Interview another student in a group of 3-4, and prepare to introduce him or her to the class:

- Name
- What you like about studying literature?
- Why are you studying English?


Course Goals

The term Literary Theory and Criticism includes many "issues of power:"


Other "ways of reading" and interpreting include considering the role of the following in texts (both literary and cinematic):


Today's goal and method: Find the underlying meaning of the passage by employing close analysis, which finds literary elements that reveal the subtext.

Review

I. Analyzing Film

     Formalism (analyzing the mise-en-scène, lighting, acting)

Contextual Analysis: how and why a film was made; how it was received

Texts can intervene in context (history, politics) and are NOT just a reflection of it


II. OPENING CLIP ANALYSIS

high-angle shot

long take = shot w/long duration

Ashley: girl in middle // panopticon > disciplinarian 

she represents "vulnerable modern subjectivity"

    Class differences > woman in fur coat waiting for her child vs. Frau Beckmann who has to work at home

 Other film analysis terms:

Sound design: on-screen sound, off-screen sound, sound bridge (between 2 scenes)

 Tracking shot > when the camera moves with the subject

 cast shadow, attached shadow (created on one's face)

 

For M., consult the glossary on the following terms:

frontal lighting; sidelight; backlighting; underlighting; top lighting; key light; fill light; three-point lighting; high-key lighting; low-key lighting; diegesis; diegetic sound; non-diegetic sound; internal diegetic sound; external diegetic sound; offscreen sound; simultaneous sound; nonsimultaneous sound; sound bridge

+ editing; cut; fade, dissolve, wipe; crosscutting; close-up; medium shot; long shot; medium close-up; extreme close-up; medium long-shot; extreme long shot; duration; take; long take; scene; shot; frame; framing; distance of framing; offscreen space, mise-en-scene
















What does it mean to you to be "human"?


Why does VF want to create a being?

- 23: ambition

- 16-7: domination of foes of race

- death of mother / need to create life

- 23: elixir of life / philosopher's stone

29-30: prove his teachers wrong

33: "renew life" 

32: doubts


Definitions:

Allegory: the use of universal symbols to teach a moral lesson and discuss another subject; OED and Merriam-Webster

Discourse: The language used to talk about a particular subject, a communal language used to discuss a topic. According to Foucault, people need to follow the rules of a discourse in order to claim their identity. See What is Critical Discourse Analysis? http://www.strath.ac.uk/aer/materials/6furtherqualitativeresearchdesignandanalysis/unit3/whatiscriticaldiscourseanalysis/

> Authorship
 > Feminism
> Human Rights
 > Literature
> Religion
 > Science


See also:

Hayward, Malcom. List of Terms and Definitions http://www.english.iup.edu/mhayward/terms.htm Last modified June 22, 1995.

Works Cited


"Feminism." OED. 2012. Web

Assignment #2: Close Analysis of a Discourse in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (10/23)


Directions: Write a 3-page essay on one of the following topics (choose one). Your essay should use close analysis of specific passages and point to literary elements and keywords that support your reading. Be careful to establish and analyze a specific discourse, and to consider in what ways Frankenstein serves as an allegory for your specific discourse.  The following questions are designed to prompt you into developing a specific argumentative focus that you must articulate:

1. Human Rights in Shelley: In what ways does Frankenstein critique Romantic-era attitudes towards race, class, and/or gender? Or, argue against the assumption in this question and point towards the ways in which the novel sustains race, gender, and/or class hierarchies before 1900. Draw on the Declarations (of Independence & Rights of Man) in order to establish your discourse. 
Both ques. should consider:

> Aesthetics, Daemon, Feminism, Human Rights, Law, Monster, Race, Species, Slavery

> Literature's role in shaping these categories

> Birth, Biography, Noble Savage, Language, Narrative, Species, the Sublime

> How they provide a lens for humanity: How human is Frankenstein's creature? What does that say about European social values (the hegemony)?

Recommendation: take time to clarify these kinds of questions for yourself.
2. Literature, Nature, Religion, &/or Science in Shelley: Who is the ultimate author/creator of Frankenstein's creature, and that being's tale? What implications does your answer have for understanding Shelley's depiction of the beginnings of life as understood by writers, thinkers, and/or intellectuals? Establish your discourse with Barthes or another source, such as the Oxford English Dictionary.


Format Guide: Your project should have a creative title that represents your subject matter. NO cover pages or folders, please. Simply put your name and date in the corner, followed by the title of the essay, and use a staple or a binder clip to hold it all together.

Reference Guide: Any ideas that emerge during class discussion are the shared intellectual property of class participants and therefore do not need to be cited, but all references to assigned readings should be cited in parentheses (Author’s Last Name, page number) and in your works cited page.

Ex. of Lit. Elements


p. 48-49:

- personification of mountains (calm)
- talking to mountains: apostrophe

- juxtaposition + metaphor of dark of side of the mountain / doubling > motif
- euphoric word choice
- allusion / intertextual reference

- narrow road = an allegory for his journey > nature more powerful?

- simile: "like a child"

- word choice: "conceive"



Example of Romantic irony in Frankenstein, or "when falsehood can look so like the truth" (Shelley 63):

p. 63: "I could not consent to the death of any human being;"

"I . . . was the true murderer."




