English 67

It seems we cannot get enough of the word freedom when discussing dystopian literature. I want to suggest, however, following our discussion on Monday, that freedom has become an essentially meaningless term.

There has been some discussion about Baudrillard’s “Spirit . . .” as perhaps excusing terror; the idea has been floated that Baudrillard would have that America “asked for” 9/11. As I mentioned in class, I don’t think that reading is “wrong,” but that’s not how I’ve read him. He does say that it is [...]

The subject of “race” plays an interesting and largely unacknowledged role in the novel Children of Men. The term gets used without explanation or explication, but runs like a thread throughout the narrative, and I think plays an unexpectedly central role in the novel (which is overtly centralized in the film – but [...]

[I'm using this orthographic monstrosity "u/dystopia" as a lexeme that denotes the inseparability of utopias and dystopias]
It’s taken me an inordinately long time to formulate some thoughts on u/dystopia, freedom and collectivity, and post-modernity in Huxley. Why, I am not sure. Not because they are anything particularly profound, that much is certain.
The idea of Utopia [...]

This afternoon, I went to Jennifer Friedlander’s lecture, “Doing the Full Monty With Jacques Lacan.” On the whole, I found the talk to be engaging and informative. I am unfamiliar with Lacan’s work, and much of what Professor Friedlander said helped contextualize the bits of Lacanian theory I do know. But when Prof. Friedlander arrived [...]

Jameson in “Post Modern Consumer Society” shows how unresponsive to and unconcerned with issues of gender and ethnicity most Post Modern discourse can be.  Under his rubric of “the death of the subject” we find that Post Modernity is characterized by a supposed “death” of individualism as it had been previously experienced for most of [...]

From the LA Times: “Navy to Mask Coronado’s swastika- shaped barracks”
The navy is about to renovate these barracks at considerable expense, even though these barracks have apparently been swastika-shaped since the late 1960s.
They have only become visible as swastikas since the advent of google earth, and satellite imagery.
Before that, they weren’t anything with any symbolic [...]

Butler persuasively describes the lack of a non-”inscribed” body, that is, one that is free from being always already interpreted. The problem is that we cannot imagine a body in the absence of interpretation, because to do so would be to imagine one independent of a culture, and language, which themselves already interpret and reinscribe [...]

Because I had to rush through this attempt at reading Milton via psychoanalysis, a fuller reading is offered here.
My attempted psychoanalytic reading of Milton’s “On Shakespeare 1630” takes as its starting place Harold Bloom’s idea of the The Anxiety of Influence which, briefly summarized, revises Freudian Oedipal theory to create a theory of literary influence [...]

[my notes for week three are appended]
Derrida wrote Dissemination (where Plato’s Pharmacy first appeared) in 1972, before anyone used the term “deconstruction.” As Lynn points out, this term has become a word without a referent. That doesn’t make it meaningless, but it ironically points to the lack of a stable “there” which words can [...]