So Long, Farewell

Looking back over this semester, I can definitely see the growth and change that we have experienced as a class. I remember during one of the first classes where Professor McGuire asked us what we already knew about theory. No one really had any definite answers, or really felt comfortable enough with what they knew to discuss it fully. Since those first tentative days, I think that we have become more familiar and comfortable with the confusion that theory hands us. There were many points during the semester where I was, undoubtedly, confused; but like Dr.McGuire said, its ok. I think that being confused is kind of the point of theory. Liberal Humanism was very easy to understand because it was smelting that we were all used to hearing; thoughts that we had thought before. But these other theories; they make us think about things in ways that we might not normally; prompting us to look beyond comfortable thought and analyze things more deeply.

I think that the theories that I found to pose the most significant questions about the culture of a text were Marxist Theory, Feminist Theory and Post Colonial Theory. These three theories all focus on cultural ideas, power structures, and hierarchy. They give us three very different ways to looks at American Society and the way that American ideologies and culture is reflected in literature. They have opened my eyes to things that I might not have noticed otherwise. Studying power structure as it is portrayed in literature is an interesting indicator of how a society functions and how people relate to each other. I also liked reading about Saussure and I thought that his ideas were very interesting and gave me a better understanding about the structure of language and how we perceive it.

Like I said before, there were definitely many challenging moments. One of the most difficult theories for me to grasp was Psycho-analytic. To me, Lacanian thought was so confusing and it was difficult for me to tie the ideas we discussed into literature that I have experienced. Overall though, I think that this class was a very positive experience. It was definitely very challenging at times, but I think that is what made it so interesting. I liked being challenged by these difficult concepts, as this helped me to seek a better understanding of the theories and how they apply to literature.

Arrivederci!

Thinking about Feminism

Thank you Dr. Krouse for an interesting post!

Feminism is a very interesting theory. Its roots, like Marxism, lie in politics, in class struggle and in hierarchical oppression. I think that approaching a text with a political agenda, like these theories do, is a very interesting way to approach a text. Through these theories we can analyze the system in which the text operates, the beliefs held by the varying tiers of society and how they all work around each other in order to form a complete, albeit imperfect, system. Through the eyes of feminist politics, we are able to examine culture in a way that we might not have before. Living in a patriarchal, male dominated society like ours, it is easy to look at things through that perspective. Feminist theory allows us to open up to new ideas, and a new way of thinking about situations. In my paper for class, I discussed a feminist criticism of The Little Mermaid. I went into it, knowing that it was sexist, but upon reading more about feminist theory, I was able to pick out things that I would not necessarily have looked for before. It is very different looking at society from the point of view of a woman, and understanding how she is supposed to participate in male society; male language.

While this theory opens up new ways of looking at literature and language, it is also partially limiting. Limiting the analysis of writing into this political framework excludes many other views. When feminist critics simply use gender as an analysis point they miss out on things like class and time period and psychology; that's why i think that using feminism combined with other theories like Marxist and Lacanian allows the theory to be more open minded, to explore gender along with other qualities. These types of feminism allow for a more comprehensive analysis of literature and language under feminist criticism.

Just for this Moment

Thank you Ms. Sheldon for such an interesting post!

I found the discussion of Lacan's idea of the "death drive" to be especially interesting. I find it interesting that it says that sexual identity is no identity at all. It has nothing to do with a persons true identity. Sexuality in fact "radically destabilizes the self and threatens to undo all the structures within which we try to make meaning of the world." Lacan says that the "death drive" directs us away from understanding our Symbolic and Imaginary and leads us towards sexual satisfaction in which we will lose all sense of these. He also says that through the sexual experience people experience "an orgasmic moment of blindness" called jouissance. In this brief moment, ones sense of self is completely shattered.

I think that the first section of Mantissa works against this idea. Fowles shows us that through Greens sexual experience he is gaining more and more of his identity. He begins to piece together bits of his identity, recognizing that the methodology being used is something he knows he would never have supported in his 'past' life. In fact through his orgasm, the moment of jouissance, he creates something. A book. His sense of self is not undone, it is confirmed. This goes against Lacan's idea that jouissance and identity can not coexist. It is through the jouissance that Green forms his identity. He is a writer, and this scene that has been playing is not reality, but a creative process.

