The Act of Interpretation - Fall 2005 - Prof. Steve Evans

Reading Syllabus • Subject to change; check back frequently • click here for current week

7 September — Wednesday

Log: Introduction to course. Decision about scheduling (MW 3:10-4:15, alternate Fridays used for discussion sessions). Distinction between plot and story, manifest content and latent content.

9 September — Friday

Introduction: Purloined Letters, Paths of Nature and Artifice
§ Poe, "The Purloined Letter: Text with Notes by Thomas Ollive Mabbott" (The Purloined Poe 3-26)
§ "Introduction to Theory and Criticism" (NATC 1-29)
§ Recommended: from Geoffrey of Vinsauf's "Poetria Nova," the page or two pertaining to "Ordering the material" (NATC 230-231)

Log: Review of distinction between plot and story, manifest and latent content. • Passage from Vinsauf about the path of nature (plot sequence identical to story sequence) and the preferable path of art, which puts "last things first" (NATC 230). • Defining the five canonical narrative tempos: ellipsis, summary, scene, stretch, and pause.

Exercise — In this course we will distinguish between two terms often used synonymously: plot and story. The plot is the manifest text, the actual words presented in the particular order chosen by the author. The story is the latent text as reconstructed imaginatively by the reader on the basis of cues and clues in the manifest text. For this exercise, you will need to identify the major actions and events (no fewer than a dozen, no more than twenty-six) narrated in Poe's "The Purloined Letter." To the most recent action or event in the "story" assign the number 1, then number the subsequent actions in their proper order through to the most distant. Now shift your focus to the narrative presentation of these actions and events (the plot). To the first major action or event presented assign the letter A, then proceed through the plot assigning alphabetic characters to the events as they are recounted or shown in the manifest text. E-mail the results of your reflections to me by 8pm on Monday, 11 September. Give both the numbers and letters to the left of a brief description of the action or event. For example (the number and letter are chosen at random here): "8G Prefect orders Minister D—'s premises to be searched." Due as e-mail to Steven_Evans@umit.maine.edu by 10pm on Sunday, 11 September.

12 September — Monday (an audiofile of this class exists)

Freud + The Classical Precedents: Plato I
§ Plato, "Ion" (NATC 33-48)
§ Macrobius, "Commentary on a Dream" (NATC 196-201)
§ Freud, chapters 1 & 2 of Interpretation of Dreams

Log: Review of work five canonical narrative tempos. • To which add the tenses: past (flashback), present, and future (prolepsis). • Examples from Proust: "For a long time I went to bed early" (retrospective, iterative). • The "scene" of the Minister's come-uppance in Poe: flashed forward but elided. • Another tense: the conditional ("as if"), counterfactual, or hypothetical. • Utopic projections: what if? • For Plato all sensible experience is "as if." • Axiom: Literature knows more than theory can articulate, but a pretty good terminology should carry us a fair way into the matter. • Slow motion (bullet time) a cinematic example of stretch. • New material: Plato's "Ion." • Division of intellectual labor: Who knows what? Who should know what? • The rhapsode knows Homer, but what does Homer know? • "Look, there is an art of poetry as a whole, isn't there?" (40). • The magnet and the iron rings (41): god > muse > poet > rhapsode > spectator/auditor. • Divine inspiration the sole source of poetic composition. • Others with this view: Shakespeare, the German and British Romantics, the American poet Jack Spicer (who thought of poets as radios receiving signals sent by "Martians"). • The contrasting view: poet as artisan. • Looking ahead to Aristotle and Horace. • The position of the spectator in Plato's magnetic chain. • Reader-response theory. • Preview of Janice Radway's Reading the Romance. • What in us responds to a song or poem? • Tynnichus, the one-hit wonder from Chalcis. • Analogy between Dupin (in Poe) and Socrates. • Figurative language: saying more than one means to. • On linguistics and literary studies: setting aside content in favor of underlying structure. • University as division of intellectual labor: disciplines, departments, colleges, etc. • Literary theory as interdisciplinary, perhaps illegitimate. • Cervante's Don Quixote. • Perverted by literature. Looking ahead: to Freud. • His contribution to German literature. • The passage from Schiller regarding reason and imagination. • Psychoanalysis as the study of human desire and the problems it causes. • The rational is not the whole story.

