ENGLISH 5000 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FALL 2009
Discussion questions for 8/31/09. No writing will be collected this week, but
do reflect on the following questions.
1. For Foucault, the author is (among other things)
“the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning”—possibly my favorite
sentence in all of his work. What does
he mean by this?
2. Foucault suggests at the end of his essay
that “the author-function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and
its polysemic texts will once again function
according to another mode…” Does this
put him in essential agreement with Barthes’s position in “The Death of the
Author”? Or Eliot’s, that “to divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a
laudable aim?”
3. When Wimsatt and Beardsley write in “The Intentional Fallacy” that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art,” what exactly do they mean by “success”? Is their claim at all comparable to the assertion by Barthes—a very, very different kind of critic--that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination?”
4. Donaldson writes, “But the third entity, Chaucer the poet, operates in a realm which is above and subsumes those in which Chaucer the man and Chaucer the pilgrim have their being.” Is this realm anywhere near the one that T.S. Eliot describes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which artists strive for “a continual extinction of personality?”
Discussion questions for
9/14/09. Please respond to all three in answers of at least 250-300 words. Note: please
double-space your replies (and please do not reprint the questions).
2. “A text cannot be overwhelmed by an irresponsible reader and one need not worry about protecting the purity of a text from a reader’s idiosyncrasies.” (CT 1030)Why, according to Fish, do we not need to worry about relativism or subjectivism in criticism—and do you find his explanation sufficiently reassuring?
3. Jonathan Culler makes what has become the standard contemporary argument that the question “what is literature?” is best answered functionally rather than ontologically—that is, that "literature,” as the critic Terry Eagleton has argued, cannot be said to exist "as an 'objective,' descriptive category." Do you agree with this claim? If not, why not? And if you do agree, have you always held that opinion, or is it of more recent vintage? What was your “conversion experience?”
Discussion questions for
9/21/09. Group A, please respond to all three in answers of at
least 300 words. Note: please double-space your replies (and
please do not reprint the questions).
2. Writing during the height of the “culture wars” of the 1990s, John Guillory suggested in Cultural Capital that both the traditionalist defenders of the central importance “Western Civilization” and those “multiculturalists” who sought to open the canon of university-taught texts to previously excluded or neglected works shared, unwittingly, both some common assumptions and some common blind spots. Like what?
Discussion questions for 10/5. Group B, please respond to
all three in answers of at least 300 words. Note: please
double-space your replies (and please do not reprint the questions).
1. Define these terms (from Saussure's Course in General Linguistics): langue; parole; sign; signified; signifier; value; signification. What does Saussure mean when he argues that "the linguistic sign is arbitrary"? Why is that considered an important insight?
2. Give it a try: produce a brief structuralist/semiotic analysis of something, à la Barthes--something you see on the way to school, or in the supermarket, or on television; clothing, speech, athletics, food preparation, advertising--whatever strikes your interpretive fancy (but not this class, or this assignment—and it might be best to stay away from the headlines, too). Remember to focus on signs and the systems or structures in which they characteristically become meaningful.
3. Northrop Frye represents another voice in the discussion we've followed this semester about the aims of criticism and the nature of its literary object. Briefly (but insightfully and cogently) situate Frye's approach in "The Archetypes of Literature." What does he have in common, and where does he part company, with some of the critics we’ve read so far this term: Eliot or Brooks or Wimsatt and Beardsley or someone else?
Discussion questions for 10/12. Group C, please respond to
all three in answers of at least 300 words. Note: please double-space
your replies (and please do not reprint the questions).
1. Define the following, explain their relevance to deconstruction, and provide an example of each: logocentrism; presence; binary opposition; indeterminacy/undecidability; différance; aporia; trace. Note: The Abrams glossary will come in handy here.
