Monday, November 28, 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Children of a Lesser God + Silences
We'll be watching "Children of a Lesser God" over the next couple of classes. Feel free to post your 'provocations' to the blog on a rolling basis. Consider connecting this movie to the other works -- cinematic and otherwise -- we've consumed this semester. You are also welcome to engage the Tillie Olsen essays on silence and its varieties scheduled for discussion on Tuesday.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
"Pkhentz" by Andrei Sinyavsky
Post questions below. Try to connect this reading to the more recent critical pieces we've read by Shklovsky and Sontag, if you can.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Susan Sontag's "Aesthetics of Silence"
You will encounter many unfamiliar names in Sontag's essay, but these shouldn't deter you from grasping the main points of her argument. Over the next few readings we will be exploring some of the issues called up in this piece, namely, the relationship between speech, silence and (re) estrangement or alienation. Particularly in _Deaf_ and in Sinyavsky's short story, "Pkhentz," we will consider how silence and broken speech butt up against the dead or tone-deaf language of the modern state and its bureaucratese.
As we figure out what exactly Sontag means by an "aesthetics of silence," we should think about both of these terms. What are the forms and purpose of art /and/ silence per Sontag? In order to put our composition exercises on clarity and concision into practice, I have assigned each of you one section for which you must provide a one-sentence distillation of the main argument. Be sure to get these up by 1 pm, since I will be making a masterlist for the class, which will form the basis of our discussion.
As we figure out what exactly Sontag means by an "aesthetics of silence," we should think about both of these terms. What are the forms and purpose of art /and/ silence per Sontag? In order to put our composition exercises on clarity and concision into practice, I have assigned each of you one section for which you must provide a one-sentence distillation of the main argument. Be sure to get these up by 1 pm, since I will be making a masterlist for the class, which will form the basis of our discussion.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Tennessee Williams Week
Please post a discussion question for one or both of the Tennessee Williams texts we've prepared for Thursday's class.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Last Day
Post your final discussion questions on the novel below. Try to ask about something that requires you to have read the book in its entirety to answer (in other words, a possible essay question).
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Six
Apropos of today's class, start thinking of potential prompts for paper 2, and vet those questions here with your peers!
Thursday, September 29, 2011
_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Five
Please post your (possibly) character-based questions and comments below. In the spirit of Thursday's close reading exercises, I encourage you to isolate a passage for deeper analysis by the class.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Four
As we go farther in the novel and observe lone characters' perspectives bleed into one another's, try cross-directing your questions at one of the characters whose diary you're _not_ keeping. What links your character to another? Conversely, what prevents them from connecting?
Post below.
Post below.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
_Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Three
Post your discussion questions below. Feel free to gear them toward your character groups.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
_The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day Two
Post your discussion questions below. Feel free to gear them toward your character groups. Or not!
Thursday, September 15, 2011
_The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ Day One
On Tuesday we'll dig into Carson McCullers's novel, _The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_. This is the first longer work we're reading, and it will require a different approach attuned to the generic specificities of the novel versus the short stories that have thus far been our fare. We'll be spending the next three weeks with the book, so pay attention to how the story is set up, who its characters are, how they're introduced, and other important things that happen at the beginning of a novel.
Post your discussion questions below!
Post your discussion questions below!
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Discussion Questions for Gorky's "26 Men and 1 Girl"
Post your questions below. You may want to experiment with crafting an essay prompt about the text (as we will continue to do in class), but you are by no means required to.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Discussion Questions for "The Blank Page"
You're on your own already!
Please post original questions below that will facilitate a class discussion of Isak Dinesen's short story, "The Blank Page." Note that this is the first work on our syllabus dealing with silence as neither deafness nor muteness in their physiological manifestations.
Please post original questions below that will facilitate a class discussion of Isak Dinesen's short story, "The Blank Page." Note that this is the first work on our syllabus dealing with silence as neither deafness nor muteness in their physiological manifestations.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Discussion Questions for “Chickamauga” and “Breaking the News”
N.B. We've cut the Nabokov piece, so pose these questions to Bierce alone. Please post your own question about Turgenev or Bierce in the comment thread.
The two short stories for next Tuesday’s class are remarkably different in setting and style, yet, because of their protagonists, have interesting points of similarity. If we pursue a comparative analysis, how would you describe the main characters? What are their relationships to the outside world? To the “news” that frames their narratives? How do they respond to the violence and torture around them?