14 September — Wednesday (an audiofile of this class exists)

Freud + The Classical Precedents: Plato II
§ Plato, from "The Republic" and "Phaedrus" (NATC 49-86)
§ Freud, chapters 1 & 2 of Interpretation of Dreams

Log: Introduction to Freud and the psychoanalytic paradigm. • The dialogic axis: analysand (who suffers, desires, and speaks) and analyst (who receives discourse and cash). • Talking and its ever-receding cure. • Two models of interpreting: symbolic (dream as a whole translated into unitary meaning) and "decoding" (different elements translated to different meanings). • A constellation charged with tension, like New Orleans the day after the storm but before the flooding: nothing is neutral. • The unconscious by definition unknowable (off the board). • The status of the wish or desire (wunsch) and the mechanisms by which it makes itself more acceptable, to the ego, to others. • Condensation, displacement, considerations of representation (darstellung), and other aspects of the "dream-work" described in chapter six. • Freud and the split subject. • Remarks on Vienna, Musil's Man Without Qualities, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. • Freud's candor, compared to Rousseau's and St. Augustine's. • Freud's dilemma: no one can occupy simultanteously the position of analysand and analyst, yet he must, in order to inaugurate his new "science." • To be continued when we read Lacan. • Patriarchal chain of men presumed to know: Socrates - Dupin - Freud. • "The dream of Irma's injection." • Summary and discussion. • "Take these people away! Give me three others of my choice instead! Then I shall be free of these undeserved reproaches!" (152). • That troubling white patch. • Desire, rivalry, shame. • How Freud reads. • Elaborating on the manifest text. • The dialectic of part and whole in interpretation. • Gradual reconstruction of lost original, as in archeology. • Turn to Plato. • The Republic and the Phaedrus. • Dialogic structure parallel to that found in Freud. Dialectic. Elencthus. • Plato's truth: supersensible, ideal. • The problem with mimesis: it traffics in appearance, and is indeed a copy of a copy. • The three beds. • The allegory of the cave. • An irony among others: in offering passages to be censored, the Republic reproduces and preserves the offending lines. • Might Socrates mean something other than he says with respect to poets? • The lover of wisdom. • Departing from poetry as one does from a lover who's no good for you. • Socrates' polemic against writing, preserved in writing by Plato. • Contrast to Sappho. • The patriarchal chain of men presumed to know, part two: Socrates - Plato - Aristole - Alexander the Great. • Freud and his followers. • Observe how Aristotle deftly sidesteps his teacher's position on poetry. • See image of Freud's couch here. The death of Socrates here.

16 September — Friday

No discussion section / no class.

19 September — Monday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve)

Freud + The Classical Precedents: Aristotle
§ Aristotle, Poetics, NATC 86-117
§ Freud, chapters 3-5 of Interpretation of Dreams

Please submit in class a copy (not the original) of one set of reading notes you have prepared in this course to date.

21 September — Wednesday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve)

Freud + The Classical Precedents: Horace & Longinus
§ Horace, Ars Poetica, NATC 124-35
§ Longinus, from On Sublimity, NATC 135-55
§ Freud, chapters 3-5 of Interpretation of Dreams

23 September — Friday (no audio file of this fifty minute session was made)

Discussion session.

26 September — Monday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve)

Freud + What Is Language?
§ Heidegger, "Language," NATC 1118-1135
§ Freud, chapters 6 & 7 of Interpretation of Dreams

Assignment: Hard copy of first position paper, of no more than 1000 words, due in class. There will be no penalty for papers turned in as late as Wednesday classtime. After that, however, no credit can be earned for this assignment.

Option One: Defend or rebut Socrates/Plato's decision to banish poetry—and indeed all mimesis—from the community of the good envisioned in the Republic.

Option two: Based on your own interpretation of a recent dream, defend or rebut Freud's thesis that "a dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish."

This assignment requires you to take a position. Even if you feel a good case can be made either way, be sure to commit yourself to one side or the other by paper's end.

28 September — Wednesday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve)

Proust + What Is Language?
§ Heidegger, "Language," NATC 1118-1135
§ Begin Proust, Swann's Way

30 September — Friday

No class / no discussion section - post questions and comments to FC folder

3 October — Monday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve)

What Is Language?
Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics NATC 956-977
Levi-Strauss, "A Writing Lesson," NATC 1415-1427
Austin, "Performative Utterances," NATC 1427-1442

5 October — Wednesday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve)

What Is Language?
Jakobson, from "Linguistics and Poetics," NATC 1254-1265
Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language & Two Types of Aphasia," NATC 1265-1269

7 October — Friday

No class / no discussion section - post questions and comments to FC folder
Make headway in Proust

10 October —Monday

Fall Break — No Class
Make headway in Proust

12 October — Wednesday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve but is mislabeled "Monday")

Proust + What Is Language?
Dante, from Il Convivio and from "Letter to Con Grande," NATC 246-252
Bakhtin, from Discourse in the Novel, NATC 1190-1220
Finish "Combray" section of Swann's Way

14 October — Friday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve but is mislabeled "October 17")

Fifty minute discussion session
Focus on Proust's "Combray"

