Monday, September 28, 2009

Third Class

Sept. 28th


allusion to poem in 5 rooms. The poem is in the course reader.

Read and see the correlation.

Something to explain.... but more something to learn from.


Patterns Constellations

12345

Wolfgang Iser

> Temporalities

Femininity/identity/body/discourse


>body style discourse:

generic/specific

iterative/singulative


Rules of Thumb (RoT):

-instructions

-formulaic

-irony > believable? serious?

expression, intention

look up irony and know the concept inside and out and be capable of explaining the variety.

says/means

-comparable with 1st story


On Looking Further into the Bodies of Men:

-guide to male body

-guide to behaviour


How to Write a Serious Novel About Love:

-guide to writing


How Deep is the River?:

-word problem


A Matter of Perspective:

-perspective


Overarching Umbrella

reason/emotion


Count your Blessings (a fairy tale):

Grace > elegance/humility/enlightenment; wisdom/mercy

humility: virtue

wisdom: divine communication

mercy: minimal hardship > luck; charmed life

presents idealization . demystifies?

Happiness Sadness

husband changeless > look into Anne Sexton's poem "Cinderella"

house static/unlike Grace

kids nameless malaise? > look into the book the feminine mystique

beauty

dog

antiques

money

^Formatted Desire

Grace Helen

known mysterious

no depth assumed depth

remove heart > male Doctor > ascend heaven > remove desire/individuality


Hysteria: a psychological malady that finds show in the body

Womb Madness: it's your uterus that driving you crazy


Innocent Objects comparison

> emphasis on material things

> antiques

> happy/not happy; happy versus not not unhappy

> isolate like Grace

> desire > limited


Desire: free-floating

transient

independent of objects

pursuit of completion

begins where wants end


MIDTEM

key terms: section one

discourse, anti-empiricism, etc.

essay question: section two

a few to choose from; theme based

close analysis of a passage:

presented with a passage we've read

write about it


Innocent Objects:

-mysterious neighbours

-objects important

-antiques

-privates/isolated

-rich


previously owned object infatuation:

objects that are highlighted in text

> have a story/history

mediate a disconnected interaction between people

acquisition/theft creates a relationship

presence and/or absence > previously owned

a means to sharing experiences

communal

representational ties


theft > comparable to Helen?

> creates relationship

> intimacy > direct/indirect

> they like tea, gardening, preserves

> laughable

> violation

> event creator > Frederick

the theft doubles as a trade

> photo album . notebook > negation and symbol of absence of....

{aside}manless

>biography collection


identity is unclear

is Helen unaware of herself or is there no one there to know?

presence/absence

multiplicity


names:

first name: formal

last name: informal

true name: intimate


physical need psychological need desires

need to live identity through things/in things

externally projected identity


{image of stickman} {image of stickman}

arrows pointing outward arrows pointing inward


generic

specific/individual


Second Class

Sept 21


Forms of Devotion (FoD):

-emblems (allegorical & didactic); virtues

didactic: used to teach

allegories: embody abstractions


Quarles >> produces emblematic imagery


FoD emblems > historically remote > temporal disjunction

image/illustration & caption/explanation


Nothram Fry


reversal of caption and textual explanation.

how does this switch change things?


FoD lacks a plot and therefore lack tension/climax/resolution....

....but there is tension between

text/image

faithful/fatihless


faithful:

vocation?

naive/moral luck?

"keeping your conscious clean, because you've never had to make any difficult decisions."


Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut

(narrations assumes you know nothing)


Interpolation:

act or phenomenon that forces one to position oneself in relation to it.


narrator is neither faithful or faithless

so is there an alternative to the two, or what is the placement along the lines of extremes.

generic groups or types


examples in the story are very specific and detailed but presented as if general


5 Small Rooms (5SR):


self-representation via objects

extended figuration > metaphor (bringing things far away close together)

Conceit


Pears/Seashells/Cats/Moth/Clocks

Pears > organic, taste, living, eaten

Seashells > sound, temporality, living, trace of living thing, skeleton

Cats > traces of mice, development, atavism, murder

Moth > transformation, burn/suicide

Clocks > direct technological rep. of time, deathless


rooms

TS Eliot

narrator

paired


perhaps the time is assigned a masculine state and it was time that she was unable to kill


yonic symbols

double entendre



The First Four Stories Compared


closure

pattern & interruption

iterative . singulative

summary . scene

sameness/generality . difference/specifity



Body Language:

good days/bad days

-iterative

-binary

physiology > body, symptoms

-nameless

specific individual body

anatomical ideal/generic body

erotic body

medical body

emotion body

body/self > are/have/inhabit

where one locates identity in the body

do you love the body or the person is the person the body and so on and so forth?

First Class

Sept 14

representation

cycle

denotation and connotation

metanarratives:

humanism

empiricism

positivism


main area of research: anxiety and urban spaces


discourse

professional vocabulary

themes/issues

map progress of debates

specifics of discussion and how it changes from book/text to book/text

macro study

analysis

micro scale

paying attention to detail

expression

oral and written


(look up:split infinitives)


oranges and SARDINES

expressions:replacement and negation


Characters are bundles of ideas.

what's represented in between the details?


what is it used to say?

what is said through it?

(the example of a child in a story)


character/characteristic:

what is its purpose/function/role/value?

come up with several and consider the significance.


authorial intent.... is not the point

(long distance telepathy)


what you see/think/find (what it does and what it means)


postmodernity

cultural context

period

postmodernism

aesthetic practice

self-indulgent weird

crossing mediums

after/more/expanded-or-anti modernism

style

(tristrum shandy: by laurence ______) 1700s novel


skepticism about metanarratives

incredulity towards metanarratives

what illusions does one choose to treat as if they were real

-postmodernist function al la alex link


humanist statement of definite traits is politically coercive....


doubt surrounds the metanarratives


Forms of Devotion:

usefulness of title - sense of reading is created

connotes:associations/implications/suggestions

denotes:literal

analysis indicates that there will be some usefulness in doing so


devotion:

religious connotations

devotional books (guide books for christians)

reading would be a ritual act (maintenance and purification of faith)

romantic love connotations

(where do romance and religion intersect and diverge)


forms:

shapes/substances/manifestations/styles/types/structures


READ THE FIRST 5 STORIES of Forms of Devotion