1. What is human? + Discourses of Frankenstein

Law, Politics, Justice, Human Rights, Religion 

    to have control over one's natural instincts
    to be inhuman = to go outside societal norms
    to make mistakes
    to have morals
    to be flawed, and make mistakes
    to reason but also think about morality

Species, Science

    to be mortal
    to be able to express emotions
    to be born naturally (in womb)
    to be able to be compassionate and sympathetic
    vulnerable, delicate, fleeting, soft

 Narration, Literature, Language --> Religion, the Sublime

     giving significance to the insignificant
    to be self aware and the desire to improve
    mark time
    capable of making individual decisions and question things
    conscious / subconscious

2. Significance of Swiss setting:
see also Human, Republic

>> the monster as other b/c it's not European (35-36)

--> How egalitarian is the ideal republic?

3. Who wrote Frankenstein?



Review 9. October 2012:

Authorship & the Text

What is the purpose beauty?

>> Way to understand discourse surrounding aesthetics, Europe, humanity, and race in Shelley

- Question open for interpretation/argument: Does appreciation for the sublime differentiate humans from non-humans?

What do the De Laceys teach the creature?

Model of Family in Frankenstein

--> Consider also the role of family in terms of DOUBLING. If the creature is Victor's unconsciousness, might he somehow unconsciously desire their deaths?

- Note the slippage between father / creature (130)


(Class) Significance of the De Laceys: The French Revolution

- caused by American ex., poverty of masses, bread famine, aristocrats' abuse of power, legacy of Enlightenment thinking (Rousseau)


- revolt in Haiti, abolition of slave trade


- first significant break from a vertical world

God > King > Clergy > Aristocracy > everyone else

 to a secular one with a burgeoning middle class


See also Rights of Man




What do you consider the top 10 basic human rights? and animal rights?

Human Rights
 Animal Rights

--> Discourse of (modern) human rights


Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Rights of Man




Family                     Love                         Life                     Birth        Creation     

                                                                                      Death

                                                          Rebirth            Afterlife         Murder     Suicide











What does Frankenstein say about the discourse of:


- citizenship?

- law?

- literature?

- monsters?

- the novel?

- republicanism?

- science?

- slavery?


1. What discourse does your paper focus on? What does Shelley mean when she uses this word/concept? What do you mean by it?

2. Choose an excerpt that you will be closely analyzing: closely analyze it. Where is evidence for the discourse you are elucidating? Tone? Irony? Word choice? Symbolism?

3. What problem is your paper trying to solve?




















How might it affect your life to be a live-in servant like a maid?

transubstantiation

Poststructuralist Theories of Identity

•    Dependence on the Other: “Subjection exploits the desire for existence, where existence is always conferred from elsewhere; it marks a primary vulnerability to the Other in order to be.” (Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection
20-21)]

•    Interpellation: “ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects…individuals are always-already subjects.” (175-176) (e.g. pre-birth rituals that inscribe an unborn child into dominant ideology: naming, gendering, etc.) This system of interpellation leads subjects to submit themselves to the exploitative conditions of capitalist society voluntarily: “the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commendments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjecton all by himself’,” ( Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,”
182)
•    Subversion through Repetition: ”a subject only remains a subject through a reiteration or rearticulation of itself as a subject, and this dependency of the subject on repetition for coherence may constitute that subject’s incoherence, its incomplete character. This repetition or, better, iterability thus becomes the non-place of subversion, the possibility of a re-embodying of the subjectivating norm that can redirect its normativity.” (Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 99)


Thursday 10/25: Relational Discourse

"it is not their real conditions of existence, their real world, that 'men 'represent to themselves' in ideology, but above it all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which is represented to them there. It is this relation which is at the centre of every ideological, i.e., imaginary representation of the real world. It is this relation that contains the 'cause' which has to explain the imaginary distortion of the ideological representation of the real world. Or rather, to leave aside the language of causality it is the imaginary nature of this relation which underlies all the imaginary distortion that we can observe (if we do not live in its truth) in all ideology" (Louis Althusser, "Ideology and the State Apparatus," Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Trans. B. Brewster. NY: Monthly Review, 1970. 164 [127-86]).

Today's Goals:

- Understand the major points of Sartre's introduction to and performance history of The Maids.

- Learn and understand deconstructive analysis; Butler and performativity, and how these critical lenses alter readings of Genet.

Binaries Maids (Les bonnes) / Madame

servant / mistress (39)
Solange / Claire (44)
loathing / love (39)
hate / love (46)
animal / Holy Virgin (40)
inside / outside
filth / beauty
sisters / individual
Mario ("a ridiculous young milkman," 37; "a half-naked milkman" 41) / Monsieur
rape / love
disgust / veneration
masculine / feminine
uniform / dress
humble / proud
ugly / lovely (37)
fall from grace / kneeling in prayer (40-1)
whimper / "noble tears" (42)
"object of disgust" / "proud beauty" (44)
"confound" / "confounded" (45)
sink / flowers (46)
submission / domination (48)
garret / "playing queen" (50)
murderer / victim (51)
"spurt of saliva" / "spray of diamonds" (52)
older / younger (55)


Questions to consider:

- Questions about lecture, Sartre, Deconstruction

- Example of a deconstructive analysis of word(s) in Genet

- How would Genet’s original plans for the play’s production—having the maids played by men—change (your interpretation of) it?


Importance of Mario/Monsieur > Women's class depends on the men they are attached to













Why do you think it is worth pursuing English as a degree? What does the field teach?







What is the value of literature (for you, the world at large, etc.)?









Make a list of the top 10 texts you think every English major should read. 












Possible Future(s) in the Profession (of Cultural Analysis of Texts):