YouTube - Lay Lady Lay, Bob Dylan

YouTube - Lay Lady Lay, Bob Dylan

FREE WRITING ON COURSE PLANS

The theme of my English 387 course will be What do we talk about when we talk about theory? Where are we and how in the world did we get to this particular postmodern place in time? By starting with disabilities theorist Lennard Davis and his critique of the critics who ignore the scars on the Venus de Milo, then reading some Plato, then reading Aristophanes's The Frogs (with a side trip to his "creation myth" in the Symposium) we begin by setting up a questioning of the idea of ideals, Plato's perfect forms to which the concrete objects of our world are mere imitations and art an imitation of an imitation. Judith Butler discusses this idea in terms of gender, questioning whether there's any there there. In the course of this questioning, we're getting the history, but we're linking it with now. I'll be linking Judith Butler with Plato and Aristotle and Aristophanes, since all are dealing with mimesis and perfomance--the idea of what comes first, what creates what, the idea or the lived experience. I want to get Briar Rose in there somewhere, fairly early, but I'm not seeing yet how it fits in. Maybe I want to include bell hooks early on, too. We'll see the dead white men through the perspective of resisting readers. And what about Sappho? This isn't a world lit class, but why not use literary writers from the same period or cultural background as the critics? Janet has a page in her course packet with quotations about beds. I'm guessing that this relates to Plato's discussion of forms. I can use this as a handout, but also start off by asking class members to describe their beds (or alternatively, their tables) and play Dylan's "Lay, Lady,Lay" and TMBG's "Bed"--are there others? There's also the Bed of Procrustes and the bed of Odysseus and Penelope.

More on this later. I'm wondering about how one might do lists on a blog. I'd like students to start collecting lists to engage our thinking: 1. WORDS--new vocabulary to them (for me a new word is oneiric--which refers to a sort of dream state--not exactly surreal--that dreamy feeling you have just on the edge of sleep--movies can induce this state) but also words we think we know being used in ways specific to literary theory or to a specific theory--not just definitions, but connotations, oppositions, intertextualities, contexts, symbolism, etc.; BINARIES--oppositions explicitly or implicitly set up by various writers--we'll look at these like deconstructionists--use them as an analytical tool; NAMES, THEORIES, LABELS--of theories and theorists, but other names, too--writers, artists, anybody who seems relevant along the way; DATES AND PERIODS--a time line to help us keep track as we move back and forth in time, cultural settings, the isms--e.g. modernism, romanticism, etc. ; QUESTIONS that come up in discussions and as we read--if it goes as it should, we'll end with more questions than we started with; FURTHER READING--discussions will focus on assigned readings, but we all need to keep lists of books and articles we'd like to read when we have time; INTERTEXTUAL CONNECTIONS--may work better in blog entries than as a list, may happen too quickly to record.

BRICOLAGE

I first encountered the term bricolage in an article on modernist poet T.S. Eliot when doing research on a postcolonial topic. That's how it happens, folks. The concept is related to found art and montage and collage--a sort of magpie thing--a magpie being a bird who collects shiny objects to decorate her nest. I'm taking the magpie approach to this blog, because I have found as a writer (and as a teacher) that if you build it they will come--the ideas, I mean. Postmodern architecture is sometimes characterized by bricolage--collecting elements from past time periods and recombining them, re-membering them, deconstructing and coming out with both/and rather than either/or--breaking down the binaries, blurring the boundaries. Postmodern music, too, does something similar. I linked a couple of You-Tube videos (a distinctly postmodern phenomenon) that use music sampling. One is Amon Tobin, the other They Might Be Giants (fondly known to their fans--including me--as TMBG). Someone put together a montage of movie and television images to go with Tobin (he has a CD called "Bricolage"). The TMBG video is the "group" itself, consisting of two men named John who are musical magpies--their song is from the point of view of a night light. Like another favorite of mine, Shel Silverstein, TMBG write for children and also write stuff that is decidedly NOT for children.

