Check here regularly for homework assignments, course announcements, and schedule changes. Any updates will normally be posted by 8:00 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

For Monday, May 11 (Day 43):

Our "exam" period begins at 12:40. I'll gladly receive final papers from those wishing to breathe a happy sigh of relief before the extended deadline of Tuesday at 4:29. (Keep in mind, though, that you need to attend Monday's class in order to qualify for that extension.) I'll have some final remarks. You'll have the last word, in the form of course evaluations, which you may supplement with printed comments that you bring with you to class, if you wish.

Please proofread your paper and try your hand at MLA style. (You can find online guides to MLA style on the "General Reference" page of our course website--which you should explore, anyway.) At the very least, format your paper with 1" margins and double-spacing throughout, employ some standard method of citation, and don't insert extra space between paragraphs, etc. Remember to bring an SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope with sufficient postage) if you want me to send your paper back to you.

Happy writing!

For Friday, May 8 (Day 42):

We'll finish the work we began today in class. This will also be your final opportunity to avail yourself of my offer of Friday, May 1 (below).

Don't forget the screening of the BBC/PBS adapation Thursday night at 7:00 in Science "B" Room 133.

As I announced in class today: if you need it, you may have a one-day extension on the due date for the final paper (final-final deadline: Tuesday, May 12, 4:29 p.m., in my mailbox in the English Department Office). If you do not attend Monday's class, however, you will forfeit your right to an extension and incur a penalty instead...

For Wednesday, May 6 (Day 41):

We move into Part 3. If you haven't found time to read Smith's "Speaking in Tongues" yet, you might do so before your life gets really crazy.

For Monday, May 4:

1. We hear from the rest of the Friday working groups...and move into the second half of the novel.
2. I've arranged a screening of the BBC/Masterpiece Theater adaptation of White Teeth for Thursday, May 7 at 7:00 p.m. in Science B Room 133.
3. And my offer (below) is still good.

For Friday, May 1 (Workers of the World, Unite!)

Identity and Representation (and, yes, Literature) in the news, Part 2:

Here's a piece that addresses some of the most basic issues about literature, representation, and speaking for another. "The power of art to open us to the subjectivities of others," write its authors, "is especially threatening to those who insist on a single narrative."

In a famous essay for the London Review of Books, Edward Said once wrote that in the contemporary West, Palestinians are effectively denied "Permission to Narrate." On the rare occasions when they are granted access to the mainstream media (including literary publishing), it's usually to have their voices dismissed, gainsaid, and shouted down, rather than heard. British playwright Caryl Churchill experienced this recently, albeit indirectly and by proxy, when she wrote a play about the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza which represented the voices not of Palestinians, but of Jews. (She is herself neither Palestinian nor Jewish.) Tony Kushner, another of the foremost dramatists of our time, and Alisa Solomon, a theater critic, wrote this analysis of the controversy that erupted for the April 13th issue of the left-wing weekly The Nation. (They are also co-editors of the book Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.)

If you'd like one last chance at reaching--or at least approaching--your desired quota of Informal Writing Assignments, here's what to do:

Carefully read Kushner & Solomon's piece, "Tell Her the Truth," as well as the text of Churchill's short play, "Seven Jewish Children." Write a response in the spirit of "unintimidated, meaningful discussion" that Kushner & Solomon model. Do your best to avoid predictable, pre-scripted positions. Use this response to demonstrate both your engagement with the assigned texts and your understanding of the central concerns of this course.

For Wednesday, April 29 (Day 39)

For your pleasure and edification: Identity and Representation (and, yes, Literature) in the news:

• "Beyond Authenticity: A Rapper Restages" (New York Times 22 April): "Impenetrability of image, that old signal of hip-hop authenticity, somehow no longer seems to count."
• "Choice of White Director Spurs Dispute for August Wilson Play" (New York Times 23 April).
• Back Talk: Elaine Showalter (The Nation 30 March): author of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

And you thought only English majors were supposed to care about this sort of thing.

For Monday, April 27 (Day 38)

Great, smart discussions on 8 Mile; I'm looking forward to reading the IWAs. Monday we begin White Teeth, at long last. I'll still only hold you to the first half of the book for the first couple of days, but as long as you've got the weekend, why not try to finish it (if you haven't already)?

