Discussions, Readings, & Exercises

Jan. 8

Readings due before class:
--Purchase texts

Assignments due before class:
1. Be a committed, mature pomo fiction student.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. The Museum of Jurassic Technology (from our intro; pastiching scientific or natural history museums; a questioning of the "advancement of knowledge").  Cones of confabulation (and the love of Englightenment science to make diagrams); No one may ever have the same knowledge again; The Garden of Eden on Wheels 
2. Discomfort in Texts of Bliss
3. 1st Laundry List of Pomo Strategies.
4. How are you postmodern?  pp. xxvi, xxvii
5. Even BYU teaches Postmodernism!
6. Lee's -Isms Lecture--a short history of American Literary/Art writing
7. POMO intro--Problematic binaries; progress/"degress" or regression (xxx); subjective/objective; low art/high art; stability/chaos (transcendental signifier vs. "anything goes")
8. Why pomos are paranoid; DDT is good for me! said the Father.  Science is progress, said the Father.  The bomb makes us Safer, said the Father.  The Patriot Act makes us Safer, said the father.  War = Peace, said the Father.
8. 50's, The Nuclear Family, Leave It To Beaver, McCarthyism, and the reactions to this...
9. Pomo laundry list: Antinomianism--the breasts present themselves (DF p. 10); excess in lists (p. 11); a pastiche of language systems (Old Testament, Science, Pop Culture, Comedy, Neuroses/Freud, Old Fart-ism (Damn Your Eyes!), Q & A Public Service Announcements, Fairy Tale p. 18 fe fi fo fum, Passive voice--the voice of objectivity/science/legalese)
10. "classic" or first generation Pomo as a clear break from modernism (angry, political, paranoid; more excessive; ironic; avant-garde--influenced by dada but also the Beats)
11. Underground postal service and the muted post horn; like Brazil with the rogue plumber Robert Deniro

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Intro xviii: McHale on Modernism (epistomological) vs Postmodernism (ontological)
Barthelme: "The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century in all media" (Norton, 26); an overview of Barthelme
2. Arguments about Barthelme--form over representation?
2. Why is "classic" the wrong word for Postmodern writing?  Lee prefers "hard core"; our text might call them "first generation" pomo writers (2nd gen. women, queers, latinos, af. am.--xix).
2. Doing close, pomo readings.
8. Enlightenment vs. "Dark Ages" vs. antifoundationalism (xx); xxix--disrupt the center/margin binary3. Antifoundationalism and Post-structuralism
3. A quick introduction to linguistics--webs of signifiers (intertextuality); excess of meaning (xxi)--Différance (differ and defer; ) vs. Platonic Ideals; vs. language as a transparent window (xx); problematizing categories (xix) and originality; the arbitrary or constuctedness of signifiers (Le Guin's "She Unnames Them" p. 525)--an excess of meaning
7. Modernism and Prufrock (high culture, formal play, not really political); questioning perception vs. identity (xxvii--identity as linguistic; the Cartesian Self vs. the "modernist" Freudian Psyche Divided vs. the pomo subject made of signifiers); the protest of the Beats (Howl) against Modernism and 50's "culture."
"8. More on Duchamp (his Mona Lisa pastiche); Man Ray (dada and surrealist); Dali (dream and real merge; our Freudian Other xxv); Warhol (appropriating images from ads xxii); 
9. Don't Trust Anyone Over 30 (Jack Weinberg at Berkeley)? and the 60's revolutionary movements...

Lee's Lecture Notes:
2. Berube--"it's hard to determine the relevant facts and features of pomo when so much of pomo has questioned how 'facticity' is constructed"--thus the laundry lists must be problematized
2. Berube--Distinction between Popular culture and "high" culture are put under erasure in his own writing (pop culture as a "new" kind of scholarly focus).
3. Berube--598--pomo and facts-- how does art enter the mainstream? (596)  Corporate Co-opting and post-avant-garde (597): David Lynch's Twin Peaks defended in USA Today (vs. his Eraserhead 1977); Grandmaster Flash recycling "vinyl cultural products" (he is actually now in the Rock and Roll hall of fame--what would Berube say?); when something from the avant-garde becomes a commodity or is used to sell commodities (music videos: David Bowie "Space Oddity" (1969) ""Boys" and "Ashes to Ashes"; Eurythmics and early MTV 1983; and a Rolling Stone cover); graffitti, and graffiti on display in 2006
4. The problem of evidence in a web of signifiers that are contextual (Xerox technology, Photoshop-- xxiv)
5. 1984, the problem of History as Fact or a Grand Narrative (xxiv; old historicism--historical facts as transcendent (as monolith, singular)-- vs. new historicism i.e. History as ideological signifiers full of cultural baggage)--who's history (native americans might see Columbus's arrival here differently)?, and who's writing it (white guys)?  And when (1800's? 1950's?)?  And who's revising it and re-reading it later?  Look at AlJazeera news vs. US news
6. But can't I have the radical truth (another pomo artifact)!?!?
6. And then there's Wikiality...("truth by concensus")--a very postmodern space where various narratives can be reresented (and pastiched); Colbert's new phrase "truthiness" might apply
10. Berube 601--women, minorities, queers helped to "shatter the pernicious sense of nostalgia to which so many men" for and against pomo subscribed to...
11. DF--all sorts of historically conflictual technologies and settings combined in a surreal way (swords, movie projectors, duels, porno films, mechanical legs); the questioning of everything (But still with given signifiers with all their huge history of cultural baggage)
11. DF p. 21 Who's Emma?  A moment of foregrounding a potential reader reaction...metafiction
12. DF p. 16 "We don't care what you think" as a 60's youth anthem (Barthelme's cultural baggage)

From "Classics" to Neo-Postmodern
Readings due before class:
--Anthology: Burroughs p. 15-25 (read this more like a piece of Dada); Vonnegut p. 84-94; Phillips 115-120 (POV, perception, language crisis and poetry); O'Brien p. 174-183 (metafiction);  Hassan p. 586-595