The New First Family

This is just because I am so happy.


I wonder what it is like to wake up one morning, look in the mirror and face the reality that you are the next president of the United States. I wonder what Lacan would say. Can you experience the "mirror stage" more than once per life time?

The Swift Fatality of Fall

First, before I say anything else, I want to say HOORAY! Happy Day After Election Day! Everything turned out quite nicely if I do say so myself...

Ok, so... Mantissa.

I could not help but notice that the first few pages of this novel connect quite well to Lacan's "Mirror Stage." the first lines where the "he" is experiencing something resembling the pre-mirror stage moment where the child has yet to realize the reality of themselves as an "I." Fowles writes "It was conscious of a luminous and infinite haze, as if it were floating, godlike, alpha and omega, over a sea of vapor and looking down." This quotation connects us well to the pre realization. Before a person realizes that they are an I they are in stuck in the haze of nonrecognition. They have no sense of their symbolic reality. From here Fowels goes on to tell more of "his" experience. "With the swift fatality of fall, the murmurs focused to voices, the shadows to faces. As in some obscure foreign film, nothing was familiar; not language, not location, not cast. Images and labels began to swim... these collocations of shapes and feelings, of associated morphs and phenoms, returned like the algebraic formulas of school days....It was conscious, evidently; but bereft of pronoun, all that distinguishes person from person." In this passage the character in the novel is experiencing the moment of the mirror stage. Where things are beginning to make sense. What was once bleak obscurity, is now beginning to take a form with solid borders. He is beginning to realize his identity, however what he is lacking "the pronoun" is his symbolic place. "All that makes a person a person" can refer to Lacan's idea of how a subject gains their subjectivity through language and through the rules and regulations of a culture. Without knowing these things the subjects can not realize their identity.

The Mirror Stage similarities continue when the subject finally does come to realize (at least in part) his symbolic place. "In a kind of mental somersault it was forced to the inescapable conclusion that far from augustly floating in the stratosphere, it was actually lying on its back in bed." He has realized his surrounding, and the reality that comes along with them.

The rest of the chapter is also a reflection of the mirror stage because he slowly beings to understand more and more of the social and symbolic reality that he has woken up into. As he makes more revelations he begins to discover himself further as he sorts out his thoughts from those that the people in his "new world" are telling him..

There is no Spoon...

Thanks to Ken Rufo for a great post!

I really enjoyed reading this post and found the real world examples given by Mr.Rufo exceptionally helpful. For my post I want to talk about his discussion of the simulacrum, simulation and the hyperreal. A simulacrum mimics a simulation, however there is quite a distinctive difference. A simulacra is a copy without any real model. The example that Ken Rufo gives is the World Showcase in Disney's Epcot. Each nation is not actually a simulation of the nation. "They are so fake that they aren't actually copying anything." He says that the culture of the simulation does not allow us to discover the actual real on our own. Simulacra make things real and we are in effect, blinded from reality by these simulacra.

The hyperreal refers to forming our reality through a simulation of the reality. Ken Rufo gives the example of going to a national park and trying to imitate the famous pictures that we have all seem of these places. Our experience and knowledge of a place is experienced through simulations that we have previously experienced. This is the same as someone traveling to Pisa and taking the picture holding up the Leaning Tower. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is experienced for thousands of people a year take this same picture, because they have seen hundreds just like it before. They have this experience of the tower through all of the other pictures that they have seen, their "reality is filtered through a simulation of the reality."

I find that these ideas are seen every day in our lives. We experience things in the hyperreal everyday. We do something because we have seen what others have done before us. We travel out of travel guides, experience places through the simulated lens that Fromer provides us with. We take the "famous" pictures and partake in the cliche experiences.. simply because they are cliche. Our realities are formed by these cliches.


I would like to say thank you again to Ken Rufo. I hope that I did not too poorly butcher my explanations and thoughts on your post.


*Disney's "Italy"

Would a Rose by any other Name Smell as Sweet?

In Foucault's essay "What is an Author," he provides some very interesting ideas about the significance of the author and their name. Where Barthes discusses the death of the author, Foucault stresses some alterior functions that the author holds, other than as the scriptor of a work.