I may post a few more reading questions if the spirit moves me, but otherwise you've got the two starter questions below, and you can selectively avail yourselves of the Random House reading group questions (in the "Recommended" column of the Course Reader), as well.

Ta-da!: the handout on the final paper.

For Friday, April 24 (Day 37)

We'll finish 8 Mile (think about issues of cultural property/cultural boundaries) and perhaps dip our toes in the water of White Teeth as well (see study questions below).

Here's your last Informal Writing Assignment, due Friday:

Choose one of the following questions to respond to. (In doing so, you may also wish to draw on your notes and/or our classroom discussion of one or more the study questions from Day 35, below.)

1. Read pp. 659-662 of the article by David Roediger that I've placed in the "Recommended" column of the Online Course Reader. (Roediger addresses some of the same issues as Eric Lott's "Love and Theft," but in a more easily digestible form. As a point of reference, you may also wish to re-read pp. 3 & 4 of Deloria's "Playing Indian.") Based on your understanding of this piece, would you conclude that 8 Mile Is about "love and theft” in any way?  I.e., is racial or cultural “poaching” one of the charges that Rabbit has to fend off?  (Or, in Roediger's terms, is Rabbit a “wigger”? A “wiggah”? Both? Neither?)
   
   
2. Re-read Matt Wray’s meditation on the term “white trash” at the bottom of p. 2 of his piece.  Does this description fit the identity that Rabbit struggles to claim, as it’s represented in 8 Mile?  (How not? How so?)  How does/n’t 8 Mile form, maintain, or transform the boundaries (14) that the term "white trash" demarcates? Does 8 Mile’s representation of this identity “help us better understand social difference and inequality and how they are produced” (2)?

For Wednesday, April 22 (Day 36)

More discussion of 8 Mile.

And here are two broad questions to ponder as you read White Teeth and prepare to talk about it starting Friday:

1. “What is past is prologue,” says the novel’s epigraph.  (In the American edition, this line is ascribed  to a “Washington, D.C. museum.”  [It is in fact inscribed on the base of a statue named “The Future” outside the National Archives.  Another statue exhorts, “Study the past.”]  But in the British edition, the quote is attributed to its original source:  Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1.)  At any rate: how so?  In what way(s) is the past prologue in this book?  How does history determine, or inform, or merely set the stage for the present?  (And what about fate?  Or chance?)
2. “Something to do with genes, I suppose,” says Maureen, the receptionist in Archie’s office, offhandedly of Archie’s imagined blue-eyed baby (p. 59).  What, exactly?  I.e., what does genetic inheritance have to do with anything in this book?  How, according to what you’ve read of White Teeth so far, are or aren’t genes a determinant of one’s identity?

I'm aiming to have a handout on the final course paper ready on Friday, as well...

For Monday, April 20 (Dude!) (Day 35)

You can now find 8 Mile and White Teeth links in the Course Reader (though additional assigned reading for the unit that includes White Teeth may still appear in the coming days and weeks).

Here are some 8 Mile discussion questions. I'll be happy to follow your interests, too, but these questions represent some of mine, and you can expect me to use some of them as jumping-off points during Monday and Wednesday's class. I may also use one or more of these questions as the basis of an Informal Writing Assignment that asks you to read 8 Mile in conjunction with Matt Wray and Eric Lott. Stay tuned:

• What do you (or did you) know about Eminem?  How is your impression of Rabbit colored by what you know about the artist playing him?
• Think about the character of Rabbit.  Who is he?  What adjectives would you use to describe him?  How would you characterize his relationship to others?  Who are his friends?  Who’s his best friend?  His love interest(s)?  Why “Rabbit”?
• How is Rabbit’s ethnicity marked in this film—by himself, by his circumstances & surroundings, by others?  Is he comfortable with it?  (Or is that the wrong question to ask?)
• 8 Mile seems very much concerned with the question of authenticity (legitimacy, street cred, keeping it “real,” etc.).  What kinds of criteria are used throughout the film to measure or establish authenticity”?  (Skin color is only the most obvious marker; what are some of the others? )
• More important: think about how the film treats these various markers.  That is, by the end of the film, which ones have been critiqued, found wanting, and abandoned (and why)?   And which ones have emerged as more meaningful or fundamental (and why)?
• Is 8 Mile only “concerned” with authenticity or is it also invested in it?   I.e., to what extent does the film buy into the whole notion of “authenticity” and to what extent does it explode it?
• What kind of a boundary—not just geographic, but symbolic—is 8 Mile Road?  How is crossing that line related to other kinds of “crossing” going on in the film?  What does it mean for the “Free World” crew to send Rabbit and his “white ass” “back across 8 Mile”?
• How, in your opinion, does Rabbit “win” his final battle with Papa Doc?  What has been decided or “proven” in this battle?
• Are gender and/or sexual identity getting as much of a workout in this film as other kinds of identity?

