Just a perspective on something that one might find disturbing:
“Ecofeminism is a movement that makes connections ... Ecofeminism seeks to recognize ... ecofeminism approaches the problems of ... Ecofeminism claims that ... ecofeminism clarifies that ... " (Andrea's blog). In other words, 'Ef' is made up by a group of people who agrees on a certain perspective (on the world?), a certain set of values and proscriptions, congregates, sort of like a church or a colonial power, and hence, in terms of literary criticism, aplly those principles in their reading and interpretation of literature. That must be what Andrea means and intends.
I remember being taught that doing that was a big no-no. I.e., essentially, that if you have already 'made up your mind' before you start reading you are not able to keep your mind open to the dynamics of the text, to the simple fact that, perhaps, it isn't unifiable under a (or your) proscriptive heading. That is, essentially, you would be behaving like the 'psychoanalytical feminist' of my satirical piece on "The Little Mermaid."
Must we accept the notion 'critical lense' in the sense that we have to committ ourselves to one fairly narrowly defined 'set of rules' before reading, most likely to the detriment of the text? Do we have any other options? If we take the satire out of Donna's piece on "The Uggly Duckling" (which of course to a Dane is practically a national anthem), her interpretation rides a similar (here: 'post-colonial') mission: squeeze everything into a pre-conceived, colonial-interpretive framework.
Just to play the Devil's advocate, I wouldn't be surprised if 50 to 100 years from now those people might consider the colonial time-period, of which we still seem to be part, one of the great achievements of human history, as essentially within a couple of hundred years mankind leapt forward from, let's say, the torturous, gut-spilling, public executions Foucault describes, to communicating blissfully on laptops. That wouldn't have happened without the, shall we say: enthusiastic expansion of cultures onto various continents. I have no expectations that any potential, future people will be less inept at empathetically distilling the past than we are now.
It seems, a literary interpretive angle has to formulate itself more broadly, more inclusively, more openly. Otherwise, one might fear we would bind ourselves to an endless amok-run of perspectival exclusivity, which in its parts so easily falls prey to satire.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Found syllabi ~ 'Ready-made art'
After scouring the web for syllabi related to teaching literature, I choose these for their various kinds of approaches and web savy. They have different qualities and possibly shortcomings that ought to be inspirational.
I like the term 'found syllabi.' It reminds me of 'ready-made art' - stuff you find washed up on the beach and hang on your wall. There's so much that gets washed up on the web that we can modify and use. There's no doubt that the structures of the media itself determines the way we - and students - plan, learn, know, and expect to communicate. Just check out the video below.
EN 223: Survey of American Literature
The Conversation of American Literature, History, and Culture: Who is an American? How Should an American Live?
http://www.assumption.edu/users/lknoles/Syllabi/amsurveyfal01.html
I like the term 'found syllabi.' It reminds me of 'ready-made art' - stuff you find washed up on the beach and hang on your wall. There's so much that gets washed up on the web that we can modify and use. There's no doubt that the structures of the media itself determines the way we - and students - plan, learn, know, and expect to communicate. Just check out the video below.
EN 223: Survey of American Literature
The Conversation of American Literature, History, and Culture: Who is an American? How Should an American Live?
http://www.assumption.edu/users/lknoles/Syllabi/amsurveyfal01.html
- Click on "Literature and the "Conversation of Mankind" and find this sentence: "And whether consciously or unconsciously, each time a person sits down to write, s/he is entering a conversation with his/her future audience and past life." Apart from its underscoring of the lit-crit conundrums: consciousness, communication, future, past - the site displays tremenduous respect for texts and reading. Re. 'goals' it is quite refreshing that they seem so self-evident that all you need is a subtitle; and re. 'Course Methods' that the document is inaccessible.
ENAM 312: AMERICAN LITERATURE SINCE 1865
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam312/
- We can always discuss format and content but this syllabus not only fulfills its practical purpose of providing structure for the class but also spurs imagination and creativity by providing images etc. Of course, such a class becomes a sort of 'canon' in its selection of works but (almost) any selection addressing the social, political, cultural etc. themes of the time period in conjunction with a clear, concise understanding of why we read and study literature should do the trick.
Philosophy/Chinese-Japanese 350:Comparative Methodology
http://faculty.vassar.edu/brvannor/Asia350/
- This course is just absolutely fascinating! It deals with fundamental human understanding of which any literary piece provides an example. The content of this class, the aim of these philosophers: "understanding and making judgments," not least in inter-cultural contexts, is the context that spins around our enjoyment of literature. The pedagogy is also so palatable: there's the text in the syllabus: prepare it; we'll discuss it in class! A basic, civilized, respectful approach.