2. Don’t let all the semioticians in Group B have all the fun: deconstruct a text or portion of a text, or a portion of a “text.”
or
Describe in detail the ways in which Riquelme’s essay (“Doubling and Repetition/Realism and Closure in Dracula” ) exemplifies the techniques or strategies associated with deconstruction.
3. “The deconstruction is not something we have added to the text; it constituted the text in the first place. A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode; and, by reading the text as we did, we were only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be in order to write the sentence in the first place. Poetic writing is the most advanced and refined mode of deconstruction; it may differ from critical or discursive writing in the economy of its articulation, but it is not different in kind” (892). Comment on this claim of Paul DeMan’s—perhaps (or perhaps not) by comparing it to Cleanth Brooks’s remarks about poetry and irony.
Discussion questions for 10/19. Group B, please respond to
all three in answers of at least 300 words. Note: please
double-space your replies (and please do not reprint the questions).
1. “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects,” writes Althusser (1268). What does this mean? Define Althusser’s terms and explain this statement.
2. “[The literature of terror] is a fear on needs: the price one pays for coming contentedly to terms with a social body based on irrationality and menace,” writes Franco Moretti at the end of his essay. What is it that Marxist critics know (about monsters, or about the world generally) that the rest of us don’t? Why are monsters such an apparently attractive subject for Marxist criticism? Does it say more about the monsters, or the methodology?
3. Devise your own discussion question based on the week’s reading that you would like the class to take up, and be prepared to ask it of your colleagues. Brownie points will be awarded to those who manage to email me this question before noon on Monday. (Brownie points will be taken away from those who do not produce a question at all!)
Discussion questions for 10/26. Group C, please respond to
all three in answers of at least 300 words. Note: please
double-space your replies (and please do not reprint the questions).
1. Greenblatt writes that “The critical practice represented [by New Historicism] challenges the assumptions that guarantee a secure distinction between ‘literary foreground’ and “political background’ or, more generally, between artistic production and other kinds of social production”(CT 1445). How do the critical essays in this week’s reading (Armstrong, Shaffer, Greenblatt himself) do this, and why do they do this—that is, what’s the payoff of such an approach?
2. Lentricchia writes that “The odd theoretical identity of new historicism is constituted by its unlikely marriage of Marx and Foucault, with Foucault as the dominant partner” 1449). We’ll take up Foucault in class, but for now you can think about (and write about) the connection between the Marxist criticism we’ve just studied and the historicist material we’re looking at this week. What are the similarities and differences between a Marxist view of a literary text as a “socially symbolic act” (Jameson’s phrase) and Greenblatt’s description of such texts as “fields of force, places of dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses” (1445)
3. Devise your own discussion question, based on the week’s reading, that you would like the class to take up. The usual brownie point rules apply.
Discussion questions for 11/2. Group B, please respond to all three.
1. Appiah and Arata argue that the themes of race and ethnicity play important roles in texts that, at first glance, might not seem to be the usual suspects: e.g., Ivanhoe and Dracula. Can you think of any other (two others, maybe?) surprising text(s) organized, at least in part, by a racialist (and thus not necessarily racist) discourse? (off limits: Twain, Stowe, Shakespeare—too easy)
2. Produce a careful and thorough summary/analysis/outline of Stephen Arata’s "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization," being sure to address all of the following topics: What sort of work does the opening paragraph do to establish the grounds of the essay, identify a thesis, and introduce key terms? What are the important steps in the essay’s argument? What is its strongest claim, and its weakest? What is its most effective use of evidence, and its least effective? You should plan to read the full essay (available on-line; check the syllabus) before responding to this question.
Your response to this prompt—which will probably require significantly more than the usual 300-word minimum—will take the place of the “critical essay analysis”referred to on the syllabus; I’ll say more on Monday about how the credit formerly attached to that assignment will be redistributed.
3. Devise two substantive discussion questions, based on the week’s reading, that you would like the class to take up. Brownie points will be awarded according to the usual process.