Assignments due before class:
1. Reading Reaction #2: 300 words--comment on one positive and one negative artifact/something/signifier from the Dead Father thus far.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Naked Lunch? Burroughs studied in Germany during Hitler's start; Documentary on Cut Ups; The Cut Ups, a film; cooptation and Nike?
2. Dystopia, The Vegetable People and Oxygen Addicts (p. 17), and the Conspiracy Theory of the Universe (Supernova Conspiracy starts with a Newsweek quote p. 18)...and Barthes' "prattle text"--putting the reader in crisis with language...
3. Hassan's laundry list/binary p. 591-592 (modernism vs. postmodernism); the idea of post-civilization (587)..."or shall we call it the age of indetermanence" 588
3. Berube--critics of Pomo on all sides (600)--Eagleton, Kramer, Donoghue-- pomo is "content to let a thousand discrepancies bloom", and Jameson "all that is left is to imitate dead styles"
2. What is dream and what is real (Pynchon, Gass, Barthelme); what is real and what is "made up" (Brautigan's excessive listing of fish books like Till Fish Us Do Part ends up being "real")
8. Barbie pastiche? Food Chain Barbie (and copyright, and ownership; the author as author-ity?)...and plagiarism..."fair use" laws...
11. Anth. p. 600 (Berube and "the apocalyptic rhetoric about the disappearance of the referent"); G. Stein and her Tender Buttons?
13. Berube and Dada's breakdown--"Dada self-destructed when it was in danger of becoming "acceptable" says Shelley Esaack on Art 101...questioning, and reviling, everything--and the desire to divorce signifiers from all previous attachments (in a quest for Originality?)?
14. Collages and dada:  Man Ray's "collages" merging organic with machines or objects; other Moma images
6. Différance (difference and deferral of signifiers)--and Burroughs ideas about everything being associations not content (p. 23)
7. Poststructuralism and Postmodernism (from Marrianne DeKoven--is postructuralism really the culmination of modernism?)
14: Antinomianism Day!  Talking dirty (175), Sea Pirates (91), Art and Writing as Protest, as Desecration of the Sacred (art on trial--The Flag),  postcolonial "assholes" and Vonnegut *, and The 700 Club (And Phyllis Schlafly's warnings to college students--take heed!).

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. True war stories?  O'Brien's "neo-pomo" telling and retelling, a deconstruction of TRUTH (transcendental signified) and of story telling.  Obscene contradictions.  John Wayne war movies vs. other 60's war movies (like those with Lee Marvin--The Dirty Dozen) vs. Platoon (a clip; but only possible long after the war in 1986).
2. Great Expectations--Acker as more pomo with her fragments and short circuits, her "samplings" (but also a punk feminist re-visiting pomo with awful violence; pastiching the more "polite" Dickens): Dickens and 1860's Victorianism--a semi-autobiographical novel with 3 "stages" of expectations; Dickens being asked to make his ending happier; the 1998 update; as a match making service; Supposedly The Graduate is based on this (Ann Bancroft simulacra--see Baudrillard below)...Acker said she came out of poetry--poets as "white niggers"; R. U. Sirius interview; R. U. Sirius himself as artifact; and Patti Smith;
3. Berube--pomo critics left and right (600)...pomo as facetious and pointlessly playful (Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure--revisionist history vs. Total Recall--revisionist memory conspiracy (from Phillip K. Dick's 1966 story), and commodification of memory)...until "pomo began to come to grips with the various social liberation movements" (601) which is I might say Acker comes into the picture.
8. Eurocentricsexism-- The protests of the Other toward 60's manly white pomo (xxix)--what does the silliness of "Sentence" do for the revolution, anyway?  And he's so sexist!
6. Marxist critiques of Pomo/Poststructuralism; but Lee thinks, along with people like J. Butler, that disrupting the Truth, the referent, the Transcendental Signified, via linguistics, is the ultimate revolution...but also see p. 599 Kuhn's paradigm shifts being shifts, not Truth...
11. Laundry List: Metafiction in "Sentence" (also short circuit, randomness) and in O'Brien (and Vonnegut, of course)
12. Phillips--First Person POV and perception and empathy (and identity--reader becoming the "I"--p. 116; and You, the little pea of cells--Plath-like imagery)
13. Are all texts Pastiche?  Or probably better put, Bricolage?  Using given objects in new ways (like the Punk movement making jewelry out of common objects like safety pins...Acker as Punk)
14. Lee's ism lecture--pomo and neo-pomo
15. A bit more art history: cubism, dada, constructivism, surrealism, abstract impressionism, assemblage art (Joseph Cornell--not unlike some of Man Ray's work), pop art (consumerism and pop culture as fixations), op art (Varasely), the 1960's, and 1970's

Neo-Pomos and "The Panic Stricken Production of the Real"
Readings due before class:
--Anthology: Maso p. 111-115; Baudrillard p. 631-637

Assignments due before class:
1. Come with 2 questions about Baudrillard (email to mortenle@uvsc.edu )

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. More on New or Pomo Historicism--McCarthyism ; and Red Channels (Scandalize My Name)
5. The Pomo epicenter: Las Vegas!  But that's not the way New York really looks!
7. The Persuaders--"A World Made of Marketing" and Times Square looking like Las Vegas which looks like everywhere else (NYC, Paris, Camelot, Rio, Greece...); 
1. Baudrillard: Simulations upon simulations upon simulations (Hotel Excalibur, the 1967 musical, 1975 Holy Grail as pastiche, Boorman's 1981 Excalibur, 2004 Spamalot (a Broadway musical of a pastiche of Arthural films from the 60's), Arthurian tours in England, but is it ultimately myth?  But what isn't ultimately myth?)
9. Advertising vs. Eco's "Semiotic Warfare" (xxi) and the co-optation/rebellion cycle (xxii); Hot Topic; Barbara Kruger (I buy, therefore I am--Berube p. 601)...the "I am" having disappeared behind consumerism
3. Berube--Hans Haacke environmental postmodernist (p. 602--"foreground the means of cultural transmission") transmision"--anti-consumption); Philip Johnson's AT&T Building (pastiche)
5. Watching, and reacting to, your first film in the context of one theory and one written piece...
6. Berube p. 600 "the map engenders the territory" and Baudrillard's hyperreal-ity (and Borges)
6. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring--DDT is good for me!  Typhus vs. Murder and insanity; And making revolutions in this world...(you have to believe in materiality--601...or do you?)...and no wonder pomos are paranoid...
7. My notes on Baudrillard

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Baudrillard: Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" published in 1940 (intellectual creation of a world begins to take over the Earth); the map of the city is so "accurate" it covers the city...but this implies a Platonic "origin" still visible if one lifts the map or if the map decays...Baudrillard says this origin IS no longer (631), and thus the Borges' metaphor breaks down...
2. Uqbar Tourism Guide
2. Everything depends upon...Plato's allegory of The Cave: Lee's Version; the Schults' version; for kids; but what's wrong with shadows?
3. Baudrillard: "substituting the signs of the real for the real" (632) until origins disappear (an extension of Derrida?  Derrida acknowledges materiality, but we don't have access to it without signifiers swimming in ideology).
4. Baudrillard: "the magic of the concept, and the charm of the real" has  Realism (the codes of mimesis) is a game of pretending that we all go along with by suspending our disbelief (Coleridge's "poetic faith") as we read--but we always know it's fiction. Simulation doesn't pretend, it feigns being real by containing bits of the real (like a psychosomatic illness contains bits of the real e.i. hysterical paralysis), but isn't real.  The "recurrence of models" and "the simulated generation of differences" are all we have left.
3. Lacan, the post-structural Freud; the terrible/wonderful separation from the mother/origin by the Law of the Father or Logos.
4. More on the codes of fiction/realism and non-fiction...
5. Hassan's extended laundry list (and the ridiculous label "postmodern" when now is always modern); 
2. Film: 1975's Network...is TV/simulation more real than The Real? No, The Real is lost--Simulation is all: That which no longer pretends (633) but is also not "the real," but which contains many elements of the real (like other real anchormen on real news channels).