ENL 684/FLL 684 Literary Criticism I: Theory & Practice
http://home.earthlink.net/~blueheeler19/lkcourses/fll684/FLL684.html
- Obviously, the topic is important. The outline and syllabus are a bit terse but hopefully the abilities of the instructor and the energies of the (mixed bag of) students in the collaborative format will accomplish to engage teory with practice.
ENG 203: Introduction to Literature
http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/lit/introlit/introsyl.htm
- Theory is just about the most practical thing there is. We hardly do anything without it. The very act of engaging language is theory which is why grammar is such a marvellous tool for understanding. That is pretty much what the first paragraph ('Objectives') and the following sections express. The syllabus and its clickable items continuously reinforce the purpose of studying literature while providing methods. Informative, supportive, coaching, an exemplary web-overview of a course. We can always discuss content, of course.
'Dream course:'
World Literature in Historical Perspective
- Develop an historical perspective
- Develop an analytical and interpretational methodology
- Select representative works of literature from a spectrum of cultures
- Find a way to make contrasting and complimentary perspectives relevant
- Create a gallery of issues, themes, behaviors
- All of the above in collaboration with student participants (provided the class is small; otherwise lecture brilliantly)
- Fit it into 15 weeks; although a 2-semester format would be beneficial
- Make it work!
Issues: plenty.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Psychoanalytical critical theory
Proposition: intellectually, the last couple of hundred years, in particular, up until now, seems, from different angles, to have perfected the notion that man is – and can be – governed by a finite set of rules. There are basically two grand movements of thought: governed from within, and governed from without*. The latter finds it clearest expression in Marxism (and all the angles of prior- and subsequent mediators associated with it): social organization determines consciousness; a model based in economic analysis reveals the power structures of this dynamic promoting a vision of equality and liberation. The former sees the human being made up in a shell of developmental propensities, under the influence of other human beings in its immediate environment, in particular mother and father whose absence or presence looms large over the development.
No wonder these two, often in combination, have constituted a fruitful landscape for literary interpretation, and what naturally follows in a media-dominated age: interpretation of images. As can be seen from the brief identifications of the positions of three psychoanalytical proponents below: model, tool, goal: from Freud’s basic suspicion of the workings of the ‘self,’ to Lacan’s complication of ‘the unconscious,’ to Irigaray’s transplantation of the condition to social, gender-based power structures - the psychoanalytical approach offers method and perspective and is sufficiently open and inviting in terms of promoting the interpreter’s creativity in filling in the particulars derived from the literary text (or image).
The potency of this postmodern condition nourished by psychoanalysis is its suspicion of surface appearance offering an endless, kaleidoscopic catalogue of critique-able motivations. As such, the critical mode has been wildly inspirational for many in the academic (interpretive) professions. They run, of course, the dangers of idiosyncratic irrelevance and arrogance. In some cases, all they need to see is an old photo of a boy saluting and before you know if they have concocted a 400-page long diatribe against French colonialism, to the giddy cheers of their professor.
It was Freud who introduced the toddler’s sexual fascination with its parents (copulating with one, killing the other; on the backdrop of contemporary socio-biological mores this line of thinking should offer plenty of incentive to mix the agents), and in one of his opium-induced stupors, surely, he took the intriguing idea further to suggest that what really confounds and complicates the boy-toddler mentally is his mother’s lack of a penis. Never mind that by the time boys enthusiastically start discovering the alternative function of their member they have had years of plenty of things to do including socio-instinctual training embracing their wealth of parental care, enriching themselves by the formative signals from their dual, complimentary source.
Nevertheless, there are psychoanalytical postmodernists who gladly adopt that particular Freudian contraption, as is, and infuse it as support-bearing argumentation into whatever it is they analytically have in front of them: guns, rodeos, whatever, to the subdued, diplomatic, un-inquisitive, puzzlement of their otherwise healthy graduate students trying to survive in a system dominated by ingrown, ideological sensitivities unwilling to fathom that life will carry on for another thousand years.
The idea that man is ‘governed’ and predictable, and that this condition is evident in literature, is what literary criticism is all about, what makes it possible. How do we determine the nature of this condition? How do we predict it in analytical models?
[*To these, it would be prudent to add a third: the evolutionary-biological paradigm which philosophically, on the one hand, seems to suggest a mind-bogglingly comprehensive ‘governing’ which, on the other hand, only may prove to suggest an as mind-bogglingly open-ended condition. A paradox of incomparably productive tragic and comedic proportions and potential.]
