ENGLISH 5000 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FALL 2011

Discussion questions for 8/29/11. Group 1, please respond to the following in answers of at least 300 words. Note: please double-space your replies (and please do not reprint the questions).

1. Earlier versions of the UM-St. Louis English BA requirements can be found here (follow the arrows back in time!); the requirement for the new major, to take effect in the fall of 2009, can be found here (starting under “Bachelor of Arts in English”). Compare the programs and discuss the changes you see reflected, especially in the context of Graff’s “Taking Cover in Coverage” essay. Then look up the English BA requirements at your own undergraduate institution (even if you weren’t an English major) and describe how that program compares—what it shares (and what assumptions it shares) with UMSL’s, and the ways in which Graff’s history is (or isn’t) visible in its structure.

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 of “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 9/12/11. Group A, please respond to two of the following in answers of at least 300 words. Note: please double-space your replies (and please do not reprint the 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 9/19/11. Group 1, please respond to two of three in answers of at least 300 words. Note: please double-space your replies (and please do not reprint the questions).

1. “Irony” is an essential critical term for Cleanth Brooks, as it was for E.T. Donaldson in “Chaucer the Pilgrim.” Do they mean more or less the same thing by “irony”?

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 9/26. Group A, please respond to two of 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 on wrestling or striptease--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?