YouTube - Birdhouse in your soul

YouTube - Birdhouse in your soul

YouTube - Amon Tobin - easy muffin

YouTube - Amon Tobin - easy muffin

A literary critic.

THE FROGS

Here's a link for Aristophanes's The Frogs, perhaps the earliest extant example of literary criticism: http://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/Aristophanes/frogs.htm . In A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present, published by Blackwell in 2005, M.A.R. Habib mentions this fact, and also points out that the rhapsodes who interpreted Homer's epics, from about 800 B.C.E. engaged in a sort of literary criticism (coming from a word for judgment) any time they made decisions about how to perform the Iliad or the Odyssey (Habib 9-12). So while we're going to read Plato, perhaps the rhapsode actually knows more about literature than Socrates.

GRAVEN IMAGES

In Exodus 20 of the Hebrew Torah, the Christian Old Testament, Moses is given the Decalogue, The Ten Commandments, on Mount Sinai. In a later episode of the story, in Exodus 32, Moses comes down from the mountain and finds the people engaged in celebratory rituals ("the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to revel") around a golden calf that the high priest Aaron has made at their request. So, it's interesting in this context that the first seven verses of Exodus 20 concern issues raised by monotheism and by the fact that YHWH is (sort of at this point) invisible. The second commandment explicitly forbids making "graven images" with long-lasting generational curses and blessings connected with the breaking or keeping of this command.

While we don't think we worship idols in the 21st century, this commandment is a surprisingly difficult one to keep. Living as we do in physical bodies, we are moved by sensory images, whether in visual art or literature. Given this physicality, it is interesting that idolatry and sexuality tend to be juxtaposed, in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. Theory, from Plato to Baudrillard, deals with an idea epitomized here. Is there an "ideal" unseen presence? Do the "forms" exist somewhere in the mind of a supreme deity, only to be imperfectly copied by artists and poets? Or, as postmodernists posit, does the copy become more real--hyperreal--than what we only imagine to be the original? Is Disneyland more real than American society, to use Baudrillard's example?

I'm not talking about God, here, really. I am a Christian believer, a fact that should be disclosed. But I do realize that my own spirituality is very concrete. I like it real, incarnate. And, at the same time, I am persuaded that most of what I understand as real is socially constructed. I can only understand unseen things in this particular body, in this ever-changing time and space. Even while commanding that concrete images of gods not be made, the Exodus text anthropomorphises the unseen presence giving the commands. In one translation, Moses gets to hide in the cleft of a rock and see God's "hinder parts" as his "glory" passes by. After that, Moses's face shines so much that he has to wear a veil--this also in Exodus 34. (The shining gets mistranslated as Moses being horned at some point, and European medieval and Renaissance images of Moses sometimes have horns.)

We walk on the sharp edge of a cliff, or maybe we dance amid the breccia at the base of Sinai, as we consider the history of literary theory and criticism. I've just been reading the Baudrillard text, "From The Precession of Simulacra" on pages 1935-46 of David Richter's The Critical Tradition, in which he refers to this idea. The simulacra to which Baudrillard refers might as easily be translated idols, in some contexts to which he applies it. Symbolism relates, too. Incarnation. The Body. I wonder if it is even possible to keep anything abstract? Show rather than tell, we say. But is all pretense to clarity, all specificity, all concrete "reality" illusory, reductive reification? I will probably pair this Baudrillard text with Plato in English 387, because both texts question whether what we read represents anything but itself. This idea of the image vs. the real also relates to the Lennard Davis essay I've considered as an opening, linking it to the images of Venus de Milo and Medusa that inspired my "ideal woman" layout for this blog.