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Simulacrum from Wikepedia...
3. Lee's Baurdrillard notes
3. A Dictionary of Postmodern Terms...exhaustion?
4. Life of Brian and the constructedness of religious symbols/icons (Follow the shoe!  No! Follow the gourd!); the panic stricken need for a Messiah (or many messiahs)
5. Hassan's extended laundry list; Prufrock and modernism's anti-romanticism (just 30% less postmodernism?); Lee likes how our anthology doesn't try, as Hassan says, to create a narrow cannon of accepted pomo texts...
4. Leaving the "nihilism" (or narcisism?) of DaDa behind: Surrealist Poets like Andre Breton (many of whom began to get more political in 1he 1930's); and back to Duchamp's pastiches (doing things again, but leaping toward the infinite), even of cubism (Lee calls Duchamp the John Barth and Donald Barthemle of the art world); every text is a found piece, or bricolage (no "originality");  Jim Morison lyrics; Dali; Frida Kahlo; also Early Renaissance artists like Bosch (is there really anything new under the sun?); Andre Breton's 1924 surrealist manifesto "Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation"; Sylvia Plath's 1963 poetic leaps "a melon striding on two tendrils"...
4. Barth and making things new in a world of imitation...(pastiche or parody??)
1. Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" a Latin American hard core pomos that put us in crisis with "reality"/language; kind of like Oedipa Maas's search for the meanings of the muted post horn; a story that also demonstrates simulation with all it's "real" elements and fictional elements colliding (encyclopedias, footnotes); Lee would disagree with Baudrillard's dismissal--when Tlonian artifacts start showing up, the Tlon world begins to take over our world--one set of memories (or language) replaces/erases another...
2. Freud, the Oedipal complex, and The DF: a metaphor about the psychological dangers of killing our fathers (symbolically) and marrying our mothers (symbolically, to return to the safety of the womb/origin).  The Wends, however, don't have to kill their fathers because they are their fathers, and they are forever married to their mothers!  What WOULD Freud say??
4. Lacan's stages (rethinking Freud with linguistics): the Imaginary or the dream of one-ness with mother/origin and Baudrillard...
3. Baudrillard and the "panicked production," or eradication, of religious Icons: --the buddy Christ from the campaign "Catholicism WOW" being used to revitalize (or popularize) the Catholic church in the movie Dogma (where the icons are simulations more of TV icons than any "original" Jesus); Lee's experience in Mexico with Iconoclasts (the fear that icons mask The Real);  the varieties of depictions of Jesus--as black, as white, as passive, as active, as weak, as strong; of Joseph Smith as Harlequin Romance God in some recent films??
3. Disneyland and the "murderous" signifier/icon
4. Borges and the land of nouns (only in the northern hemisphere of Tlon, of course)--and how perfect systems take over the world (like the detailed encyclopedia, or like the world of marketing which sometimes even ends up tattooed on people--think about Jameson here too).

Neo-Pomos, the "Neo"-Avant-Garde, and Pomo Skeptics
Readings due before class:
--Anthology: "Colide" intro pp. 193-196;   L. Anderson 216-226;
--Handout (hard copy outside my office): Barth's "Literature of Exhaustion" (Hassan's literature of silence or unmaking)

Assignments due before class:
1.At least 2 questions or comments about the "Literature of Exhaustion."

Lee's Lecture Notes:
2. John Barth and "Doony's" version(sssss) of 1001 nights--Chimera's frame-tales (stories within stories within stories as a way to save the world, or at least womankind; metafiction on drugs! pastiche up the wazoo; antinomian and cultural intrusions from the 60's); Scheherazade as college co-ed, dropping out to make a difference (p. 417); non-murderous signifiers--the "magic" in the words; the "narcisism" of Barth as a genie in his own story giving "Sherry" her own stories, the "stories everyone tells"; sex and narrative being the same; the key is that the treasure is the treasure; frame tales, compound tales 422
1. The problem of making it new--the artist Alex Bigney told Lee that 20th century surrealism wasn't all that new--see Bosch and Botticelli and other early Renaissance painters vs. Dali (dream and real merge)...2. Literature of Exhaustion (silence, unmaking)--the difficulty of originality (indeed, the impossibility of one thinks of  (exhausted possibilities within naive realism ; p. 70--Kierkegaard "every moment falling back into the finite"; the medium is the message p. 71 (though to Lee that seems more like modernism's goal); you can't do Beethoven's 6th again (p. 66)--he also says you can't do old sonnet-sequences any more either, but look at the neoformalist poets (like Marilyne Hacker); Borges' Baroque p. 72-73; "exhaust reality's frightening guises" to get to the truth exhausting the "finite" codes of mimesis, perhaps? 75; Anth. p. 441--Shah Zaman says "They're too important to be lies!" which as a line creates and erases its meaning into infinity, and like O'Brien says--a True war story might not have happened;
2. Avant-Garde: Coined in 1863?  Is it a subset of postmodernism, or does it contain postmodernism, or perhaps is it another word for postmodernism?  Conceptual/concrete memoir performers like Laurie Anderson "creating an entirely new scene" p. 216; listening to her is key--disruption/short circuit of oral syntax (seeing her is key too; language is a virus; O Superman; her Art 21 intro); her "normal" looking narrative vignettes; the signifier "beauty" differing between cultures (p. 217); and jewels (glasses); the lack of "logic" in the photos; other works (1979 United States and technologism concerns)
3. Avant-Garde performers: how DID the Blue Man Group become so popular (think about Berube asking the same question about David Lynch)?!?
8. Examples of Lee's 1988 reactions to the Dead Father--using intelligent quotes to find a way into the text; perversely using new critical close reading and affective stylistics to explode the text; using MLA; would be more hybrid with film references too (and also more bricolage/pastiche moves); and Lee's thin, bloody grasp on poststructuralism...
5. Essay #1: Hybridity examples from Lee...(alternative hybrid writing assignments), combos; violations; pastiche, bricolage reasemblages??

Feb. 17

Feb. 19

Hassan's Neo-Avant-Garde, Pop Culture, and History
Readings due before class:
--Anthology:  History intro p. 291-93; D. F. Wallace p. 362-393;
--Be sure you've chosen (and started critically pomo reading) your film or book for essay 1. See the syllabus for choices.

