Nota Bene

Starting with this Unit, bring your Sims to each class.

Notes from past classes that uses Stevens are here.

Past weeks will be moved to the bottom of the page.

Week 9

Tuesday, October 16

• Review Stevens Chapter 6: focus on “Derrida and Deconstruction” 154-157
• Parker. "Chapter 4: Deconstruction"
• Derrida. “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”

Thursday, October 18

Workshop for Essay 2: Please bring in Stevens, Sims, and other readings + a draft of your essay.

• Ives. Sure Thing: A One-Act Play
• Swift. Part IV from Gulliver’s Travels
• Required Viewing:
  • Stoppard. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)
  • If possible: Riley. Sorry to Bother You (2018) 
• Optional: Map of Places in Gulliver's Travels
• CommunityWalk Map - Gulliver's Travels Map

Essay 2 of 3

Due Saturday, October 20

Submit the paper here
1) Create a Visualization of one either "Sweat," "A Rose for Emily," or the earlier poetry from this course.
A Visualization is any picture: this can be a hand-drawn chronology of "A Rose for Emily" or a graph of the narrative beats of "Sweat" or running text(s) through Voyant. Include this image and integrate it into your interpretation of that text.
2)A Deconstructive reading looks for the ideological project of the piece and then finds its opposite within the same text. Write a paper that makes an argument about what you believe to be the ideological project of the text, and then address its antithesis (we will discuss this more, I promise). For More, click here.
3) Apply one of the theories read since the last essay to a narrative, poem, or a contemporary example. You may use this example to argue with or against that theory.
4) Close Reading of a text.

Past classes

Week 6

Tuesday, September 25

Stevens: Chapter 6: Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Formalist Approaches (Read it all but focus on “Anglo-American Formalism” 142-148)
Sims. Introducing Critical Theory  (start reading)

• Wimsatt and Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy”
• Brooks.“‘‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’ from The Well-Wrought Urn”
• Brooks. “The Formalist Critics”
• You should be reading Sims consistently during this unit

Thursday, September 27

• Choose FOUR (4) blogs to browse. Be prepared to discuss at least one post, video, or section from each site:

1. Bully Bloggers
   1. Related to our conversation today:
      1. Discussed at length in class: Takla, Nefertiti. "Reitman vs. Ronell: Rethinking the Role of Gender and Patriarchy in Sexual Harassment Cases" (7 September 2018) and Quiroga, José. "Lonely Planet" (5 September 2018)
      2. The actual text of Title IX
      3. Howard University's Title IX Office
      4. Chu, Andrea Long. "I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser." (30 August 2018)

         Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it. When scholars defend Avital — or “complicate the narrative,” as we like to say — in part this is because we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep. Intelligence is a hungry god. 

   2. The Public Medievalist
      1. Mentioned in class: Mondschein, Ken. "Not a Good Look: The SCA Swastika Incident" (1 February 2018): part of the site's "Race, Racism and the Middle Ages" series.
   3. #TransformDH (this article will make the preceding link make a bit more sense)
   4. FemTechNet (good places to start with this site: Workbook, blog, video)
   5. #ADPHD
      1. Mentioned in class: "BLOGROLL: Hunter on The Long History of Child-Snatching in the United States" (4 June 2018)
   6. Black Perspectives
      1. Mentioned in class:  Perry, Kennetta Hammond. "Black Nationalist Women’s Political and Intellectual Labor" (25 September 2018).
      2. Mentioned in Class:  Scott, Jermaine. "On Race and Sports: An Interview with Howard Bryant" (21 September 2018).
   7. Lindsay Ellis
      1. Not mentioned in class, but a good example of the tension between the literal text and its form (in this case, cinematic framing):
   8.  Wisecrack
      

• Mini Essay 3 of 5  Due Saturday, September 29 Submit it here.

  Free Response to any of this week's reading. 500-1000 words.

  Week 7

  Tuesday, October 2

  Review Stevens Chapter 6: focus on Saussure and Structural Linguistics (137-140)
• From Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics [Link Fixed]
• Video: Ferdinand Saussure and Structural Linguistics

• Thursday, October 5

• Review Stevens Chapter 6: focus on Russian Formalism 140-142, Levi-Strauss and Structuralist Anthology 149-150, and Barthes and Structuralist Semiotics 150-151, Narratology 152-154
• Barthes. “Death of the Author”
• Levi-Strauss “The Structural Study of Myth”
• Make sure you are still reading Sims!

• Optional:

  The Allusionist: Episode 25 "Toki Pona"
  For more on this episode, please see the show notes and transcript

  Week 8

  Tuesday, October 9

• Barthes. From Mythologies, read “Myth Today,” “Soap-powders and Detergents,” “Novels and Children” and one other essay of your choice from this collection
• Fanon. “The Fact of Blackness” and “On National Culture.” 

• Thursday, October 11

• Faulkner. “A Rose for Emily” (1930)
• Hurston. “Sweat” (1926)
• Hughes. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921)

Mini Essay 4 of 5 

Due Saturday, October 13

Submit papers here.

Choose one of the following:

1. Apply one of the theoretical frameworks covered so far to either the Faulkner, Hurston or Hughes reading from this week.
2. Write a cultural analysis essay similar to those by Barthes.
3. Discuss Hurston or Hughes within the context of their other writing which we read earlier in class.
4. A general response to a specific text from either this or last week.
5. You can also start drafting Essay 2 (prompts below)

1. Notes!