Archive for September, 2013
Sabina Spielrein
A couple of mediations of Speilrein’s legacy for us, in relation to chapter 2 of Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters Images and text from her life and writings: The Hollywood version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=664eq7BXQcM
Scientific Neutrality
I saw this blog this morning and having just read the implication in Gordon that conflates Morrison’s Schoolteacher with our relative critical position (if not our moral, emotional one), I thought it might interest all. http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/09/24/224785758/is-science-value-free
Ghostly Matters: Chapter 4
Lauren Shoemaker Dr. Lothian ENGL 985 24 September 2013 Chapter 4: not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there “This chapter is about the lingering inheritance of racial slavery, the unfinished project of Reconstruction, and the compulsions and forces that all of us inevitably experience in the face of […]
Voting to change the beginning time of the class
As you may know that Dr. Lothian is living in Pittsburgh and commuting to Indiana. Therefore, I thought what if we could start our class earlier than the usual time and give Dr. Lothian a chance to get home early. please vote if you are able to be in class before 5:30 pm and the […]
Reading on Haunting
Sheila, Matt, and I will be presenting tomorrow night on Chapter 1, 2, and 4 respectively. If you’re crunched for time, skip the third Chapter and move on! See you tomorrow! Lauren
Judith Butler Seminar on Benjamin’s Philosophy of History – UTube Link
Judith Butler on Benjamin’s Philosophy of History
Paraphrasing Benjamin
Rob Welch Dr. A. Lothian Engl 985 17 Sep 2013 Angels and Marxists: Highlighting Benjamin on History I Historical Materialism “enlists the services of theology,” and wins every time (253). Note the quotes on “historical materialism.” It is the name we “call” it. Benjamin does not attack historical materialism as such, but rather the […]
Mal d’arkhe, or the Trouble with Archives
Megha Baikadi Dr Lothian Engl 985 9/17/2013 Mal d’Arkhe, or The Trouble of Archive Fever Derrida’s Intro and Three Theses from Archive Fever Ten Questions About Derrida 1. What do we think about Derrida? Feelings, reactions? 2. How about those archives? How do we view them, how do we […]
Additional passages from Archive Fever
Derrida being Derrida, the key and easiest-to-comprehend insights are distributed around the book. Here are some that weren’t in the parts we read. What is at issue here … is the violence of the archive. … [E]very archive … is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional. (7) right on that which permits and […]
Introducing Diana Taylor’s Ideas About Performance Studies
This page contains an interesting interview with Taylor where she talks about: What is Performance Studies? http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/hidvl/hidvl-int-wips/item/1350-wips-dtaylor
Recent Comments in this Document
December 3, 2013 at 4:33 pm
I think this is precisely Gramsci’s point — the factory worker and the sculptor may both be intellectuals or artists, but only one has the *function in society* ––the class position, the privilege––that makes it his or her assigned role. Just as it no doubt requires a certain class status or aspiration to see oneself as able to choose a social function or calling.
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December 3, 2013 at 2:37 am
And, regarding the university as machine, Ferguson would have it even more strongly: he would say that the liberal multiculturalist concern for development of identities is part and parcel of the university as machinery of capital, since it refocuses students’ energies on individual identity rather than the potential for redistribution of resources.
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December 3, 2013 at 2:23 am
Great articulation of the temporality of the classroom.
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December 3, 2013 at 1:46 am
Coming back to this, I’m thinking about whether this discussion of taste might be interestingly put in the kind of terms Mel Chen uses in her discussion of the boy licking the train…
Another possible citation for you, if you pursue this, might be Siane Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, which deals with various literary affects––and the sizeable subdiscipline of food studies, about which I know relatively little but which seems extremely interesting.
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December 2, 2013 at 1:45 am
This is, overall, an attempt to expand on my first writing assignment, channeling the concept into some practical form with some practical justification.
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December 1, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Gramsci’s idea of the organic intellectual is of one who is part of the subaltern group committed to opposing and transforming the social order first; intellectual work is developed with and for the group, rather than in an institution outside of it. So Nafisi’s commitment to the interests of women, which goes beyond her institutional role, might be a kind of organic intellectual work. The distinction between organic and traditional intellectual often doesn’t fit neatly onto the real world, though…
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December 1, 2013 at 2:58 pm
What do we gain by using the term labor––why might it be important to recognize what we do as *work*?
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November 28, 2013 at 7:30 am
Yeah, when we read it in class some of these critiques came up. They have a lot of textual support, too.
But that doesn’t mean its not a good text to tackle issues with – actually, it may be the best way to deal with them. after all, we can sometimes get the best critiques out of texts we *don’t* agree with. It really shows how the cultural scripts differ from the actual truths.
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November 28, 2013 at 7:24 am
Addressing the first part of your comment, there is a binary between bad-old times and good enlightened now, but I think there’s another possible binary between the good, golden past and the present troubled times. I mean, so many historical moments get romanticized, likely because those past things were good to some, and those who would or think they would benefit are those who romanticize them.
And yeah, looking at every ill does sometimes does come across as polarizing all groups into subsets of ills. It becomes too difficult to speak generally, then.
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November 28, 2013 at 7:14 am
Very nice!
I like the examples you’ve chosen to reflect on. The idealization of certain times or actions (often historical) is rampant, and it seems to be an important tool for disseminating happiness scripts, both those of perceived history and the now in which they are created and disseminated.
The female troublemaker and the feminist killjoy… I agree just the act of not enjoying, or not wanting the thing they are ‘supposed’ to want can be itself a killjoy (it doesn’t have to be starting arguments, though that’s fun too).
I’m not sure how much the subject (middle/upper class women) is simply problematic and how much it is simply the script, the happiness script of the culture. I think that probably didn’t sound right. I mean, given the racial, class and gendered nature of happiness scripts, I wonder if this film might be a site for finding problematic elements in the cultural happiness scripts, and not itself a problem choice for such a script because of its exclusions.
I can see how well you’d do with these texts – its really fascinating to me. popular culture is rich with layers of meaning, and so can be carefully analyzed… but it is also dear to students, so they should care (very much) about how it is analyzed. This combination can be a very powerful tool!
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