17 October — Monday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve)

Proust + What Is an Author? Who is an Intellectual?
§ Barthes, "The Death of the Author" NATC 1466-1470
§ Foucault, "What Is an Author?" NATC 1622-1636
§ Proust, "Swann in Love" (193-397)

19 October — Wednesday (an audiofile of this class is on reserve)

Proust + What Is an Author? Who is an Intellectual?
§ Gramsci, "The Formation of the Intellectuals" NATC 1135-1144
§ Sartre, from What Is Literature, "Why Write?" NATC 1333-1350
§ Proust, "Swann in Love" (193-397)

21 October — Friday

Proust + The Act of Interpretation
§ Schleiermacher, "Hermeneutics" NATC 610-625
§ Finish "Swann in Love" section of Swann's Way

Fifty-minute discussion session.

24 October — Monday

Proust + The Act of Interpretation
§ Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" NATC 870-884
§ Finish Swann's Way

26 October — Wednesday

Barthes + The Act of Interpretation
§ Poulet, "Phenomenology of Reading" NATC 1320-1333
§ Iser, "Interaction between Text and Reader" NATC 1670-1682
§ Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

28 October — Friday

Barthes + The Act of Interpretation
§ Eichenbaum, from "The Theory of the Formal Method," NATC 1058-1087
§ Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

No discussion session scheduled

31 October — Monday

Barthes + The Act of Interpretation
§ Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory" NATC 1547-1564
§ Hirsch, "Objective Interpretation" NATC 1684-1709
§ Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

2 November — Wednesday

Barthes + The Act of Interpretation
§ Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," NATC 2067-2089
§ Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

4 November — Friday

Kipnis + The Act of Interpretation
§ Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic
No Class — (Steve in NY for this)

7 November — Monday

Kipnis + The Act of Interpretation
§ de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric" NATC 1509-1527
§ Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

9 November — Wednesday

Kipnis + The Act of Interpretation
§ Fredric Jameson, "The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act" NATC 1932-1960
§ Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic

11 November — Friday

Kipnis + The Act of Interpretation
§ Finish Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic
Fifty minute discussion session

14 November — Monday

Radway + The Act of Interpretation
§ Hall, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies," NATC 1895-1910
§ Begin Radway, Reading the Romance

16 November — Wednesday

Radway + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Masters & Slaves
§ Hegel, from The Phenomenology of Spirit, NATC 626-636
§ Radway, Reading the Romance

18 November — Friday

Radway + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Gender
§ Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, NATC 582-594
§ de Stael, both selections in NATC, 594-610
§ Radway, Reading the Romance
Fifty minute discussion session

21 November — Monday

Radway + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Gender
§ Radway, Reading the Romance
§ Woolf, from A Room with a View, NATC 1017-1030
§ de Beauvoir, from The Second Sex, NATC 1403-1415

23 November — Wednesday

Thanksgiving Break - No class

25 November — Friday

Thanksgiving Break - No class

28 November — Monday

Purloined Poe + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Gender
§ Rich, from "Compulsory Heterosexuality....," NATC 1762-1783
§ Wittig, "One Is Not Born a Woman," NATC 2014-2021
§ Purloined Poe, Chapter One, "Poe & Lacan" (1-99)

30 November — Wednesday

Purloined Poe + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Gender
§ Sedgwick, both selections in NATC 2432-2445
§ Butler, from Gender Trouble, NATC 2485-2502
§ Purloined Poe, Chapter One, "Poe & Lacan" (1-99)

2 December — Friday

Purloined Poe + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Gender
§ Spivak, from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, NATC 2193-2208
§ Purloined Poe, Chapter One, "Poe & Lacan" (1-99)
Fifty minute discussion session

5 December — Monday

Purloined Poe + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Gender
§ Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," NATC 2269-2299
§ Purloined Poe, Chapter Three, "Derrida and Responses" (157-283)

7 December — Wednesday

Purloined Poe + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Race & Empire
§ Dubois, "Criteria of Negro Art," NATC 977-987
§ Hurston, both selections in NATC 1144-1163
§ Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," NATC 1313-1317
§ Purloined Poe, Chapter Three, "Derrida and Responses" (157-283)

9 December — Friday

Purloined Poe + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Race & Empire
§ Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth, NATC 1575-1593
§ Ngugi et al., "On the Abolition of the English Department," NATC 2089-2087
§ Purloined Poe, Chapter Three, "Derrida and Responses" (157-283)
No discussion session

12 December — Monday

Purloined Poe + Subjects of Capitalist Modernity: Race & Empire
§ Said, from Orientalism, NATC 1986-2012
§ Purloined Poe

14 December — Wednesday

Catch up day, evaluations, conclusions

16 December — Friday

No discussion session