1. Download this template and follow the instructions on it carefully.
2. Upload the completed exam by Wednesday at midnight via the correct link for your section. Submit here for sec 3 and here for sec 4
3. Feel free to email a copy if you’re concerned that the Dropbox upload didn’t work.
4. If you hear nothing on Thursday morning, all is well. If I don’t get an exam from you, I will let you know.
5. For feedback, refer to your Dropbox Paper feedback sheets: it’ll take me until early next week, but feel free to email me a week from Wednesday if you don’t see anything or can’t find your feedback sheet link.
Here is a 30 minute audio lecture hitting some of the high points of the Spillers piece for today. I also recommend the Wikipedia entry on Spillers. Weirdly, it doesn’t say much about her career beyond the “Mama’s Baby” essay, but it gives a bang-up summary of the argument.
Your only assignment is to email me a brief (one-paragraph) comment or question on the reading. Here are some questions that you can answer, though you’re free to write about some other aspect if you like:
How does Spillers open the essay? What does it mean to be a “marked woman”? How does this opening compare with Fanon’s from earlier in the term?
What is the Moynihan Report? You might need to use Google or Wikipedia to get a quick sense. What are some of the ways Spillers confronts the conclusions of the Report regarding the “black family”?
What is distinctive about the shape of the black family that emerges from enslavement? How and why does it differ from the patriarchal structure of Western families, the structure assumed by Freud’s theory?
What is “monstrous” about black mothers in Spillers’ view? See p. 80. Is this a bad thing? What are some of the effects of the centrality of this maternal figure in the black family?
For Tuesday, we’ll be back in action. We’ll read an excerpt from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: I don’t have the right page numbers, since my copy is at the office, but you’ll find it in the Norton. I’m going to post the correct study questions right now as well. For those who have used their “skip,” you’ll need to submit your final blog post by Tuesday. Feel free to expand on your paragraphs on Brooks or Spillers for that assignment, if you like.
Reading your exam responses, many of which touch on Nietzsche’s and Saussure’s theme of arbitrariness in language, I kept thinking about this arresting moment in the hearings prior to Justice Jackson’s confirmation last week:
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn to define the word “woman.”RELATED: Supreme Court pick Ketanji Brown Jack…
I kind of wish Jackson would have dropped some linguistic theory on Sen. Blackburn, pointing out that the concept aggregates unlike objects and includes/excludes arbitrarily: when is a “girl” a “woman”? Is a “lady” a “woman,” and vice versa? Is a woman a woman before she is born and after she dies? How about a “woman” on screen or in a book? A person in drag? And so on. We’ll talk more about these issues later. But the sheer strategic stupidity, and the wish to muzzle the entire enterprise of any education worth the name, which is grounded in questioning received wisdom, is very much in tune with what we’re about in this class.
This is a classic instance of what Lacan calls “meconnaissance” (misrecognition), whereby the subject identifies with the idealized figure in the mirror (here, the “brawny, suntanned” man with the hot wife and scads of money) to substitute for the unbearable fact of his own frustrated, discontinuous, dislocated self (Mujo, like the narrator himself, is an immigrant who, Lazarus-like, is permanently alive and dead, between two worlds, already over and beginning again).
Here’s everything you need to write/submit your midterm:
download this template and write your exam on the template. Be sure to follow instructions at the top. Note that you need to download rather than edit within Dropbox. Click the DOWNLOAD button in the upper left of the linked page.
upload your completed exam here (the link is also on the template)
if I don’t get your midterm by 9am on Monday, I’ll let you know individually. If you hear nothing, that means I got your work and you’re good.
if all else fails, you can email the document to me, but please upload to Dropbox if humanly possible: helps me keep organized and save time.
let me know ahead of time if you hit any tech snags: you must submit the exam by Monday at 9am.
Good luck, and I look forward to reading your work.
Brief lecture unpacking Barbara Johnson’s “Melville’s Fist” for 306 students
After you’ve finished reading and watching, please post on one of the following questions, which will serve as your Blog Post #3:
What kind of reader is Billy? What kind is Claggart? How does Johnson use Saussure’s theory of signifier/signified to clarify this difference?
On 2268-9, Johnson reads the plot of BB against the grain: that is, as if Claggart were right and Billy were guilty of a willful mutiny. What is the point of this? What does it say about BB that either reading is equally defensible?
How does Johnson distinguish, on one hand, a “difference within” and, on the other, a “difference between” in her discussion of Vere’s act of judging? What does Melville’s text tell us about these two different kinds of differences?
What does the example of Vere suggest about our commonsensical notion that judges are “above politics”: that is, that they decide on guilt/innocence independently of the practical effects of this judgement (2275)?