Look for White Teeth discussion questions soon. (I'll also be working on a handout on the final course paper over the weekend.)

In the meantime, know that we'll be devoting Monday and very possibly part (or even all) of Wednesday to 8 Mile, and get through at least the first half (through the "Samad" section) of White Teeth by Wednesday.

For Friday, April 17 (Day 34)

We'll finish 8 Mile. I may have some discussion questions drafted before then...but probably not.

Let me repeat here the announcement I sheepishly made on Wednesday: I'd been using Moodle's gradebook feature to record grades--until I discovered that, contrary to assurances, Moodle sometimes "loses" data. In my case, it lost my record of your first informal writing assignments. If you did that one (see February 4, below), I'd be much obliged if you could bring it back in and let me borrow it for a day or so.

Sad news from the New York Times obituary section: "Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose critical writings on the ambiguities of sexual identity in fiction helped create the discipline known as queer studies, died on Sunday in Manhattan" of cancer at age 58.

For Wednesday, April 15 (Day 33)

We go farther down 8-Mile. You will get Informal Writing Assignments back (and the next round probably won't be due till next Monday).

Our discussion of 8-Mile will stretch into next week--which will have ramifications for the calendar for the rest of the semester. Stay tuned.

I'll be asking again whether you'd like me to arrange an evening screening of 8-Mile so you can watch the entire thing in one sitting, with blankets, slippers, popcorn, and apple slices.

For Monday, April 13 (Day 32)

Please prepare the pieces by Eric Lott and Matt Wray in the reader for Monday. I plan to refer to them in a short lecture before we begin watching 8 Mile, and I'll probably be asking you to draw on them as part of an informal writing assignment that grows out of the film.

Since almost all of next week's classes will be spent screening a film, you should take advantage of the down-time to get a jump on White Teeth, if you haven't already. It's a long, sprawling, complex novel with lots of characters (and lots of shifts in setting)--so it's really crucial that you read carefully and actively, supplementing your marginal notes with a notebook where you can keep track of character development, emerging themes, recurring motifs, etc., etc.

For Friday, April 10 (Day 31)

Thanks to all who stuck their necks out today, and to all who maintained a civil tongue. Racial and ethnic identity can be touchy subjects--not to mention subjects about which most of us are learning to think and speak (and I include myself in that "us").

That's why I find it more productive to adopt as analytical a mindset as possible, to try not to prejudge any question, and to allow people the room to say things that any given one of us might for various reasons find outrageous, naive, or boneheaded. That doesn't mean we can't engage in respectful debate and critique, but unless and until we have reason to believe otherwise, let's also assume that no one intends to give offense.

One subject that's particularly unsettled, it seems, is what it means to for white folks to think of themselves as white. "White" ethnicity is a concept that has not been around all that long, really, and its evolution is connected to lots of things, including history, nation, region, social class, race and racism, "political correctness" and the "culture wars," gender, power, and politics. Christian Lander (the "Stuff White People Like" guy) says that his blog is "fundamentally about class." History professor Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White and founder of the journal Race Traitor ("treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity") wants to abolish a system that attaches privilege to skin color: "To be against royalty," he says, "does not mean wanting to kill the king. It means wanting to do away with crowns, thrones, titles, and the privileges attached to them. In our view, whiteness has a lot in common with royalty: they are both social formations that carry unearned advantages."

We'll be talking Friday about ethnicity as obligation, as performance, and as "property." Re-read Walter Benn Michaels, and explore the "recommended" side of the ledger in the online course reader.

For Wednesday, April 8 (Day 30)

Informal Writing Assignment #5: In the coming days, we’ll be exploring how the boundaries of ethnic identity are drawn and “policed” in imaginative works like novels and films.  For the time being, let’s take Werner Sollors’s observation that “ethnicity is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual and that it is often something quite puzzling to the individual, something over which he or she lacks control” as the spark for a different sort of imaginative work.