Assignments due before class:

Lee's Lecture Notes:
7. Thinking about Essay 1; Lee's 1988 reaction to the DF (as an example of writing, and messy theorizing)
2. D.F. Wallace as neo-pomo (he has plot and other mimetic devices), but he also plays with short-circuiting quotes, and revisionist history (bits of "real" and details so real they seem real; think of it as a simulacrum in its own right); I went all the way with LBJ (and the Jim Crow exhibit as racist pastiche?); 
8. Jameson: postmodernism rebelling against modernism--"expresses the inner truth of...late capitalism" via pastiche (fragmented, humorless parody--there is no norm to compare it to--p. 657) and schizophrenia (656); identity as corporate which sells the myth of the individual; "imitation of dead styles" (658); Robert Venturi pomo architect; "they no longer quote such [pop culture] texts" p. 655 "they incorporate them"...the divide between high and low art blurs...(Lee's thinking of Blade Runner right now and other dystopic cyberpunk sci fi's with their product placements--but also a Jamesonian "pastiche" of the old Film Noir movies, nostalgia as Jameson calls it); 
1. Jameson p. 662--noticing a shift after WWII to a media culture (Lee might say with the advent of TV and visual advertising); postmodernism and it's fragmentations facilitate "late" capitalistic culture, but are also made by/of it; The Persuaders as demonstration of this?  Rushkoff--"A World Made of Marketing," a "second skin" of advertising clutter covering our cities; and our "selves"?  Lee thinks about a Self made of marketing--fear of the fragmented subject, the erasing of "solid" identity or a coherent self, being used by marketers--"express your unique style," they tell us, "with these 10 new IPod Skins!"  Lee talked about Identity being wrapped up with purchases, and how this is like Baudrillard's Icons--we buy, eat, wear things that represent certain emotions we have lost track of (and that perhaps never existed at all [outside of language, Lee would say])--a panicked production of identity via capitalism (and is it late because it can't be sustained?  That's what Marx says); also think of Borges Tlon eventually replacing reality (memory is language, and the more detailed the language/system, the more likely it is to replaces it's weaker predecessor (like Nazi-ism).
9. Advertising vs. Eco's "Semiotic Warfare" (xxi) and the co-optation/rebellion cycle where New is taken over by The Mall (xxii); Hot Topic and the cooptation of Punk; Barbara Kruger (I buy, therefore I am--Berube p. 601); Your Body is a Battle Field (the cooptation of the female form to sell products and patriarchy--also see Kilburn's Still Killing us Softly videos); my "I am" having disappeared behind/under the Borgesian map of consumerism...
4. Avant-Garde performance artists (conceptual/concrete): , John Cage's 4'33", a "happening where nothing happens" says John Barth p. 68; see a review of "Empty Words," a performance where a riot ensued
5. Avant-Garde performance artists: Anderson's Nerve Bible "script"; Gertrude Stein's "Portraits" (modernism? cubism? DaDa?); Alex Caldiero and his scripts (he also reads with Theta Naught)...
5. Derrida's idea that we are always already shaped and shaping the world/the web of signifiers; Lee would use this to question Jameson and others about the idea that writers are working with dead language;

Assignments due before class:
1.

Lee's Lecture Notes:
2. An introduction to One Hundred Years of Solitude (and Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and the postmodern; how do you read the time shifts of that first line?!?  And then the "uncanny" or magical "discovery" of ice...3. Magical Realism...a white, sterile introduction?  Wikipedia's Magical Realism--the marvelous real--unexplained fantastical elements; (the) fantastic (T. Todorov): the uncanny vs the marvelous; the uncanny is when supernatural things happen in a story that can then be explained by "natural" law (R. Bass); the marvelous is when supernatural things happen in a story without explanations, yet they give off the feel of being "normal" (G. Garcia Marquez); Alberto Rios explores magical realism; MR and GGM; and another MR site about Marquez
2. Magical Realisms vs Fantasy and other speculative writing

3. Film samples (Kill Bill 1--pastiche/love letter to past Bruce Lee flicks; Network--identity as television ratings, and the future of Reality TV; The Quick and the Dead and meta-cinema)
4. Lee is thinking about banned art and books and obscenity laws (the Miller Test) because she is going to lead a discussion on The First Amendment and Art; speaking of Baudrillard's icons, let's look at Serrano's pastiche/bricolage?  Rather beautiful, kind of like Robinson's grandfathers dawn views of heaven?  Or is it beer (the Homer Simpson pastiche?)?  And what does knowing it's in piss do to us? Other sacrileges like those Mohammed cartoons, or Bagley or Bensen--are these offensive?  Depends on the reader--and thus we go back to Barthes' reader response treatise (the reader creating meaning with the text)...
2. Cha's Dictee; hybrid forms (like Laurie Anderson)--she says she wants to blur boundaries (161); about women suffering and transcending suffering; what is an Enemy (167) when the occupiers/enemies are always changing?  The martyr (we white sterile types have never heard of) not ever knowing time/age, then Cha herself murdered by a stranger 7 days after Dictee's publication
3. Dictee: Japanese law all encompassing, taking over with it's perfect system that writes new laws on top of everything Korean (like the Encyclopedae of Tlon, or Naziism's systematically slow and thorough ethnic cleansing) 
4. Marilyn Robinson's revision of Lot's Wife; loneliness and Western mythologies; her other writing focused on critiques of technologism and science (her response to The God Delusion--science as the end all be all of logic and meaning?  Or science as something out of control?  "those exotic war technologies always waiting, always ready"; Nuclear energy biproducts; pesticides like DDT; 
6. Robinson and memory and Borges and memory and everyone and memory...
7. Robinson on NPR
8. Metropolis (1927) chrome and art-deco machines (style over function), and flying wings (and the "dreams" of Gibson's narrator; but is the 1948 wing based an a dream of the future from 1927?)

Mar. 3

Assignments due before class:
1. preparing for essay 1...

