ENGLISH 5000 FALL
2006
Discussion questions for
1. 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,” if you had one?
2. The UM-St. Louis English Department recently (more or less) lost its one full-time Shakespearean to retirement. Given what you now know (from Gerald Graff) about the history of English Departments and about the "coverage model," and (from Menand and Guillory) about the narrowing of the market for advanced literary study, do you think that the Department should seek a replacement--that is, another Shakespearean--assuming that the resources are available to do so? Or should we use those resources to do something else--and if so, what? Would it make a difference if the retirement had been in some other field—Anglo-Saxon studies, say, or the eighteenth-century novel? Try to supply arguments on both sides of the issue.
Discussion questions for
2. One of the chief issues in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale is the question of maistrie, mastery, that is, who should be in charge in a marriage. What position does the text support, in your reading?
Discussion questions for
1. Define the following terms and describe their importance to Freud’s work: repression; "Oedipus complex"; id, ego, superego; condensation, displacement.
2. We know (from question #1, if nowhere else) about the importance of the Oedipal crisis to Freudian readings. Phyllis Roth’s “Suddenly Sexual Women in … Dracula,” however, promises to describe the“pre-Oedipal focus of the fantasies” that inform the novel. What does she mean, and how does a pre-Oedipal interpretation differ from an Oedipal one?
3. 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.
Discussion questions for
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’s has suggested in another place—always two fathers? Can you think of other texts structured in the way Foster claims Dracula is?
2. Is the Wife of Bath a femme fatale in Žižek’s sense? (Note: Fradenburg on the role of choice will be useful to you here.)
3. (Held over for a limited time only!) 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.
Discussion questions for
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
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
Discussion questions for
1. Define the following and explain their relevance to deconstruction: logocentrism; presence; binary opposition; indeterminacy/undecidability; différance; aporia; trace.
2. Don’t let all the semioticians in Group A have all the fun: deconstruct a text or 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.
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
Discussion questions for
1. “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects,” writes Althusser (1268). What does this mean? Define Althusser’s terms and explain this statement.
2. (a) Define the following terms as they appear in Williams’s Marxism and Literature: base; superstructure; hegemony; dominant, residual, emergent.
or
(b) Describe the different ways in which Laurie Finke and
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
Discussion questions for
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 (Patterson, Shaffer, Grady) do this, and why do they do this—that is, what’s the payoff of such an approach?
2. Kelli’s question from the discussion board: “Does anyone else feel like it becomes very difficult to separate
the Marxism from other theories?” This is not meant to be a “yes” or “no” question, by the way.
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
Discussion questions for
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 surprising text(s) organized, at least in part, by a racialist (and thus not necessarily racist) discourse?
2. What is “Orientalism”—an idea, a practice, an analytical category?
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
1. (a) In Literary Theory:
A Very Short Introduction, Jonathan Culler asks, "Is cultural studies
a capacious project within which literary studies gains new power and
insight? Or will cultural studies swallow up literary studies and destroy
literature?" Which do you think it is? Does the study of
popular culture represent the final exhaustion of the literary critical
paradigm (and thus the end of civilization as we know it), or the first
stirrings of something else entirely?
or
(c) If, as Bourdieu, writes “art
and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not,
to fulfil a social function of legitimating social
differences” (1403), then doesn’t our study the classical corpus of English
literature potentially contribute to a state of affairs—a system of “social differences”--
that we might not otherwise endorse?