ENGLISH 5000

ENGLISH 5000 Discussion Questions FALL 2008

Discussion questions for 8/30/06. Group 1, please respond to both in answers of at least 250-300 words. Note: please double-space your replies.

1. While this week’s readings have much to say about the intellectual interests of professional literary study, they also make considerable reference to the institutional factors that influence it. Discuss some of those factors, with reference both to the essays (let’s say at least 3) and your own institutional experience.

2. The UM-St. Louis English BA requirements can be found here; the requirement for the proposed new major, to take effect in the fall of 2009, can be found here. Compare them and discuss the changes you see reflected, especially in the context of Graff’s “Taking Cover in Coverage” essay.

Discussion questions for 9/3/06. Group A, please respond to two of three in answers of at least 250-300 words. Note: please double-space your replies.

1. 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?

2. (a) 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?

(b) 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”?

3. Jonathan Culler suggests that, when it comes to theory, mastery is impossible—a claim that acknowledges what it is that makes theory intimidating, but also offers us some consolation. But how does that claim sit with Graff’s recommendation from last week that theory courses should be central, not peripheral, to the English curriculum?

Discussion questions for 9/17/06. Group North, please respond to two of three in answers of at least 250-300 words (each!).

1. Discuss the importance of “irony” for Brooks and Donaldson. Do they mean more or less the same thing by “irony”?

2. 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”?

3. “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?

Discussion questions for 9/24/08. Group 1 should respond to all three. Keep double-spacing your replies.

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--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. 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 to those who manage to email me this question before noon on Wednesday.

Discussion questions for 10/1/08. Group A should respond to all three. Keep double-spacing your replies.

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 One have all the fun: deconstruct a text or portion of a text.

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.

Discussion questions for 10/8/08. Group North should respond to all three. Keep double-spacing your replies.

1. “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects,” writes Althusser (1268). What does this mean? Define Althusser’s terms and explain this statement.

2. Define the following terms as they appear in Williams’s Marxism and Literature: base; superstructure; hegemony; dominant, residual, emergent.

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 10/15/08. Group One should respond to all three. Keep double-spacing your replies.

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, Grady) do this, and why do they do this—that is, what’s the payoff of such an approach?

2. Produce a careful and thorough (but not necessarily exhaustive) summary/analysis/outline of Talia Schaffer’s “’A Wilde Desire Took Me,’” 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. The usual brownie point rules apply.

Discussion questions for 10/22/08. Group A should respond to all three. Keep double-spacing your replies.

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?

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.

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 10/29/08. Group North should respond to all three. Keep double-spacing your replies.

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 11/5/08. Group One should respond to all three. Keep double-spacing your replies.

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, 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: 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 betweem texts. No yes-or-no queries, please. These questions must be emailed to me by 4:00 on Wednesday so that they may be fully incorporated into our class discussions.

Discussion questions for 11/12/08. Group A should respond to all three. Keep double-spacing your replies.

             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 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 4:00 on Wednesday so that they may be fully incorporated into our class discussions.

Discussion questions for 11/19/08. Group North should respond to all three. Keep double-spacing your replies.

             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. These questions must be emailed to me by 4:00 on Wednesday so that they may be fully incorporated into our class discussions.