I argued today in class that “ethnicity” is something we’re made to feel we should have, that we should have an allegiance to, and even that we should be proud of.  And we agreed that one way ethnicity differs from race is in its emphasis on geographic location.  Both of those factors motivate Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage,” which begins with the question, “What is Africa to me?”

You try writing a similar poem.  Let the first line of your poem read:  “What is _______ to me?,” filling in the blank with a continent or a country or an even more specific place that looms large in your family history (or mythology).  Then riff on that question for at least twelve lines, using Cullen as your model.  Finish by providing a short commentary on what you’ve written, using Walter Benn Michaels’s take on Cullen as your inspiration.  (We’ll talk more about Michaels later in the week.)  Feel free to refer to the entry on “Race and Ethnicity” that I’ve added to this week’s section of the online course reader.

For Monday, April 6 (Day 29)

Pieces in the online Course Reader by Sollors, Cullen, and Michaels. I'll work on some reading questions and an informal writing assignment. No guarantees on when those will appear...

For Friday, April 3 (Day 28)

More subaltern talk.

For Wednesday, April 1 (Day 27)

No foolin': Informal Writing Assignment #4.

“With these words I presented myself,” says Susan Barton about her first encounter with Robinson Cruso upon her arrival on the island, “and became his…subject.”

She’s not the only person in the book who is “subjected” in this way—i.e. who tries to claim, or who is given, a subjectivity, an identity, in words.  Foe addresses a number of the core issues of our class, in fact.  Notably:

• To what degree is our sense of self dependent upon the way we’re represented? 
• To what degree is our sense of self dependent upon (our representation of) the Other?

With that in mind, here is the focus of your next informal writing assignment:  What sorts of ethical dilemmas arise when we presume to speak for another (or an “Other”) or to tell another’s story?   Before you answer that question in writing:

• Re-read (the excerpts from) Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
• Read Spivak’s “Questions of Multi-Culturalism” and “Subaltern Talk” (interviews) AND/OR Ania Loomba’s commentary on “Can the Subaltern Speak” (both now in the “Required” column of the Online Course Reader)
• Read and ponder the quotes I’ve extracted from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and bell hooks and placed in the “Required” column of the Online Course Reader under Weeks 9 & 10.

Make sure your answer reflects your conscientious reading of Spivak. That's a lot to take on in 400 words.

For Monday, March 30th (Day 26)

All this time has passed, and no one has told me that two pages were missing from "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Hmm. It's fixed now.

For Monday: No New Reading! (I thought about prefacing that with a Poppy Bush-like "Read My Lips," but I'm not sure how many of you would be old enough to get the allusion.) I'll be updating the Reader Table of Contents page to reflect this new dictum. We'll continue working with what we've got--although I will strongly recommend that you check out "Questions of Multi-Culturalism" and "Subaltern Talk" from the "Recommended" column, especially if you're scratching your head over Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

Expect an Informal Writing Assignment for Wednesday.

For Friday, March 27th (Day 25)

It seems unikely that we'll have time to take up Gayatri Spivak on Friday--though what she has to say is certainly relevant to some of the topics you're currently working on (most immediately: what are the ethical implications of representing or speaking for another?) Keep working individually on what you began in class today, and think about how you can present your findings most efficiently (each group will have 10-12 minutes--not a lot of time!). If you were the primary note-taker in your workgroup today, then please don't leave your fellow group members in the lurch on Friday.

For Wednesday, March 25th (Day 24)

What--a major paper isn't enough? You want more? We'll continue the preliminary work on Foe that we began today. (I'll do my best to transform your list of topics, questions, and observations into a more coherent agenda or classroom exercise.)

Just a reminder that it's bad form to be late on a day that a paper is due. ’ll be collecting papers at the beginning of the hour.  If, god forbid, you should have a last-minute computer or printer malfunction, then...well,  in the first place, you shouldn’t have left it till the last-minute.  But if you do have a last-minute computer or printer malfunction, don't compound things by missing class. We’ll deal with it afterwards.

For Monday, March 23d (Day 23)

The additional required reading for this week (beside Coetzee's Foe, that is) is now online in the Course Reader. And here are some reading questions to help you focus your thoughts about it. (Should you expect an Informal Writing Assignment on this material? It might be prudent to do so....)