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
” the ego is the conscious self created by the dynamic tensions and interactions between the id and the super-ego, which has the task of reconciling their conflicting demands with the requirements of external reality. It is in this sense that the mind is to be understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects of consciousness reside in the ego, the contents of the id belong permanently to the unconscious mind, while the super-ego is an unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks to limit the blind pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the imposition of restrictive rules. There is some debate as to how literally Freud intended this model to be taken (he appears to have taken it extremely literally himself), but it is important to note that what is being offered here is indeed a theoretical model,” http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/freud.htm
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
“Lacan developed a psychoanalytic conception of how the body is caught in the play of meaning-formation between subjects, and expressive of the subjectivity that 'lives' through it, as well as being an objectificable tool for the performance of instrumental activities. For Lacan, that is, 'the unconscious' does not name only some other part of the mental apparatus than consciousness. It names all that about a subject, including bodily manifestations and identifications with others and 'external' objects that insist beyond his/her conscious control.” http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/lacweb.htm
Luce Irigaray (1932-present)
“Her subsequent texts provide a comprehensive analysis and critique of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics. Irigaray alleges that women have been traditionally associated with matter and nature to the expense of a female subject position. While women can become subjects if they assimilate to male subjectivity, a separate subject position for women does not exist. Irigaray's goal is to uncover the absence of a female subject position, the relegation of all things feminine to nature/matter, and, ultimately, the absence of true sexual difference in Western culture.” http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/irigaray.htm
Satirical psychoanalytical reading of “The Little Mermaids”
““First and foremost I want to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to be here today as a literary-critical-psychoanalytical-feminist to finally, once and for all, set the world-historical, critically interpretive, record straight by providing the ultimate, final, interpretive understanding of Hans Christian Andersen’s (1805-1875) fairy tale: “The Little Mermaid” (1836); briefly, succinctly, as is the founding principle for our SBSNCBLLI (Society for Brief, Succinct, Non-Contradictable, Bottom-Line, Literary Interpretation), the annual meeting of which, thank goodness, this year takes place here in downtown San Francisco, so there’ll be plenty of good things to do when we skip afternoon sessions to shop, chat, visit galleries, go eating, meet up, check out people.
First of all: forget everything you know about extra-textual affairs including socio-economic, historical contexts, biographical informative explanations about the author, weird language-communicative grammars of signs and signifiers and whatever the hell they signify, narrative irony, and solely intra-textual structures: this is ultimately a story about Hans Christian Andersen’s missing vagina. And not only that: it becomes a metaphorical archetypical myth about man-man’s hatred of his penis. He wants to castrate himself because he wants a vagina. Take for instance rodeo queens: biologically speaking they undoubtedly (perhaps not?) have a vagina but they just don’t know they have it. They are “”denying”” it because they have been forced into the male vacuum of the rodeo “”spectacle”” in which men themselves cry out for their lost vaginas. How else do you explain their riding on bulls, broncos, etc. were it not in effect an act of castration, a primal-scream for that which they do not have but want? Why would a man otherwise mount a tortured, wild bronco or spread his legs across vicious bulls to have his balls mashed in the process?
Scientific, audiological studies have proven that after half a year at the rodeo-circuit, male voices actually arrive at a higher pitch. And how would you otherwise explain “Brokeback Mountain.” Yes, it was a bad movie, but that only demonstrates the degree to which the myth has been established in our literary heritage, for example through the traditional, erroneous interpretations of our specific tale. This is not a story about unrequited love, about obtaining a human soul within a Christian universe, about the author’s personal sense of alienation, given universal expression and appeal, no, this is about the main character’s search for her missing vagina.
What is a mermaid? It is half a fish. Fish don’t have vaginas but they want to. Where does she live? She lives deep in the ocean in a gluttonous swamp of repression, by family, by all the wants destined to be so by the fact there are plenty of vaginas above, on land, in the human world. Does she really “”fall in love”” with the prince on the boat whom she sees when it is her time to swim to the surface? Or does she really “”fall in love”” with the image of the prince which symbolically refers to the “”human soul”” which of course is code-word for vagina – the only place of true humanity, also proven by ancient human, fertility rites. Clearly, this is the transformation she undergoes: from fish-body split into human legs revealing her long lost vagina.