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Ansaldua--Creation coming out of unrest (189); borderlands being an especially strong image/place of unrest (with Mexico--the current debates on immigration and wall building; the 38th parallel in Korea which is still rigorously patrolled, and further separated by land mines; Macondo and it's borders; the border created by eurocentric Western museums that house native masks like the The Royal BC Museum housing totem poles, and even a simulated display of their "natural" displays; the movie Crossing the Line where Private James Dresnok crosses over to North Korea in 1962--Traitor?  Hero? Enemy?  Disaffected?); p. 191--let the walls fall; relates to Robinson, of course, in the figure of the decaying homestead houses and also Sylvie, blurring the border between inside vs. outside, proper vs. pagan; Hassan's ideas of differences collapsing (592); Macondo like a town surrounded by border, floating in the sky in all it's fantastic isolation (and how when it's borders are crossed, sometimes magic happens, and sometimes killing)

3. White Sterility and control and death--Anzaldua p. 186
2. "I write the myths I want to become" (188)--language and identity formation and performance (190--creating self); playing the game Jumanji that then begins to become real...
2. Anzaldua: (184)--the ability of story to transform the storyteller as "shamanistic" art and sacred merge; p. 185--"hybridization of metaphor," all phenomena are "interrelated and imbued with spirit"; totem poles always in performance

2. Anger (and it's non-management)--Anderson (224)--"Why would you want to talk that way?" Network: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" And then The Gong Show happened (is it really a spoof?), and USA Today article about our fascination with talent shows; Diana's desire to create another reality show called "The Mao-Tse Tung Hour." The muted post horn becomes a scud missile for Lee--she has seen it many times these last two days: Anderson and Leynor (248) and Ensler and Robinson and...; as Ensler says, "Vagina" is a bad word, but "Scud" isn't (The HooHah Monologues coming to a town near you!)...and the classic Madonna/Whore problem...

Postmodernism and Insomnia and Love (the REAL transcendental signified??!?!?) and Borders and Hybrids
Readings Due Before Class:
--GGM pp. 65-131
--Anthology:  Shange p. 42+; Hong-Kingston p. 458-470; Cruz p. 263-271 (black vernacular/"rap-lit")
--Handout: Barthes reads "The Face of Garbo"

Assignments Due Before Class:
1. 

Lee's Lecture Notes:
3. Anzaldua -- Laws and Borders (like obscenity laws; property fences; jails)--drawing lines to help contain those things that exceed containment; those things that disturb, disrupt, put us in crisis with YAWEH/LOGOS, put us in crisis with our own identities; "We have to draw the line somewhere!" which of course means that the speaker of such a sentence believes chaos reigns;
2. Marquez and the Insomnia Plague (crosses their border)--more marvelous than uncanny; 
2. The BBC on Marquez
3. Postcolonial criticism
4. Complexity of defining Magical Realism from

5. Marquez and humor...
1. Hybridity Clashes--Never Marry a Mexican, her mother tells her (curses her)--and so she doesn't see the list of men of color who flip tortillas or pack bags at the grocery store(69; why does she list so many? Pomo Excess? Anger?  A sense of self-critique here)--and so she only "borrows" white married guys; "I do it to kill these women without their knowing it" (77); "No Mexican woman would react like that" (77); vagina dentata p. 82; Lee's own Mexican father preferred to date white girls because Mexican girls were too "passive".
2. Hong Kingston (J. Wang asks can an Asian American be an all American hero? p. 102); Can there be a gay superhero like Rage in Queer as Folk?  Can there be a Mormon superhero like Orgasmo (ha...but he IS making safe sex again)?
3. Kingston:  "No ching-chong chinaman for me" (says Nanci, but is she kidding?  461); Nanci doesn't look chinese = she's too pretty to be Chinese (464); "You sound black," Nanci says of his beat poetry (468), and the king of monkeys goes bananas; p. 469 when do you out your characters as Chinese?  Also, her trickster uber narrator playing with Wittman, playing with us, always ironic, always butting in...
6. Alexies' "Captivity" vs. Captivity Narratives (the passive white woman in the grips of evil; Mary Rowlandson's narrative); "I am not the fancydancer" (fancy dancing "for visitors" started in 1920's? (343)--things that change a story (meta)...
7. More postcolonial concerns: the banana Gringos in GGM bring all their Gringo things with them and set up their own town (keeping the Other out with their blue grass and walls-- 245); Lee was thinking of William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways...; of course, Remedios escapes the "banana plague" (and all men) p. 255 (though the town thinks her being blown away (or sucked up by a light--from a space ship?!?) is just a story to hide her being pregnant)...
7. Silko's captivity themes from WWII (the captive Laguna GI, the captive Japanese Americans; colonial captivity narratives); stories are saving (like Alexie's stories being weapons)...
6. Does poetic language get in the way of plot?!?! Back to Lee's Lee's -ism lecture...
4. My mini-lecture on Genette--Order and time in GGM
6. Ethnicity issues in Disney movies

1. LUV and anger; love and identity and discourse; signifiers on my chest; The horror of not being the Other/beloved (Barthes), and the deconstruction of "oneness"; I am mad to be in love (but not really mad, not mad like Howard Beale in Network); Network: Faye Dunaway as the new power feminist but also as someone who can't love (she talks about work during sex); Love has to be the transcendental signified or it must mean nothing!...holy binaries! and I don't understand women!
2. More Anger: 60's rebels like The Weather Underground; Ameriprise ad with Dennis Hopper "Dreams don't die" created by Saatchi and Saatchi (see The Persuaders); but dreams of revolution certain did die...see Bernadine Dohrn

2. Lee's thinking of Foucault--the Panopticon (and the text in his words) and a "carceral continuum"where we are all connected by some sort of supervision (control vs. surveillance)

3. Texts of Pleasure vs. Bliss, and neo-postmodern-isms (and the recuperation into safety or realism of love, madness, punk, murder).

Assignments Due Before Class:
1. Essay on Film/Book/Theory #1: 3-5 pages (900-1500 words), double-spaced; an academic analysis of style or content (character, theme) of a chosen film (from our postmodernism film list in the syllabus) that "talks to" or extends or displays something from one of the stories/fragments we've been reading (not the post-colonial or gender readings/films). where pomo strategies are taking place. Use something from one of the theory essays we've read (and/or from section introductions, or author bios) to help you analyze, interpret, critique, extend something very focused in the film and the story/fragment. For those who want to write this essay in a pomo fashion, you can do a creative hybrid response like Cha or Coover or White or Anzaldua or Anderson, where you critically bring together various media and genres to comment and/or creatively speak to your film or book. Using pomo vocabulary and close reading of specific textual evidence is key (even in a creative hybrid). Use MLA format and citations. Click here for essay ideas...

Lee's Lecture Notes:
Anzaldua as mestiza theorist, and chicano/pocho (s)language "terrorist"; Chicana violations/terrorisms vs. Master narratives vs. Hybridity in class, race, identity, age; Cisneros and Tejana; why aren't we learning the languages spoken in the U.S.?   Anzaldua's belief in revolution ("when the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they've created" 86).
2. Lee asked what's good and bad about having Chicano or Black Vernacular classes? 
7. Margaret Cho (on My Space--"you're not testing Asian"); Chris Rock (Black People are the biggest racists...)--and bell hooks call to use pop culture as a meeting place between the theory head and folk (631)
3. The leaking of categories, borders, skins, maps, jail cells (Foucault)
5. Anzaldua: You are what you think, what you write


7. Trinh Minh-Ha (artist, film maker, hybrid) and her identity politics; "infinite layers" and I am not i (649); subject/I vs. object/Other; "you and I are close; we intertwine" and the lover's discourse; not one, not two, but multiple..."categories always leak"; her ideas of authenticity/origin, genuine self
8. The Subject vs. the Cartesian Self and all the authority/colonizations of identity; The Subject is usually defined or known and orderly, civilized--the object or Other is usually the opposite or absence of whatever the subject is; mythologizing binaries
6. Marquez and the deconstruction of fixed gender roles (Ursula takes charge of the house and the town); also Sex in the City and Samantha as gender role deconstructor (she has relationships/sex "like a man").