Foucault asks "How does the name of an author function?" He goes on to discuss that an author's name does not simply signify that they wrote a work, but also speaks about the work itself. "[The author's name's] presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts." When we think of Shakespeare we think of his works as a whole. We attribute comedies, dramas and sonnets to his name, and therefore we get a sense of his works as a whole. His name in our culture means something. Through Shakespeare we have a better knowledge of the sonnet genre as a whole and works written by him are seen as credible because they are attached to his name.

This idea is relatable to the pseudonimity that bloggers assume. Ms.Bean is of course not my given name. But here, on this blog, it is my identity. Dr.Crazy discussed the reasons behind using a pseudonym on her blog. She says that, "by disconnecting one's writing identity from one's "real life" identity, one preserves first a measure of control over how one's writing is perceived and second acquires a level of protection from certain kinds of scrutiny (often gendered)." The idea of controlling the way that one is perceived is quite related to the ideas that Foucault attributes to an author's name.

A pseudonym is a safe way for a lot of people, professors in this case, to openly discuss ideas without the danger of ruining their credibility. Dr.Crazy says, however, that even under a pseudonym we develop a reputation, "one has responsibilities under this identity, through one's relationships to others in the community. You're "known" as the identity that you've created, and you develop a reputation under that name." Our work is attributed to us, and people expect certain things out of our Blogger identity. To go against these expectations would be out of character.

I am definitely no Shakespeare but I think that the ideas Foucault expresses about the relevance of an author's name fits nicely into both the world of great authors and into the bloggosphere.

Gonna Keep on Loving You... Cuz its the Only Thing I Wanna Do

I think that Derrida's idea of love being narcissistic is a very interesting one to explore. In today's world the term narcissism has a very negative connotation. A person who is labeled narcissistic is considered to be self obsessed and vain. We talked in class about the psychoanalytic use of narcissism. Freud discusses narcissism as something that we are born with. As babies we are inherently narcissistic, unable to understand the needs of anyone but ourselves. We have no ability to create a distinction between the self and the Other. As we grow, we grow out of this implicit narcissism and form the abilities to recognize the needs of the other people in our lives.

Derrida however, says that we maintain some of this narcissism in our relationships. All love is narcissistic- that we project our own desires and needs onto the person that we love. I think that this also ties into what Derrida was saying in the film about truly loving someone or just loving something about someone. We look for people to love that fulfill our needs. Whether it be someone to make us laugh, someone that makes us feel beautiful, someone that can cook if we can't, someone who is supportive of our career and decision and a whole host of other things that we need from a partner. We look for self fulfillment in a partner.


I don't think that when Derrida discuses the narcissism of love he necessarily means it in a negative way. However, it is a very interesting notion to look at love in such a way Do we love only to be loved in return? Is love a selfish act?

Give the Sign and Swing Away

Reading Saussure last week was a little bit intimidating, but I will try to make some sense out of it. When he says, "in language there are only differences without positive terms," he is saying that meaning only comes from within the linguistic system. For example, our meaning of Night is only comprehensible because we understand Day and vice versa. Therefore he says "the idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it." Meaning that when we look at signifier and signified separately, their meaning is "differential and negative," but when looked at together, we are able to get a positive and total meaning. So, we can not understand the meaning of a word unless we look at it in the context of the linguistic system.

Post Structuralism works to challenge these ideas. For this theory it is not so simple to say that combining signifier and signified can give us a total meaning; they do not have a stable relationship. In class we discussed the idea that the signified keeps slipping farther and farther away, and in its place we continue to get more signifiers. Therefore we can truly never get at the meaning of something because the meaning keeps getting deferred. I want to try and give and example of this... bare with me.


Let's use 'baseball' as the signifier. You have the image in your head, and you know what it sounds like. So what is the signified? Is it the actual ball? Or do you take the meaning of 'baseball' to be the sport itself. If so, you start to see other signifiers right? Like players, teams and rules. With each one of these signifiers, the meaning of 'baseball' gets father and farther away from you. All these other and sounds and images expand and defer the meaning and we are unable to get a true and stable meaning of the word.


Hopefully, I didn't confuse you... because I am still kind of confused! Haha.



Ciao until next time!