I can substantiate this interpretation by analysis of an example from Andersens’s text:
“Presently they came in sight of land; she saw lofty blue mountains, on which the white snow rested as if a flock of swans were lying upon them. Near the coast were beautiful green forests, and close by stood a large building, whether a church or a convent she could not tell. Orange and citron trees grew in the garden, and before the door stood lofty palms. The sea here formed a little bay, in which the water was quite still, but very deep; so she swam with the handsome prince to the beach, which was covered with fine, white sand, and there she laid him in the warm sunshine, taking care to raise his head higher than his body. Then bells sounded in the large white building…”
There’s a lot of unimportant stuff here, especially the one about raising the head higher than the body as if the body isn't important. But this totally reminds me when I was a graduate student running around on the beaches of California with no panties on, smoking pot, sleeping with my professors, finding my own vagina. It was just the grooviest of times.
Sorry if I went a little overboard in this. It has to be kept short, of course, but I’ve got so much to say! It is just so damned important. When you have the right interpretive angle as I have provided it here, you actually don’t have to read the text itself, or you can just browse it quickly. The good thing about SBSNCBLLI is that you can skip all the boring details in texts and contexts and go right to the point which is what I have done here. Is it true there’s an art exhibit on Union Square?””
http://hca.gilead.org.il/li_merma.html
No wonder these two, often in combination, have constituted a fruitful landscape for literary interpretation, and what naturally follows in a media-dominated age: interpretation of images. As can be seen from the brief identifications of the positions of three psychoanalytical proponents below: model, tool, goal: from Freud’s basic suspicion of the workings of the ‘self,’ to Lacan’s complication of ‘the unconscious,’ to Irigaray’s transplantation of the condition to social, gender-based power structures - the psychoanalytical approach offers method and perspective and is sufficiently open and inviting in terms of promoting the interpreter’s creativity in filling in the particulars derived from the literary text (or image).
The potency of this postmodern condition nourished by psychoanalysis is its suspicion of surface appearance offering an endless, kaleidoscopic catalogue of critique-able motivations. As such, the critical mode has been wildly inspirational for many in the academic (interpretive) professions. They run, of course, the dangers of idiosyncratic irrelevance and arrogance. In some cases, all they need to see is an old photo of a boy saluting and before you know if they have concocted a 400-page long diatribe against French colonialism, to the giddy cheers of their professor.
It was Freud who introduced the toddler’s sexual fascination with its parents (copulating with one, killing the other; on the backdrop of contemporary socio-biological mores this line of thinking should offer plenty of incentive to mix the agents), and in one of his opium-induced stupors, surely, he took the intriguing idea further to suggest that what really confounds and complicates the boy-toddler mentally is his mother’s lack of a penis. Never mind that by the time boys enthusiastically start discovering the alternative function of their member they have had years of plenty of things to do including socio-instinctual training embracing their wealth of parental care, enriching themselves by the formative signals from their dual, complimentary source.
Nevertheless, there are psychoanalytical postmodernists who gladly adopt that particular Freudian contraption, as is, and infuse it as support-bearing argumentation into whatever it is they analytically have in front of them: guns, rodeos, whatever, to the subdued, diplomatic, un-inquisitive, puzzlement of their otherwise healthy graduate students trying to survive in a system dominated by ingrown, ideological sensitivities unwilling to fathom that life will carry on for another thousand years.
The idea that man is ‘governed’ and predictable, and that this condition is evident in literature, is what literary criticism is all about, what makes it possible. How do we determine the nature of this condition? How do we predict it in analytical models?
[*To these, it would be prudent to add a third: the evolutionary-biological paradigm which philosophically, on the one hand, seems to suggest a mind-bogglingly comprehensive ‘governing’ which, on the other hand, only may prove to suggest an as mind-bogglingly open-ended condition. A paradox of incomparably productive tragic and comedic proportions and potential.]