Also, this weekend, I read the Lyotard text in Richter. "Defining the Postmodern," on pages 1933-35. The concept that jumps out for me from that text is bricolage. Much more on that later--a really important concept, related to what I call JAZZ in my blurb at the top of this blog. In fact, I'll be editing that blurb to include the word bricolage. I'm going to ask students to keep a list of words they encounter in our readings--not just as a list of definitions but as a list of connotations and intertextual connections. We'll also want to generate a list of who said what--Julia Kristeva has been credited with inventing that word, intertextual--but I have found in my reading of theory that often such coinings are misattributed. More later on all these ideas.

British Museum - The 'Queen of the Night' Relief

British Museum - The 'Queen of the Night' Relief. When graven images were forbidden, perhaps the law considers images such as this one.

British Museum - Welcome to the British Museum

British Museum - Welcome to the British Museum A USEFUL WEBSITE.

BRIAR ROSE by ROBERT COOVER

Looking toward classes in the fall semester, researching literary examples of postmodernism, I ran across a web site with Robert Coover's "Briar Rose"--hosted by Robert Scholes, et al. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/people/scholes/BriarRose/texts/BRhome.htm. I'm thinking that I'll start my History of Literary Theory and Criticism course with postmodernism, then flash backward to Plato and move forward. Or maybe I'll just do the Merlin thing and live in reverse. Book for the course is David Richter's anthology, The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 3rd Edition, published by Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston: 2007. The book was chosen by Dr. Janet Ellerby, who was slated to teach the course but will be interim director of the Women's Resource Center intstead. So enter me, the eternal understudy. I really like the book, but am not sure exactly how Janet had planned to use it with the short stories and poems in her course packet. So I decided to choose my own literary texts. I'm looking for my focus. "Briar Rose" might be at least a place to start. Richter refers to an Emily Dickinson poem in the Introduction, too, that I may go with. And several of the texts refer to Homer, including the excerpts from Plato that open the book, and an excerpt from the Odyssey, maybe the scene described by Auerbach from Book 19, would make an interesting literary text to examine from several angles. All of these texts are available online, and I could link them. Auerbach argues in "Odysseus' Scar" that Homer's flashback to the hunting accident in which the hero received the scar is not done to provide suspense for the present story but to illuminate fully the details of the past story. Robert Coover's postmodern narrative "Briar Rose" gives the reader multiple stories within its story, too. So I can see bringing these two texts together.

Briar Rose Home Page

Briar Rose Home Page

IDEAL WOMEN?

As my "Women in Literature" class draws to an end and I collect and read final papers, I keep thinking how much I love it when--to quote the A-Team of long ago--a plan comes together. I especially love it when the "plan" comes together in unexpected ways, as it did this summer. As I told the class, I see teaching as JAZZ--there's a basic melody there, but as good musicians improvise and you get the call and response thing going, share the stage, etc. something intricate and beautiful happens, and we all get a perspective--a syncopation--unique to that particular gathering of individual voices. I have never used the Carol Gilligan retelling of the "Cupid and Psyche" myth before, so it amazed me when Venus reappeared in a Lennard Davis disability studies essay, just as I was pulling together all the threads for my final lecture. Davis points out that art critics gloss over the flaws of the Venus de Milo statue, yet we avert our eyes from suggestions of eroticism in the life of a real woman with disabilities, much as a student panel noted about a character with a mutilated face in the novel Invisible Monsters. Davis sets up a binary between Venus and Medusa. So I added their pictures to my blog, along with one of Rosie the Riveter. Maybe I need to link one of the 19th Century African American Sojourner Truth, too, who asked when told that women needed to be taken care of by men, "Aren't I a woman?" baring her muscular arm. Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, et al. write from a woman's perspective about issues of the body, similar to those Davis considers. So as I move into planning for the Fall Semester, which starts sooner than we are ready, I start with all these ideas in mind, and we'll see where the JAZZ takes my theory classes!

First Blog--Look at me!

Thanks to Bob Tennant for helping me set this up! Summer II session was great! I'm still absorbing all the new connections.