For those who missed Friday's class: because I did not in fact manage to finish reading your last batch of Informal Writing Assignments, I made good on my promise to postpone the midterm paper deadline till the beginning of class on Wednesday, March 25th. Let me just repeat what any serious writer will tell you: 90% of the work of writing is revising. That means it's extremely foolhardy to begin work on a major paper one or two nights before it's due....

Check back regularly over the break for further updates.

For Friday, March 12th (Day 22)

Read King and Deloria. (No, really: read King and Deloria.) That's it. See you.

P.S.: Oh, yeah: the other thing you should be doing over the break--besides writing a paper? Reading J. M. Coetzee's Foe.

Wednesday, March 11th (Day 21)

Bring questions on the midterm paper, come prepared (and armed with passages & page numbers) to finish our discussion of the coherence of the "Indianist" discourse propounded by LOM, and be ready to start talking about the pieces by Thomas King and Philip Deloria.

For Monday, March 9th (Day 20)

I know: we all can almost taste Spring Break.

I'm working on posting the reading for the coming week (two really entertaining lectures by Thomas King and an essay by Phlip Deloria), but you should know that because--as always--we have some unfinished business to attend to, I'll now be asking you to prepare those pieces for Wednesday, not Monday. Check the Reader later tonight or Saturday and get a jump on them.

Here, at long last, are the guidelines for the midterm paper. In my inimitable way, I make this sound like a complex assignment. It is challenging (I hope), but I think it's also fairly straightforward. Bring any questions to class on Monday and articulate them as specifically as you can. ("I don't understand what you want" isn't so helpful. "I don't understand what you mean when you say ___" is better.)

Don't forget to set your clocks ahead on Saturday night!

For Friday, March 6th (Day 19)

This is something you should already have gotten a start on last week (as a casual “homework” assignment)—and it’s also a first pass at something you’ll be incorporating, in a more formal and extended fashion, into your midterm paper. 

We’ve been paying special attention to how characterization is treated in this novel, and (implicitly) to how the whole issue of character figures into the book’s thematics.  (By characterizing certain individuals in part as racial “types,” we’re asking, what is Cooper trying to say about the nature of racial identity, the historical “destinies” of the races, and the suitability of various races for membership in the American nation?)

For Wednesday, March 4 (Day 18)

We'll follow through on what we began in class today: mapping out the romantic axes of this book, and figuring out which romances are sanctioned and which are doomed. This means that most or all of my planned discussion of the novel's construction of "Indianness" and "whiteness" will get put off till Friday--and consequently, so will the informal writing assignment on "Orientalism." (You could take the extra time to check out some of the "Recommended" material related to Said in the online Course Reader.) But today's exercise was one of several intended as an object lesson in the value of marginal notes and external annotations: if you take the time to figure out what might be useful to keep track of as you go along, you won't have to spend quite so much time thumbing back through the book to find stuff later.

Here's another bit of homework: in addition to completing your list of passages pertaining to Magua-Cora, Heyward-Alice (Cora?), Uncas-Cora, and Hawkeye-?, go back through the book and take two more inventories: make a list of every reference you can find to "Indian nature" and white nature (and the like)--and then figure out a way to organize it. Do the same for all mentions of manliness and its others. This will make our subsequent discussions--and perhaps your further work with this book--more efficient.

For Monday, March 2 (Day 17)

(Re-)read the excerpt from Edward Said's (that's pronounced "Sah-eed") Orientalism in the online Course Reader. I also highly recommend the piece by Stuart Hall just above it--and the supplementary materials in the column directly across from it.

Also: make sure you're finally all the way through LOM, if you weren't already. (Your secret's safe with me.) Go back through the book with a fine-toothed comb, and compile a list of all the passages--or even fleeting phrases--where Indians are "Orientalized" (Indianized?). How would you characterize this book's representation of Indians? Is it consistent? Contradictory? Complex?

For Friday, February 27 (Day 16)

I forgot to mention in class today that "The Sagamore" is in fact one of Chingachgook's aliases. (I was confusing "Sagamore" with "Tamenund," the elder who speaks in the book's final pages.)

And speaking of those final pages: if you're not all the way through the novel by now, then what are you waiting for? You should definitely be finished no later than next Monday.

Heads up: I'm planning to give another Informal Writing Assignment next week--one that will be somehow preparatory for the paper that will be due after Spring Break. (I'm also aiming to have guidelines for that paper ready by the end of next week.)

