts of a mythology and probably corresponds to a universal way of organizing daily experience; the logic of myth confronts us with a double, reciprocal exchange of functions; myth exhibits a slated structure which comes to the surface through repetition; myth provides a logical model of overcoming a Graduate Literary Theory Farley/p.2 contradiction; its logic is as rigorous as that of modern science - its difference is in being applied to different things).

Sept 28 Structuralism and Psychoanalysis

Rivkin and Ryan, "Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis" and selections of your choice. Review of Freudian and Lacanian perspectives: Freud's emphasis on the unity of the self and the dream language of the repressed from the unconscious through overdetermination; the normative construction of gender and heterosexuality through resolution of the Oedipal Complex; Lacan's earlier focus on the prelinguistic and the fragmented self from the epoch of the Mirror Stage.

Oct 5 Structuralism and Marxism

Rivkin and Ryan "Starting With Zero: Basic Marxism" and selections of your choice. Review of the dialectic, Marx's grounding of ideas in social reality, the class struggle, the fetishism of commodities, Volosinov's discussion of how "existence reflected in signs is not merely reflected but refracted…determined…by an intersecting of differently oriented social interests within one and the same community, ie by the class struggle. . . . The sign becomes an arena of the class struggle. This social multiaccentuality of the ideological sign" is what the ruling class strives to extinguish; "the ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social or value judgments which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual"(280). But there is an "inner dialectical quality of the sign….In the ordinary conditions of life, the contradiction embedded in every ideological sign cannot emerge fully because the ideological sign in an established dominant ideology is always somewhat reactionary and tries, as it were, to stabilize the preceding factor in the dialectical flux of the social generative process, so accentuating yesterday's truth as to make it appear as today's. And that is what is responsible for the refracting and distorting peculiarity of the ideological sign within the dominant ideology" (281).

Oct 19 Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Post-Modernism

"The class of 1068 - Post-Structuralism par lui-meme" and read, with your partner/s, the selections by Derrida or Kristeva or Foucault and be prepared to teach them to the class.

Foucault's panopticon as model of new, modern power as disciplinary and distributed, replacing old model of power as repression from the top. His archaeology of knowledge, ascribing to discourse the practices through which the "object" becomes constructed; "Discursive practice is a place in which a tangled plurality…of objects is formed and deformed, appears and disappears" (427).

Please look over the other possible readings in the text before discussing with the teacher what inquiry will inform your paper. Project proposals due, and take-home exam to be picked up, next time.

Oct 26 Derrida and the problem of logography via the myth of Theuth's offering, as an aid to wisdom, of grammata to the god/king/father, origin of value, who evaluates it as also a dangerous aid to untruth, an undoing of the living presence, the ground of possibility for its supplement, supplanting, and usurpation ("Plato's Pharmacy" 434). If "in language there are only differences" then "the signified concept is never present in itself…every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system…by the systematic play of differences" (392). "Differences are thus 'produced' - differed - by differance" (395) which is the medium of possibility for the process of meaning-making. "Presence is a determination and effect within a system which is no longer that of presence but that of differance" (397). "The trace is not a presence but rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself" (403). "What is unnameable is the play that brings about the nominal effects, the relatively unitary or atomic structures we call names, or chains or substitutions for names" (405). "There is no essence of differance; not only can it not allow itself to be taken up into the as such of its name or its appearing , but it threatens the authority of the as such in general, the thing's presence in its essence. That there is no essence of differance at this point also implies that there is neither Being nor truth to the play of writing, insofar as it involves differance" (405). The "question that enters into the affirmation put into play by differance" as in: "'Being speaks / through every language; / everywhere and always /'" (406).

Nov 2 Midterms due.

Kristeva discussion.

Nov 9 Feminism

Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women"
Lorde, Audre. "Age, Race, Class and Sex"
Rich, Adrienne. "Notes Towards a Politics of Location"; plus your choice.

Nov 16 Gender studies , gay-lesbian studies, queer theory

Rubin. "Sexual Transformations" (from "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality") Foucault, Michel. "The History of Sexuality"
Halberstam, Judith. "F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity"
Chodorow, Nancy. "Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation"
choice: Irigaray; Cixous, others

Nov 23 Historicisms

Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets"

Nov 30 Ethnic Studies, Post-coloniality, International Studies

Said, Edward. "Orientalism"
Anzaldua, Gloria. "Borderlands/La Frontera"
Bhabha, Homi. "The Location of Culture"

Dec 7 Cultural Studies: choice

Dec 14 Review; Papers due (or commitment to date negotiated)

Dec. 21 FINAL EXAM