2. Foucault and structuralism's post..."A New Generation of Thinkers"
2. Barthes' Lovers--subject/I vs. object/Other; and how the Arias of luv are outside structuralism, are poststructural; Barthes' poetry, hybridity

Mar.12

Postmodernism, Romanticism, and Satire
Readings Due Before Class:
--GGM pp. through 262
--Handout: K. Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" (that's what I call equality!)
--Handout (hard copy): H. L. Gates from Figures in Black (a call for critical bricolage but also traditional close reading)

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Marquez's magical realism: "expands the categorizes of the real so as to encompass myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena in Nature or experience which European realism excluded" (Gabriel García Márquez, eds. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, 45).
4. Roland Barthes' famous "Death of the Author" (1967); a reader-response treatise; along with the ideas of Derrida/Foucault (author-ity only began when the author "became subject to punishment"); questions the authority of the author as origin, as locus of meaning and control which New Critics also questioned, but Barthes questions the sentence as a releaser of singular meaning which was/is the New Critical project; another way of thinking about texts as bricolage--"a tissue of quotations" or signs p. 146 ; "writing can no longer designate an operation of recording...representation" p. 145; but Lee also wants to say writing is also not out of our control, "control" being the wrong word (we are shaped by and shaping the web of signifiers)
2. Todorov's uncanny (sci fi?) vs. marvelous (mag. realism?).
3. Macondo--based on Marquez's childhood village--a place out of time, an Other to LAW/Science/Enlightenment
4. GGM: the novel as a sort of satire of excessive and ridiculous bureaucratic legislation...as in being told to paint the houses all one color
5. Marquez "romantic" rather than pomo deconstructive?  Lee says yes--the romantic poets, for instance, were rebelling against the sterile enlightenment focus on dissection and rationality (that science is the center of the universe); the romantic poets writing about human and natural beauty and feeling as the center...
2. Marquez vs. Barthelme--Marquez focuses on beauty, Barthelme on the grotesque
7. Someone asked about Marquez and The Epic (large spans of time, many settings, one or multiple characters)--but One Hundred Years is mostly set in Macondo; Lee talked about some postmodernists doing picaresques, epics where the anti-hero travels all over and gets in a lot of trouble (she was thinking of picaresques like John Barth's The Sot Weed Factor, and the movie Tom Jones--a postmodern film from 1963 based on Fielding's 1749 "low" novel).
4. H. L. Gates: is theory just a white man's construct?  Seen as elitist because it is not accessible nor does it seem to acknowledge materiality enough to do anyone any good...The need for groundedness when you have little ground (race and class issues, and the pomo elite); Is D. Barthelme just an elitist pig phallologocentric white sterile writer even though he busts through/around/under borders?
6. Vonnegut--uncanny or marvelous satire? Or neither? And is it postmodern or neopostmodern according to my -ism lecture?  Lee thinks the shooting of the "heros" makes this story more pomo...but it has a plot...but it also has something potentially marvelous (that gets disrupted).

Assignments Due Before Class:
1. Reading Reaction #6: say something fascinatingly brilliant about One Hundred Years of Solitude (600 words) ...

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Solitude and it's uruboros ending (a kind of literature of exhaustion? an O'Henry snap?)

2. H. L. Gates--Signifyin(g): homonyms (same signifier, different meanings--"stalk," "bad"; Gates calls this "antanaclasis"); changing a letter in a word (Gates calls this "agnominatio": Derrida's differánce = differ + defer, or herstory instead of history; Signifyin(g) is changed to point toward how folk likely said the word); the Signifying Monkey (52) an "oxymoron" that itself signifies newly against the racists motif--Esu that creates chaos at the juncture of black and white discourses with figurative/rhetorical play; trope reversing tropes ("tropes-a-dope"); a vehicle for narration (the trickster uber narrator); a postmodern figure (chaos, meta)??
8. Violating White Man's Rules/Logos/Theories (Alexie 345; Gates' Figures ) vs. Pocho, tex mex, Cruz's (s)language, bell hooks and naming (and Shange's Indigo/Digo = "says" in Spanish p. 47) ...violations of white, sterile, "standard" American English (standard as not normal, as master, colonizing, evil text); The F-wordS as necessary; the C-word as necessary (the "V" word as necessary)...
3. My mini-lecture on Genette and Time... A sample Genette-style Order map of Marquez...

6. Thinking of Voice (author, narrator, character, reader)...close reading for violations (Genette; S. Fish; Gates calls for close reading and a "critical bricolage" Figures xxx)
7. Bonn directed us toward Engrish.com as an example of odd translations (we likely suffered similar problems during the 80's Japanese fascination)...

1. More postcolonial and racial concerns--the history of Mexican cinema is a good indicator of artistic movement for outsider groups (think of Mormon literature or cinema--the need for outsider groups to present a united front, but that doesn't last for long)
2. Langston Hughes and his dream deferred poem "Harlem" (printed version of "Harlem")--political art vs. real art??  It's too simple, too angry...what's the problem with that?  What is canonized and why? Semiotics--the reading of "low" or popular texts (like Barthes looking at Garbo vs. Hepburn, or wrestling as Greek theater--if everything is a text, then all texts are available for interpretation); or how about the language of detergents (Omo or Surf)--even here there are binaries!  Chemical vs. Powder, war vs. order, washerwoman beating vs. housewife pressing...
3. The negritude postcolonial movement in France--why would this be needed (or black power, or "fry bread" power)?  Why do we still need black power or affirmative action (Chris Rock says that if he and a white guy were equally qualified, fuck the white guy, hire Chris!  The white guy has had 400 years to get ahead! The Diaspora of peoples (African; Apache trail of tears), the erasure of histories and genealogies (only genetics found Oprah's actual roots in Liberia, not South Africa), the embedded systems of good ole boy networking; 
4. GGM--The Ouruboros story (that creates and then eats itself) vs. the Tlonian story that spins it's own creation ad infinitum until Aureliano and all Buendia history is sucked up in a Godly (?) wind (sucked up as he reads the end of the Buendias from the trickster Melquiades); like Spike Jonzes' Adaptation -- Charlie Kaufman (a real screenwriter of Being John Malcovich played by Nicolas Cage) is using voiceover to show us his huge insecurity--in the credits his brother Daniel is listed (but isn't a real person); the scene where Kaufman tells the new producer (Tilda Swinston) about what he doesn't want to have happen (drug running, car chases, plots) ends up happening (in this movie about movie making?...but Lee still isn't sure how the story ends a la Ouruboros...)
1. Thinking about Semiotics and low art--Wrestling as spectacle, as role playing, as extreme drama, not really plot--compare to soap operas with varieties of love (romantic, sexual, mean); varieties of characters (the innocents like Remedios or Cleofilas; the villain duo who sometimes come together for sex or bitchy conversation).