Buying into Ideology

In reading Dr. Craig's post, I was struck by some of his ideas and was able to, at least I hope; gain a better understanding of Marxism and Marxist theory. I thought that his first examples of the Communist Manifesto and Che Guevara supported the Marxist idea that a works meaning is relevant to the time. Today, the Manifesto does not hold the same meaning that it did when it was first published. Back then it meant danger to our capitalist society. The threat of communism and Marx's ideas created paranoia in our country and fear in the ruling class. As Dr. Craig said today the Manifesto serves only as a symbol of rebellion in this society, no longer a true threat. I found it an interesting point that while the Manifesto is used in a store display to encourage rebellion from society, true communist ideas are lost in the fact that it is not being used to "inspire action" but seems to support the class division that a sweat shop implies. This supports the greater ideas of hegemonic control.

I think that I was most interested in Dr. Craig's point that "American ruling class ideology continuously spins narratives that attempt to limit the working class’s ability to recognize and respond to its own subjugation." I never thought of ideology working in this way before. I know that in class we discussed how in hegemonic society we buy into the ideologies of the ruling class and accept them as just the way things are, but I think that Dr. Craig did a great job of explaining this idea further. In his sports analogy he discussed how the sports industry targets working class people in its advertising. By cheering for our teams at a game, going to a sports bar to watch the game or throwing a Superbowl party we experience release of the frustrations that we deal with on a daily basis that "result from working in a low-wage job." However in providing this release, the ruling class is also making money. When people go out like this they spend money- on tickets, food, beer and souvenirs. So, while the working class is releasing tensions brought on by the ruling class, the ruling class is still making money. A distraction from the working classes discontent. I also find the idea that "When the ruling class convinces working people that corporate profits are actually a good sign for all – all boats rise in the rising tide sort of thing – it encourages them to believe in the virtues of an economic system that does not have their best interest in mind." supports the point about how we go along with the ideologies of the ruling class because we have accepted them as the way things are.

Thank you again Dr.Craig.

Ciao until next time!

Musings on Marxism

So here it goes: an attempt to make some sort of sense of Marxist criticism. I know that today in class we were all somewhat overwhelmed and confused, but I am going to give it my best shot.

Let me first say that I agree with the Marxist idea that literature is a product of its social, economic and cultural circumstances. Because of this, Marxism provides a stark contrast to the ideas of liberal humanism.

Liberal Humanism says that true literature is timeless. It presents us with thoughts and values that transcend place and time. Basic human truths. LH also tells us that the piece of literature has its own meaning and has no need to be placed in the context of time. The entire belief of Marxist criticism goes against this. Marxist criticism tells us that a work of literature is a product of very specific circumstances, thus making it a reflection of the time and culture in which it was written. The economic system, class position, and the where and when are all important factors that influence a writer's works.

In the first week of class, we discussed this idea to some extent. Does a work carry the same meaning with it through time or does its meaning change as cultures and values adapt? Personally, I think that this is true- in reading a work from the early 1900's we may not understand it the same way in which someone living in that time and place would understand it- however, we are given a window to that time, we are allowed a glimpse into the circumstances surrounding the author's life and a reflection of those circumstances in their writing.

Another interesting idea is presented in Lenenist Marxism: art and literature can and should be used for political purposes. In liberal humanism however, we are told that literature is not able to influence political views. "If literature becomes overtly and directly political it necessarily tends towards propaganda."

I know that that last bit about political influence was a bit off topic from the rest of this post, but I wanted a chance to incorporate a picture. And with the upcoming election I thought that a little bit of election art would be interesting.

OK so what do we think? Propaganda or an expression of support of the party views? How can we think about this poster in a Marxist way?

Comment with your thoughts!

Ciao until next time :)

The First

Hello to all!

I find it much easier to introduce myself and share ideas in written form, so I am happy that we get to keep a blog for this class. I am a senior at Emmanuel and a Communications major. The word senior, admittedly, freaks me out; but I'm dealing with it. I love to travel and spent the last semester abroad in Italy and it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

I love photography and theater. Fall is my favorite season, especially in New England. I am a Boston-aholic. We have great sports, history, art and of course that certain charm that only Boston could ever have. Hopefully through this blog, I will be able to tie my experiences living in this beautiful city into the world of theory.

As of now, I don't really know all that much about theory, but am definitely interested. I find it very interesting to analyze something from a point of view that might differ from your own, in order to gain a deeper understanding of its meaning, and I think that is what theory allows us to do.

So I guess that will be it for my first post! Ciao until the next!