We'll continue our preliminary discussion of LOM's principal characters on Friday. Eventually, we'll set those characters in motion and see what they get up to as they "encounter" the wilderness....

If you need some crib notes about some of the things I mentioned at the beginning of today's class, here are primers on "The Vanishing American," Indian Removal (PBS and the University of Houston's "Digital History"), and "Manifest Destiny." (You may also wish to bone up on the French and Indian War and/or compare a historian's view of the so-called "Fort William Henry Massacre" against Cooper's.)

For Wednesday, February 25 (Day 15)

Keep on plowing through LOM, and if you didn't read Appiah's "Race" before (for shame!), then atone for your sins by doing so now. Be prepared to examine closely the book's initial presentation of its characters. And do some thinking--on paper, I'd recommend--about what this book gets it knickers in a twist about.

For Monday, February 23 (Day 14)

Read Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Race" (online Course Reader) and make your way through at least the first 145 pages of Last of the Mohicans. Here are some reading questions for LOM; check back over the weekend to see if I've managed to concoct a few more that put Appiah into conversation with Cooper.

For Friday, February 20 (Day 13)

Before you start in on your second informal writing assignment, jot down a few notes:  what were your initial reactions, visceral and/or intellectual, to the excerpts that I assigned from Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree in the online Course Reader?  What about this text, if anything, struck you as “Indian”?  (Were you at all influenced by the way the book was “packaged” or introduced?  Had you ever come across this book before?)  What “stock” elements, if any, could you pick out that were familiar to you from other such stories that you knew?

Now read this piece by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  (You'll need to plug in the usual username & password. Feel free to check out any or all of these recommended supplemental materials from Wikipedia, David Treuer, or Thomas Trevenen, as well.)

Now, the actual prompt for your assignment comes from Beckett by way of Foucault:  with respect to Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, “what does it matter who is speaking?”  Why do we/should we care about the ethnicity of the author?  To what degree does our willingness to confer “authority” upon a text depend upon our sense of the ethnic authenticity of its writer?  Take that cluster of questions as your starting point for some ruminations about the relationship between ethnicity, authenticity, and authority.  Take care that your response reflects your careful reading—and comprehension—of both Carter and Gates.  (If you can also find an apt way to deploy your understanding of Foucault, so much the better!)

Here, by the way, are some reading questions for Last of the Mohicans...

or Wednesday, February 18 (Day 12)

No class on Monday. I've fixed the link for Foucault's "What Is An Author" (O joy!). And feel free to make liberal use of the "training wheels" in the righthand column of the Course Reader.

Please make use of the extra prep time to do your best to get a good handle on Foucault. Herewith are some open-ended questions intended to help you do that (along with the above-mentioned "recommended" reading in the Course Reader):

• What's an "author-function"?  How does (à la Schoolhouse Rock) an author-function function?
• So, um, what does it matter who is speaking? Why do we care who wrote a given text?
  
• How would you relate the notion of "authority" (as Foucault conceives of it) to the notion of "authenticity"? Can you extrapolate from his ideas in this piece to come to any conclusions about how we think of things like the race and gender of an author, and why, as a culture, we get our knickers in such a twist over literary "frauds"?

I've decided to postpone Informal Writing Assignment #2 till Friday, when we'll be taking up Forrest Carter.

For Friday, February 13 (Day 11)

Read Terry Eagleton on Freud & Lacan (and Althusser) and Rosario Ferré's short story "The Youngest Doll."

Freud is so popularly misunderstood these days, and so often dismissed by people who haven't read him, that I think it's important to give him a hearing. (He was kind of an arrogant old guy with a couple of serious blind spots and some annoying stylistic tics, but he's one of those unignorable thinkers of the 20th century. He's like Eureka: there's no bypass, so you've gotta go through him.)

Lacan, meanwhile, is one of the most famously opaque writers of our time. While it would be instructive to hear something from the horse's mouth, I think Eagleton provides very helpful introductory summaries to both Freud and Lacan.

So lemme see, some questions....for starters, you could chart how Freud & Lacan's visions of the stages of development toward "subjecthood" compare. Next:

• In what sense, according to Freud, does a child enter the "cultural order" by negotiating the Oedipus complex (and thereby organizing his [sic] libidinal desires)?
• In what sense, according to Lacan, does a child enter the "linguistic order" by submitting to the Law of the Father?
• What's Eagleton mean when he says (141) that Freud produces a "materialist theory" of the making of human subjects?
• How could you read Rosario Ferré's short story as a kind of feminist critique of (or supplement to) Freud?