Discussion questions for 11/9. Group C, please respond to all three.
1. This week’s readings might all be grouped under the heading “feminism,” but they don’t all necessarily agree about the relationship between women—that is, real people--and “Woman,” the essential category or Platonic ideal or patriarchal myth. Discuss some of the differences in approach, and the consequences of those differences.
2. Produce a careful and thorough summary/analysis/outline of Phyllis Roth’s "Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula," being sure to address all of the following topics: What sort of work does the opening paragraph do to establish the grounds of the essay, identify a thesis, and introduce key terms? What are the important steps in the essay’s argument? What is its strongest claim, and its weakest? What is its most effective use of evidence, and its least effective?
3. Devise your own discussion question, based on the week’s reading, that you would like the class to take up. Brownie points will be awarded according to the usual process.
Discussion questions for 11/16. Group B, please respond to all three.
1.
Gender “is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes for the real,”
writes Judith Butler, which seems to be taking us to a place very different
from Simone de Beuavoir’s “myth of the Eternal
Feminine”—though perhaps not so far from her claim, echoed by Monique Wittig,
that “one is not born a woman.” What
does Butler mean when she calls gender “performative,”
and what does she see as the implications of her claim?
2.
What's the difference between
gender criticism and feminist criticism?
What assumptions do they share?
How do their goals differ? Supply
some examples to support your claims. Is the move to gender studies a
moment of crisis for feminism/feminist criticism, or simply a productive
expansion of its methods into further areas? Or was feminism already
compromised by the appearance of male feminist critics? (Another, more
tendentious, way to put it—thinking of Craft’s essay—is this: is gender
criticism capable of recognizing misogyny?)
3. Devise two discussion questions, based on the week’s reading, that you would like the class to take up. They should be substantive and thoughtful, and ideally should invite connections between texts. No yes-or-no queries, please. As always I would appreciate early submission, but I should tell you that at present the brownie point bank is overextended, and will remain empty until I receive an infusion from the Fed.
Discussion questions for 11/30. Group C, please respond to all three.
1. “…if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,/
to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom
we conduct our different lives…” Are we all Freudians now, as W.H. Auden
suggests in these lines from “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1940)?
2. Laura Mulvey’s
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) was extremely influential in the
development of a feminist film criticism.
Her argument, in a vastly oversimplified nutshell, is that “by
orchestrating the ‘three looks’ of spectator, camera, and character, the
cinematic appartatus naturalized a masculine gaze in
the service of patriarchal ideology” (Maltby and Craven, The Hollywood Cinema, p. 398).
In other words, the camera’s gaze is implicitly male, because it
objectifies the female characters it records, and the gazes of the (implicitly
male) spectator and the male protagonist follow suit; the relationship is
reinforced by a process of identification between the spectator and male
protagonist in the film, who share the same “look”. Describe (don’t just name!) three movies for
which this claim seems to be accurate, and three more that present problems for
this theory.
3. Devise two
discussion questions, based on the week’s reading, that you would like the
class to take up. They should be
substantive and thoughtful, and ideally should invite connections between
texts. No yes-or-no queries, please.
These questions must be
emailed to me by 12:00 on Monday so that they may be fully incorporated into
our class discussions
Discussion questions for 12/7/09. No written response
is required, though I would like everyone to spend some time thinking about #s
1&2, and I encourage you to bring additional questions that we might want
to discuss to class.
1. Explain what Dennis Foster means when he refers to “the function of the Father in both restraining and giving access to pleasure” (497).
Are there—as Žižek has suggested in another place—always two fathers? Can you think of other texts structured in the way Foster claims Dracula is?
2. According
to Žižek,
“we are far from inventing a new ‘formula’ capable of replacing the matrix of
courtly love.” Why?
3. Devise two discussion questions, based on the week’s reading, that you would like the class to take up. They should be substantive and thoughtful, and ideally should invite connections between texts. No yes-or-no queries, please.