How would you characterize the narrator and the style of narration in these stories? What does the narrator tell the reader—in accordance with or in excess of the main character’s knowledge? What kinds of clues does the author leave for the reader’s collection alone? In what does the reader’s surplus (or shortage) of knowledge consist? How does that affect the way we experience the text? As with Turgenev’s text, we should ask what narratorial mode the muteness of a main character elicits or compels.
Both of these texts can be read through the prism of history: for Bierce, the Battle of Chickamauga in the American Civil War; for Nabokov, the Weimar period in Berlin (when the Nuremberg statues were introduced) preceding the Holocaust and WWII. With this background in mind, how would you pursue an allegorical interpretation?
Useful URLs:
Ambrose Bierce Site: http://donswaim.com/bierce.resources.html
Battle of Chickamauga: http://ngeorgia.com/history/chickam.html
Vladimir Nabokov in Berlin: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3157/full
The two short stories for next Tuesday’s class are remarkably different in setting and style, yet, because of their protagonists, have interesting points of similarity. If we pursue a comparative analysis, how would you describe the main characters? What are their relationships to the outside world? To the “news” that frames their narratives? How do they respond to the violence and torture around them?
How would you characterize the narrator and the style of narration in these stories? What does the narrator tell the reader—in accordance with or in excess of the main character’s knowledge? What kinds of clues does the author leave for the reader’s collection alone? In what does the reader’s surplus (or shortage) of knowledge consist? How does that affect the way we experience the text? As with Turgenev’s text, we should ask what narratorial mode the muteness of a main character elicits or compels.
Both of these texts can be read through the prism of history: for Bierce, the Battle of Chickamauga in the American Civil War; for Nabokov, the Weimar period in Berlin (when the Nuremberg statues were introduced) preceding the Holocaust and WWII. With this background in mind, how would you pursue an allegorical interpretation?
Useful URLs:
Ambrose Bierce Site: http://donswaim.com/bierce.resources.html
Battle of Chickamauga: http://ngeorgia.com/history/chickam.html
Vladimir Nabokov in Berlin: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3157/full
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Discussion Questions for Ivan Turgenev's "Mumu"
Consider some of the themes broached by the works we’ve encountered in the first couple days of class, namely the binaries embedded in speech as a cultural act: animal/human; slavery/freedom; nature (country)/civilization (city).
How does Turgenev reckon with these binaries? In general, what is the status of speech in “Mumu”? How does the story depart from and coincide with Aristotelean attitudes and Enlightenment philosophies of language/speech, as conceived in _The Politics_ and embodied in Truffaut’s “wild boy” of Aveyron?
What is the significance of Gerasim’s muteness? How does it impact on his interactions with other characters, including the human and animal objects of his affection, Tatiana and Mumu?
How does the protagonist’s silence shape the story itself, both in terms of plot and narration? What position does it structure for the reader? How might we read his silence allegorically, given the context of serfdom in Russia?
What do you make of the surprise ending? (How) does it resolve the ethical issues posed throughout the story? What are those issues?
How does Turgenev reckon with these binaries? In general, what is the status of speech in “Mumu”? How does the story depart from and coincide with Aristotelean attitudes and Enlightenment philosophies of language/speech, as conceived in _The Politics_ and embodied in Truffaut’s “wild boy” of Aveyron?
What is the significance of Gerasim’s muteness? How does it impact on his interactions with other characters, including the human and animal objects of his affection, Tatiana and Mumu?
How does the protagonist’s silence shape the story itself, both in terms of plot and narration? What position does it structure for the reader? How might we read his silence allegorically, given the context of serfdom in Russia?
What do you make of the surprise ending? (How) does it resolve the ethical issues posed throughout the story? What are those issues?
Friday, August 26, 2011
Discussion Questions for _Seeing Voices_ and _The Wild Child_
Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (excerpt)
This excerpt from a monograph on deafness in Western culture is designed to frame our ensuing conversations about ontologies of speech and silence. It is informative but not infallible or unproblematic (as with Aristotle). Please read with a critical eye.
Francois Truffaut, Wild Child (L’Enfant Sauvage, 1971)
Based on the journals of an eighteenth-century doctor, The Wild Child is the true story of a boy found naked, speechless, filthy and living on all fours in a forest near Aveyron in 1798. Truffaut himself plays the doctor who takes the eponymously “savage” boy into his charge and attempts to “civilize” him.