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
” the ego is the conscious self created by the dynamic tensions and interactions between the id and the super-ego, which has the task of reconciling their conflicting demands with the requirements of external reality. It is in this sense that the mind is to be understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects of consciousness reside in the ego, the contents of the id belong permanently to the unconscious mind, while the super-ego is an unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks to limit the blind pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the imposition of restrictive rules. There is some debate as to how literally Freud intended this model to be taken (he appears to have taken it extremely literally himself), but it is important to note that what is being offered here is indeed a theoretical model,” http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/freud.htm
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
“Lacan developed a psychoanalytic conception of how the body is caught in the play of meaning-formation between subjects, and expressive of the subjectivity that 'lives' through it, as well as being an objectificable tool for the performance of instrumental activities. For Lacan, that is, 'the unconscious' does not name only some other part of the mental apparatus than consciousness. It names all that about a subject, including bodily manifestations and identifications with others and 'external' objects that insist beyond his/her conscious control.” http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/lacweb.htm
Luce Irigaray (1932-present)
“Her subsequent texts provide a comprehensive analysis and critique of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics. Irigaray alleges that women have been traditionally associated with matter and nature to the expense of a female subject position. While women can become subjects if they assimilate to male subjectivity, a separate subject position for women does not exist. Irigaray's goal is to uncover the absence of a female subject position, the relegation of all things feminine to nature/matter, and, ultimately, the absence of true sexual difference in Western culture.” http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/irigaray.htm
Satirical psychoanalytical reading of “The Little Mermaids”
““First and foremost I want to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to be here today as a literary-critical-psychoanalytical-feminist to finally, once and for all, set the world-historical, critically interpretive, record straight by providing the ultimate, final, interpretive understanding of Hans Christian Andersen’s (1805-1875) fairy tale: “The Little Mermaid” (1836); briefly, succinctly, as is the founding principle for our SBSNCBLLI (Society for Brief, Succinct, Non-Contradictable, Bottom-Line, Literary Interpretation), the annual meeting of which, thank goodness, this year takes place here in downtown San Francisco, so there’ll be plenty of good things to do when we skip afternoon sessions to shop, chat, visit galleries, go eating, meet up, check out people.
First of all: forget everything you know about extra-textual affairs including socio-economic, historical contexts, biographical informative explanations about the author, weird language-communicative grammars of signs and signifiers and whatever the hell they signify, narrative irony, and solely intra-textual structures: this is ultimately a story about Hans Christian Andersen’s missing vagina. And not only that: it becomes a metaphorical archetypical myth about man-man’s hatred of his penis. He wants to castrate himself because he wants a vagina. Take for instance rodeo queens: biologically speaking they undoubtedly (perhaps not?) have a vagina but they just don’t know they have it. They are “”denying”” it because they have been forced into the male vacuum of the rodeo “”spectacle”” in which men themselves cry out for their lost vaginas. How else do you explain their riding on bulls, broncos, etc. were it not in effect an act of castration, a primal-scream for that which they do not have but want? Why would a man otherwise mount a tortured, wild bronco or spread his legs across vicious bulls to have his balls mashed in the process?
Scientific, audiological studies have proven that after half a year at the rodeo-circuit, male voices actually arrive at a higher pitch. And how would you otherwise explain “Brokeback Mountain.” Yes, it was a bad movie, but that only demonstrates the degree to which the myth has been established in our literary heritage, for example through the traditional, erroneous interpretations of our specific tale. This is not a story about unrequited love, about obtaining a human soul within a Christian universe, about the author’s personal sense of alienation, given universal expression and appeal, no, this is about the main character’s search for her missing vagina.
What is a mermaid? It is half a fish. Fish don’t have vaginas but they want to. Where does she live? She lives deep in the ocean in a gluttonous swamp of repression, by family, by all the wants destined to be so by the fact there are plenty of vaginas above, on land, in the human world. Does she really “”fall in love”” with the prince on the boat whom she sees when it is her time to swim to the surface? Or does she really “”fall in love”” with the image of the prince which symbolically refers to the “”human soul”” which of course is code-word for vagina – the only place of true humanity, also proven by ancient human, fertility rites. Clearly, this is the transformation she undergoes: from fish-body split into human legs revealing her long lost vagina.
I can substantiate this interpretation by analysis of an example from Andersens’s text:
“Presently they came in sight of land; she saw lofty blue mountains, on which the white snow rested as if a flock of swans were lying upon them. Near the coast were beautiful green forests, and close by stood a large building, whether a church or a convent she could not tell. Orange and citron trees grew in the garden, and before the door stood lofty palms. The sea here formed a little bay, in which the water was quite still, but very deep; so she swam with the handsome prince to the beach, which was covered with fine, white sand, and there she laid him in the warm sunshine, taking care to raise his head higher than his body. Then bells sounded in the large white building…”
There’s a lot of unimportant stuff here, especially the one about raising the head higher than the body as if the body isn't important. But this totally reminds me when I was a graduate student running around on the beaches of California with no panties on, smoking pot, sleeping with my professors, finding my own vagina. It was just the grooviest of times.
Sorry if I went a little overboard in this. It has to be kept short, of course, but I’ve got so much to say! It is just so damned important. When you have the right interpretive angle as I have provided it here, you actually don’t have to read the text itself, or you can just browse it quickly. The good thing about SBSNCBLLI is that you can skip all the boring details in texts and contexts and go right to the point which is what I have done here. Is it true there’s an art exhibit on Union Square?””
http://hca.gilead.org.il/li_merma.html
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