3. Hybridity Clashes--Cleofilas from "El Otro Lado" who doesn't speak English and believes in Telenovelas (and the myths of telenovelas will eat her yet be her), her Mexican American husband (who beats her), her "lesbian" rescuers (one defies state laws to help her escape her husband; one won't own a "pussy" car)...
5. Barbershop and Beauty Shop--"low" art race movies?
4. Barbie-Q and pop cultural "topical references"; also, and always, gender and class deconstructions (the culture of White, middle class consumption is different than that of poor Latino kids in Tejas) Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. M. Cho and her TV show All American Girl--"real" life (meth, southern racism, The Face, insulting family, Asian American misconceptions) vs. Sitcom Life ("Saved by the Gong," apologizes to family, Asian = Asian/Exotic requirements); Lindsay sends this Tyra Banks article about celebrity and race--how "being white for a weekend would be so relaxing"; also Irene Bedard (Pocahontas) who says "we are invisible people"; are there any Native American icons right now?  Any Asian American female stars now?  Lucy Liu as deconstructive?  Askmen.com...says she says she doesn't want to be an Asian American ambassador; Jackie Chan as deconstructive (he buffoons/monkeys! his enemies out of the way instead of killing them; he seems always about to gaff)?  Or a Charlie Chan repeat?
2. Finding the theoretical postcolonial trope (Kingston says do no judge it by British colonialist codes; Wang 103), the Latino trope (Anzaldua's borderlands), the Asian trope (tripmaster monkey?), the black trope (Gates--Signifyin(g) Monkey Figures xxxi), the queer trope (performing sexuality and gender--drag), the Mormon trope ?
3. Eyes of Zapata and Magical Realism in Cisneros (uncanny?  marvelous? magical?); the narrator as shaman/bruja (say the townspeople p. 104); the narrator as spurned/patient woman?; the narrator questioning news reports p. 100 about sisterhood for the cause...
4. Other stories with infusions of MR or magic: Shange's Indigo (people have 6th sense gifts that no one really seems to question--marvelous-- vs. Indigo's dolls talking to her); Alexie's character's seemingly tall tales (the white boy who appears in town)--Lester FallsApart says he drank the boy and "spat him out whole into the dust"--a mini creation myth narrative (344)...
9. Signification vs. signification--critiquing the nature of "white" meaning--black people colonizing a white sign with puns, insults, ironies, repeating and revising and reversing (Gates SM 47), not unlike gay "reading" (Perez Hilton?); Gates--the dreaded homonym where there is one signifier that has multiple, unrelated, meanings; "some black genius" emptied/re-filled the given signifiers--SM p. 45-46); 
10. A good essay on Latin American films...

Postmodern Feminisms--the Violence of Hierarchies and Cyborgs and Sci Fi
Readings Due Before Class:
--Anthology: Capote p. 127-141; Cixous 583+
--Anthology:  Donna Haroway's Cyborgs essay; Joanna Russ p. 537+; Le Guin "She Unnames Them" p. 525+

Assignments Due Before Class:
1. 

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Metropolis (1927) and cyborgs (and Frankenstein 1931); Haroway's inconsistencies needing to both/and exist; organic vs. machine (mixing in order to live: Borgs;
3. Philip Roth's non-politically correct Anne Frank revisionist history...(but if she lives, what about her book??); about Ghost Writer
9. More rantings about Political Correctness...
1. Queer Theories, performativity, and waves of feminism; 2nd wave essentializing feminists vs. 3rd wave deconstructive feminists and Gender roles norms/cliches--women care more about their hair, don't they?  And they're more nurturing, aren't they?
3. Dave Eggers' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius sexuality scale (where do you fit?).1. Winterson and the deconstruction or meta-awarenss of love codes/cliches.
2. Orlando Queerings: wanting a ring (but not really anything else attached to marriage); p. 252 you're a man! you're a woman!
5. Joanna Russ--a future without men (and 70's separatist fiction), and world coliding.
4. Reclaiming "slurs" on t-shirts (and playing the trickster--signifyin(g) queerly); Why you are a queen (Washinton Post; essentializing gays?)?  Gays in Bangkok (macho cultures vs. transexualisms);

1. Queer Theories, and post-gendered Cyborgs?  
2. Haroway...blasphemies...creationism and child abuse (606)? Cyborgs and Hybrids; Other Cyborgs--passing for human.
3. Orlando as cyborg/hybrid--a deconstructive character/signifier
2. Maus--the holocaust via cartoon animals (high/low boundaries, but also human/animal boundaries)
3. Winterson: "it's the clichés (or myths) that cause the trouble" (71)...saggy armchair of love (Jacqueline) vs. "I will never let you go" (Louise); gender bending--cyborg--How is Winterson disrupting the usual romance novel codes and/or gender codes (and do these disruptions go hand in hand?)?  P. 76 "I'm addicted to the first six months"
3. Why is the measure of love loss?  Because we are our lack as Lacan says...we only love what we can't have.  We love to perform the "suffering lover" or the "heartbroken lover."
2. Roedy Green's Gay and Black Glossary/lexiconic history (R-Rated to be sure; but also rather amusing historical interpretations): queen; nelly; queer; lesbian; dyke; faggot (why is dyke not derogatory now but faggot is?)...
4. http://www.zumanity.com (gender/ethnic bending circus meets Las Vegas--muy pomo)
4. Camille Paglia and her misreadings of post-structuralism

1. New Historicism--what does it mean to write/read a biography?  What does it mean to write/read a History? How do our reading make us question history and our relation to it?
4. Capote--a true crime, but told by mixing novel style (3rd limited POV and poetic description) and journalism style (what seem like transcripts copied almost verbatim); much lik Jon Krakauer's style (his books about Everest and the Lafferty Brothers use some journalism technique and some novel/narrative technique); this is also seen in Orlando when we have an odd 3rd limited POV moment (p. 13)
3. Orlando's (mock)biographer--over the top in all ways (Lee says Woolf is in a sense signifyin(g), or restating with great irony/sarcasm, the tenants of Old Historicism; pastiche; also starts to sound as pompous as Normal Mailer's Army's uber narrator--and metafictional): "must plot...in the indelible footprints of truth" p. 65
4. Orlando's biographer often interrupts him/herself (metafiction) because the text might bore--stops quoting because the reader can read it everywhere else (p. 202; also, the semi-interruptive footnote); 
5. Orlando's biographer must make sure the subject is worthy of a biography, thus aggrandizes the smallest things Orlando does ("Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel..." p. 13; true wit! true profundity! p. 202)
6. And what to make of the opening line??  "He--for there could be no doubt about his sex..." (13)...the lady protesteth too much?
7. New Historicism vs. Phyllis Schlafly's warnings to students - be careful, oh ye sheep of things like multiculturalism and political correctness...