Why is the wild boy the way he is? And what does it mean to be “wild”? How do language and articulate speech fit into the equation? Does the wild boy have a “voice” in the story? Is he free? How does the film understand freedom (from the perspective of different characters)?
What does it mean to be human or animal? How does this film relate to the passage of Aristotle’s Politics we read in our first class?
What does it mean to be “civilized”? Can a person become civilized? How? What is the philosophy of pedagogy or education advocated by Itard?
Consider that the Wild Boy of Aveyron turned up in the midst of the French Enlightenment, an era of fervent philosophical inquiry into the nature of man outside of culture, occasioned in part by the country’s colonial expansion into territories regarded as savage or wild. How might we read the film as a colonialist allegory?
On the subject of form, how would you characterize the genre of the film? Medical case study? Narrative drama? By what techniques does Truffaut align his film with either these or other genres?
This excerpt from a monograph on deafness in Western culture is designed to frame our ensuing conversations about ontologies of speech and silence. It is informative but not infallible or unproblematic (as with Aristotle). Please read with a critical eye.
Francois Truffaut, Wild Child (L’Enfant Sauvage, 1971)
Based on the journals of an eighteenth-century doctor, The Wild Child is the true story of a boy found naked, speechless, filthy and living on all fours in a forest near Aveyron in 1798. Truffaut himself plays the doctor who takes the eponymously “savage” boy into his charge and attempts to “civilize” him.
Why is the wild boy the way he is? And what does it mean to be “wild”? How do language and articulate speech fit into the equation? Does the wild boy have a “voice” in the story? Is he free? How does the film understand freedom (from the perspective of different characters)?
What does it mean to be human or animal? How does this film relate to the passage of Aristotle’s Politics we read in our first class?
What does it mean to be “civilized”? Can a person become civilized? How? What is the philosophy of pedagogy or education advocated by Itard?
Consider that the Wild Boy of Aveyron turned up in the midst of the French Enlightenment, an era of fervent philosophical inquiry into the nature of man outside of culture, occasioned in part by the country’s colonial expansion into territories regarded as savage or wild. How might we read the film as a colonialist allegory?
On the subject of form, how would you characterize the genre of the film? Medical case study? Narrative drama? By what techniques does Truffaut align his film with either these or other genres?
Friday, July 29, 2011
Silent Subjects
Who is speaking?
What matter who’s speaking?
“Silent Subjects,” a first-semester course in Reading & Composition, addresses both the subjects about which literature does not or cannot speak; and those subjects who themselves do not or cannot speak in the literary works on its syllabus. The class poses the implicit flipside to the famous pair of theory questions cited above, namely: Who isn’t speaking? and What matter who isn’t speaking? Further, it asks: About what aren’t they speaking? and Why? It gently mobilizes various methodologies—including feminism, deaf and disability studies, queer theory and critical race studies—to ground these interrogations.
Over the semester, students will grapple with instances in which absent speech is eminently significant, no matter the motivation for the silences they encounter—which range in the readings from the pathological to the political, the natural to the supernatural. The course will contemplate the formal implications of muteness for the verbal work of art (as stylistic device and aesthetic consequence). At the same time, it will pursue the social and structural implications of breaking speech and biting tongues. Students are encouraged to read between the lines relentlessly as they explore the poetics and politics of silence in our textual universes and beyond them.
What matter who’s speaking?
“Silent Subjects,” a first-semester course in Reading & Composition, addresses both the subjects about which literature does not or cannot speak; and those subjects who themselves do not or cannot speak in the literary works on its syllabus. The class poses the implicit flipside to the famous pair of theory questions cited above, namely: Who isn’t speaking? and What matter who isn’t speaking? Further, it asks: About what aren’t they speaking? and Why? It gently mobilizes various methodologies—including feminism, deaf and disability studies, queer theory and critical race studies—to ground these interrogations.
Over the semester, students will grapple with instances in which absent speech is eminently significant, no matter the motivation for the silences they encounter—which range in the readings from the pathological to the political, the natural to the supernatural. The course will contemplate the formal implications of muteness for the verbal work of art (as stylistic device and aesthetic consequence). At the same time, it will pursue the social and structural implications of breaking speech and biting tongues. Students are encouraged to read between the lines relentlessly as they explore the poetics and politics of silence in our textual universes and beyond them.
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