For Wednesday, February 11 (Day 10)

Will I still be able to hold to my ambition to return your Informal Writing Assignments, even as my life careens into midterm madness? Wait and see...

I'm planning a quick-march through Foucault. Will I employ the means of correct training, or perhaps exercise some other, even more subtle, mechanism of power? Come with questions that arise from your reading, and make them as specific as you can (did you get hung up on a particular term? lose him as went around a sharp curve? miss the point of a particular paragraph? feel as though there's a passage you should probably understand better than you do?). And take a gander at the following & jot down some notes to bring with you:

• What's a panopticon? (And what's "panoptic visibility"?)
• How exactly is Discipline supposed to "create" individuals?
• What is the power of the norm?
• How does the Means of Correct Training work in your everyday life?

I haven't yet decided whether or not I'll post some reading by Terry Eagleton on psychoanalytic theory; stay tuned. You can make provisional plans to read "The Youngest Doll" for Friday, though, and expect some reading questions later in the week.

For Monday, February 9 (Day 9)

Calendar alert! Just giving you a heads-up, a week ahead of time: there will be NO CLASS on Monday, February 16. We WILL hold class on Wednesday, February 18 and Friday, February 20, however.

For THIS COMING Monday, February 9th: we'll conclude our examination of Felix Mnthali's poem; I'll try to tidy things up a bit by way of a short lecture (with passing reference to Ngugi's "Abolition of the English Department" and the notion of "Identity Politics," and then we'll move along to a more explicit (and more fundamental) consideration of the topic of "Identity."

To that end, you should read Foucault's "Means of Correct Training" and Felluga's "Social History of the Western Subject." (You may also find the SparkNotes on Foucault in the righthand column to be helpful.) I may post some reading questions over the weekend, so check back from time to time!

For Friday, February 6 (Day 8)

Thanks to all for helping to raise & explore some fundamental questions. (Different aspects of those same questions will crop up throughout the semester, by the way. Don't be afraid of being impertinent--or of asking me to explain and/or defend any unspoken premises.)

Friday, I'll lecture briefly (I hope!) and we'll work on Felix Mnthali's poem as a segue to a discussion about how the politics of representation is connected to the politics of identity--especially in relation to the organization of institutions like literary study.

For Wednesday, February 4 (Day 7)

Your first Informal Writing Assignment is due. Well, why don't we just take what we've already done and formalize it? Choose ONE of the bulleted questions below (Day 6) as your primary focus for a 500-word meditation (I misspoke today when I said 400) on this week's assigned reading. Review the syllabus for more guidelines, and make sure you have your response ready at the beginning of Wednesday's class if you intend to hand it in for credit.

For Monday, February 2 (Day 6 - Groundhog Day)

"Curse and mark of Cain" (Wikipedia) - for them that's interested.

The required reading assignments have changed slightly. (See the Course Reader page under "Week 3," and have all the required reading done for Monday.) Here are some initial reading/study questions--with one of my trademark longwinded prefaces. We’ve still got some unfinished business from last week, obviously—which means, among other things, that you’ll have to connect some dots between there and here—but do the best you can with the following questions, which pertain mainly to the prose pieces required for this coming week (we’ll work with the poems in class):

• Phillis Wheatley’s writing implicitly argued for “opening up” the canon to people who had previously been denied the means of entry.  But it also left the terms of membership unquestioned.  Henry Louis Gates, Jr. proposed that African Americans should devise alternative standards of aesthetic judgment that emerged “organically” from their own cultural practices (oral, written, and other).  What happened to his proposal, and others like it, in practical terms was that it resulted in the creation of alternative canons, formed on the basis of social categories (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality) by which we often define our identities.
  Like Phillis Wheatley, Chinua Achebe was also moved to take up the pen in response to allegations made about his people by white folks.  But how do their motives—and their responses—differ? 
• Although he didn’t start out with this ambition, Achebe became one of the “founders” of a new field, modern African literature.  In other words, in large part because of him, Africa now has widespread “representation” within English departments--in anthologies, on syllabi, etc.  But Achebe’s essay is concerned with a different sort of “politics of representation”:  not how Africans are represented in the literary institution, but how they’ve been represented on the page.  What’s the difference—and what’s the connection?
• So okay then:  based upon what you’ve read and what you might already have known, what’s your working definition of “identity politics”?  What are the tactical or strategic advantages of organizing certain spheres of life (including disciplines of study and shelves in the bookstore) on the basis of various categories of “identity”?  What are the potential drawbacks or pitfalls?