Ap. 7-9

Lee at Pop Culture

Ap. 14

Sex Changes and Cyborg Violators
Readings Due Before Class:
--Winterson: finish
--Anthology: Susan Daitch p. 338+ (will the translator make up her history?); Delany

Assignments Due Before Class:
1. Reading Reaction 7: How are you a technological cyborg?  P. 611--technology recrafting our bodies...

Lee's Lecture Notes:
1. Daitch's identity/history/signifier story...what is it to be an American?  A red neck?  An unread post-Elizabethan?
4. French Feminism and Cixous as poststructuralist (an Algerian, thus also postcolonial?); bounces off/puns/tricksters from established texts or binaries--if woman is a nothing, then she is outside the binary and can kill it (584); escriture feminine as pomo; mocking Freud and other patronizing definitions of women (like Orlando)
2. Biographical parody--the codes/mythologies of "capturing" a person's life "accurately" (everything is text; there is no absolute master narrative for New Historicists)
7. Thinking of Anzaldua again--artifacts in a museum are out of context...lee thinks of the Royal British Museum
8. Revisionist History: if history is a text, it has fluidity and can therefore be played with by anyone; a NH doing thick description would try to look for multiple texts supporting a certain notion of history, but then also thickly describe or close read their cultural baggage; Andrew mentioned that he's seen ideas that Lincoln might have been gay, for instance...
1. Winterson: The text within the text--hybrid of prose and poetry, of physical (anatomical) vs. non-physical (Haraway); The fabulous poetry of sinew; the desire to control/know the lover anatomically--science/Elgin will cure the lover, will control her out of control body (her disease as cyborg?), and the narrator must trust this father of science, the narrator as violation must stay away...
2. Winterson's narrator as cyborg/hybrid--deconstructive figure--but are all queer characters deconstructive? Is Winterson making a political statement in terms of gender (gender doesn't matter--post gender?)?  Or in terms of love?
3. Yet because this isn't hard core pomo, by p. 79 narrator decides he/she wants the holiday and the homecoming
4. Haraway: p. 609 "what is it that can't be coded as natural?"
5. Haraway: the cyborg violates all comfortable zones, contains all contradictions, violates all things thought to be separate or foundationalist, yet is still part of that *grid of control* (608) which is very Matrix-y--"the translation of the world into a problem of coding (611); 
6. Haraway: p. 618 that *writing is pre-eminenetly the technology of cyborgs...cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly...* AND isn't that was good creative writing is often about? Otherwise death lies in the phallologocentric (perhaps what Cixous was referring to, there is death already inherent in the binary because it posits itself against nothing))...
4. Leguin: Animals and humans...colonizing animals with our language (and colonizing anyone with our language--Zami is Audrey Lorde's other, chosen name; Amiri Baraka is Leroy Jones' other name; Malcolm X's name shows an erasure of his own history); Who has the power to name, and what does naming do to the world, to the animal?  What about unnaming?
6. Russ and Gene Rodenberry's 1974 Planet Earth where women are the matriarchs (really, they are the patriarchs, but they are put back in their place in the end; see more pictures)...
7. Delany and Transhumance (p. 470 and writing politics carefully via inference)9. More rantings about Political Correctness...
6. Continue with New Historicisim--finding ideology in the history we read/make1. Orlando the movie (simulacra)...Orlando played by Tilda Swinton, a gender bending woman; Queen Elizabeth played by Quentin Crisp (a famous, out queen from WWII and 50's Britain); the gay singer Andy Bell from Erasure (who sings in falsetto) ...multiple queerings
2. Orlando the book is often queering things by questioning gender and attraction--p. 38
6. Some background on Orlando (the book; based on her friend Vita Sackville-West--see pictures p. 159, 247, 318); the Great Frost
7. Orlando: the pictures add a "factuality" to the mockbiography (but p. 54 looks like a photo); Gender Bending in the pictures...p. 15 "eyes like drenched violets" (Vita's eyes)
8. Orlando and the disease of writing (75)--and the meta pauses on p. 77
1. The TRUTH about Orlando!
2.  Orlando and  sex; p. 134 parody of Spencer's Faerie Queen, or Milton calling the muses to make a big change; "we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can" (139); p. 188--clothes make the man/woman...
5. Macondo and revisionist history (or is one revolution just like another after time)?
2. Talking about your questions: is the sex change magic, literal, or symbolic?  Uncanny or marvelous?  At least it's a parody of Milton calling forth the muses...
6. Continue with New Historicisim

April 28

Final (REQUIRED) 1PM-3PM

Assignments Due:
1. Written Final (which is NOT your essay 2...see below): A less formal, reaction-style write up, 600 words (double-spaced): How are you a postmodern subject (or a neo-postmodern subject) in terms of cyborgs, hybrids, texts of bliss, binaries, borderlands, deconstructions, antifoundationalisms, antinomianisms, or any of the other theories/vocabulary we have been using/seeing/reading this semester (or are you just naively real, or do you resist all attempts at establishing foundationalist identity markers)?

Assignment Due:
1. Essay on Film/Book/Theory #2: 3-5 pages minimum (900-1500 words), double-spaced; an academic analysis of style or content (character, theme) of a chosen film (from our postmodernism film list in the syllabus) that "talks to" or extends or displays something from one of the stories/fragments we've been reading (the post-colonial, African American, magical realism, or gender readings/films) where pomo (or neo-pomo) strategies are taking place. Use something from one of the theory essays we've read (and/or from section introductions, or author bios) to help you analyze, interpret, critique, extend something very focused in the film and the story/fragment. For those who want to write this essay in a pomo fashion, you can do a creative hybrid response like Cha or Coover or White or Anzaldua or Anderson, where you critically bring together various media and genres to comment and/or creatively speak to your film or book. Using pomo vocabulary and close reading of specific textual evidence is key (even in a creative hybrid). Use MLA format and citations.

*Creative Option: If you received A-level grades on your first essay, and on the majority of your reactions, you have the option of creating a postmodern fiction/prose/artifact (5-10 pages).