When time permits, I’ll do this all term. I found these posts especially strong for one reason or another. None is perfect, whatever that means, and they’re not necessarily the “top four,” since it’s harder to rank mini-essays than, say, hot sauces or forty-yard-dashes. But they’re all good and worth reading as helpful examples of how to balance summary and speculation:
Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things is an enormously influential theory of how the West has constructed its own “ways of knowing” by obscuring the contingencies of certain knowledge and projecting a fantasy of a pure, objective knowledge. Foucault borrows heavily from Nietzsche in his distinctive “genealogical” method of narrating history. We can see some of the influence of Nietzsche’s work here in ways that anticipate much of what we’ll talk about in the future.
Foucault’s book begins with a riff on a passage from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Here is the first page more or less in full:
The point, of course, is not the obvious and chauvenistic one: what a zany people those Chinese are!? The point, rather, is more like “what must our Encyclopedias look like to the Other? How are our regimes that make “data” and its analysis seem so transparent and objective equally absurd and humorous and continent when looking in from the outside?
A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site. In what follows, I will outline three things:
a rationale for why I ask you to blog in the first place, rather than write traditional essays
a quick primer on how to create your first post
a simple rubric to guide your writing + an example of a good-looking post
First things first: why blog?
Blogging is sharable: rather than have a private circuit between you and me, we have a much more dynamic conversation across the entire class.
Blogging is public, sort of: I like the idea that we are responsible for our ideas in front of broader audiences. In practical terms, I doubt anyone is listening in most of the time, but I think it’s important that we roll up our sleeves and defend our arguments in an open and public forum as often as possible. And of course, you can show your family/friends/pets what we’ve been up to in class. For those who have reservations about privacy, note that a) you can only be identified via firstname+last initial, so you have relative privacy beyond our class; and b) you are free to delete your posts at the end of class. If anyone has serious reservations despite all this, feel free to contact me.
Blogging is sturdy: rather than forget the piece of paper once it’s been handed back, we can link back to prior statements or observations, or to each others’. If you like, you can leave your posts up for future 306ers to see.
Blogging is responsive: rather than only getting comments from me, you’ll comment on and get comments on each other’s work.
What makes for an excellent post? For this class, posts should:
contain at least 400 words (use word count in WordPress or your word processor)
explain a given text’s argument (or part of an argument), using quotations and paraphrases of the text with page numbers in parentheses
engage that argument critically, noting its limitations, its links to other texts we’ve read, its unstated assumptions, etc.
Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that I will use to evaluate your work:
Rating
Characteristics
A
Exceptional. The post is focused and coherently integrates examples with explanations or analysis. It moves beyond summary of the argument to engage the argument critically, articulating weak points or dubious assumptions. It makes useful connections to other thinkers and/or applies theoretical arguments to practical situations.
B
Satisfactory. The post is reasonably focused, and explanations or analysis are mostly based on examples or other evidence. It provides a compelling summary of an argument but fails to engage the argument more than glancingly. The entry reflects moderate engagement with the topic.
C
Underdeveloped. The post is restricted to summary, without consideration of alternative perspectives, and may contain misreadings of the argument at one or more points. The entry reflects passing engagement with the topic and/or fails to hit the minimum word count.
D
Limited. The journal entry is unfocused, or simply rehashes others’ comments; it fails to engage the argument seriously. It may be well under the minimum word count.
0
No Credit. The journal entry is missing or consists of one or two disconnected sentences.
What do I write about? You are free to choose any focus you wish and to write about any of the texts we’re reading in any combination. A couple of caveats:
You may write about what we’re about to discuss our what we’ve just discussed. I prefer that you not write about something we’ve discussed long ago. So, for Friday, you may write about Nietzsche or about Culler’s piece. By the time Blog Post #2 rolls around, I don’t want to hear about Nietzsche, since we’ll have moved on.
Be careful how much you bite off. It’s better to “do more with less” than the opposite here. So a close examination of de Saussure is probably a better idea than a breezy, loose comparison of Nietzsche, de Saussure, and Derrida, in which each gets a sentence or two.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Getting zeroes in the gradebook for the posts is deadly. Better to dash of something that’s not your best work than to leave it blank. And it’s good discipline: no one feels like they “got it” after reading Lacan for the first time, so writing your way towards clarity, no matter how messily, is valuable.
Use the study questions: it’s perfectly permissible–even suggested–to simply answer one of the study questions in your blog post, or to use it as a springboard for a more complex argument. They’re there, so use them!
Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post. I’ve annotated it using the hypothes.is tool, so you can see what makes it exemplary. And remember: it’s not an exercise in cookie-cutting: your results may vary, and there are lots of ways to write an excellent post.
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