I also intend to devise something for the first Informal Writing Assignment for next week, too, probably for Wednesday--so stay tuned,

For Friday, January 30 (Day 5):

Review Gates, especially those portions of the essay dealing with Phillis Wheatley, and carefully read Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America" (also in the online Course Reader), taking care to struggle through the elevated poetic diction, the contorted syntax, and the unfamiliar vocabulary. In other words: make sure you understand what--underneath the flowery language and so on--the poem is actually saying. We'll be working with that poem in class, and possibly with some other poems as well. Have a look, then, at the three additional poems and the prefatory material from Wheatley's collection, in the "Recommended" column of Week 2.

For Wednesday, January 28 (Day 4):

We'll get caught up, at last--promise! Come in with any questions you might have about my windy lecture on Saussure. And we'll take up John Guillory's article on "Representation," as well as start in on Henry Louis Gates. (See my preliminary reading & discussion questions below--and add some of your own.) By Friday, we'll bring the "literature" portion of Literature, Identity, and Representation more directly into the discussion, courtesy of Phillis Wheatley.

For Monday, January 26 (Day 3):

• Prepare all of the assigned pieces in the Course Reader for next week (Guillory, Gates, and Wheatley). We'll start with Guillory on Monday, but may refer to Gates and Wheatley as early as Monday, too. Have a look at as much of the "Recommended" material as you can, as well--the page by Landow would serve as a particularly good supplement to the assigned article by Guillory, for example.
• I was toying with the idea of posting an e-lecture covering some of the points I'd hoped to address in Friday's class, but I think you've got plenty to read already. Maybe I'll get around to some of them on Monday before starting in on the new material, or maybe we'll just move on! Meantime, here a few "starter" reading questions for Guillory and Gates. This is not (yet) a bona fide informal writing assignment, but jotting down some notes in response to these questions would help you think through the material more carefully and have something to say in class:
  1. Had you ever given much thought to the question of why your teachers and professors were asking you to spend time studying certain works of literature rather than others?  Did you imagine that they were on the syllabus simply (or mainly) because they were considered “great”—and that you would learn to appreciate exactly how and why they were considered “great”?
  2. Guillory spends the first six or seven pages of the article pursuing a couple of red herrings (thanks a lot, John!):  contrary to the ways in which critics and defenders of the canon have framed the debate, he finally reveals on p. 238, there are no universal, transhistorical standards of excellence that guarantee a work’s inclusion—nor is there some white-supremacist, patriarchal conspiracy that keeps works out.  Rather, he argues, canon-formation is a function of what he calls the “social conditions” of judgment (238)—“institutional forms of organization” and regulation (239).  What does that mean, as you understand it?  What are those social and institutional conditions?  How would you begin to characterize literature’s location in the larger field of social and ideological structures?  (I suppose this is another way of asking a question I posed to you last week:  how could we characterize the relationship between the aesthetic and political senses of “representation”?)
  3. So if we don’t read a given work only (or even primarily) to appreciate its “excellence,” then why does Guillory think we should read it?
  4. If things like race and gender have not figured into canon-making in quite the way that Guillory’s straw-man conspiracy theorists allege, then how does Henry Louis Gates, Jr., see them operating in the realm of literature?  What does race have to do with the permission or denial of entry into the world of writing?
  5. Does Gates believe, like Guillory, that canons finally have little to do with standards of “greatness” or excellence?  Do you see him arguing for “opening up” the canon, doing away with canons, or forming canons according to other standards of judgment?

For Friday, January 23 (Day 2):

• Read the unabridged syllabus and come back to class with any questions.
• Explore the "General Reference" page of this website.
• Required reading: W.J.T. Michell, "Representation" (online Course Reader). Also check out the "Recommended" texts for Friday in the Course Reader. I may post some additional reading questions by noon Thursday, but here are three, for starters:
  • Why is it “naïve” to regard literature as a “representation of life”? 
  • What’s the difference between the political and the aesthetic senses of “representation”?  What’s the relationship between them?
  • What does any of this have to do with the "quiz" you took in class on Wednesday?