Dates

Tuesday

Thursday

1/12

1/17-19

The House of Mirth (44-87); Sarraute, "Tropism VIII"

1/24-26

The House of Mirth (88-142); DS#1 DUE

The House of Mirth (143-178)

1/31-2/2

The House of Mirth (179-220); Parker, Ch. 3 Structuralism (44-85)

The House of Mirth (221-264); Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics; Flores/Notes on Saussure ; optional: Roman Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles"

The House of Mirth (265-305); Parker, Deconstruction (86-111); Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense"; DS DUE OR SUBMIT CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE ON THURSDAY ON NORRIS OR ROBINSON

Margot Norris, "Death by Speculation: Deconstructing The House of Mirth" (431-446); Lillian S. Robinson, "The Traffic in Women: A Cultural Critique of The House of Mirth" (340-358); CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE DUE ON NORRIS OR ROBINSON IF YOU DID NOT SUBMIT DS ON TUESDAY

*Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (pdf ‘handout’ on Blackboard); *Barbara Johnson, "Writing"(on Blackboard); *Jacques Derrida, "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing"; suggested: Jacques Derrida, "Différance" (on Blackboard); Derrida, "Semiology and Grammatology" (on Blackboard) ; option/suggestion: After you finish reading the excerpt from Derrida's Of Grammatology, on "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing" (98ff, and also the other readings for today), you might return to the opening paragraph, and see if your understanding can explain/unpack these sentences: "It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historico-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon. It must do so not only because all that desire had wished to wrest from the play of language finds itself recaptured within that play but also because, for the same reason, language itself is menaced in its very life, helpless, adrift in the threat of limitlessness, brought back to its own finitude at the very moment when its limits seem to disappear, when it ceases to be self-assured, contained, and guaranteed by the infinite signified which seemed to exceed it" (qtd. in Parker, Critical Theory 99).

DS DUE OR SUBMIT CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE ON THURSDAY ON SULLIVAN

Parker, Psychoanalysis (112-147); Ellie Ragland Sullivan, "The Daughter's Dilemma: Psychoanalytic Interpretation and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth" (464-481); see Stephen Dunn's poem "On Hearing the Airlines Will Use A Psychological Profile to Catch Potential Skyjackers" (via Blackboard pdf) ; CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE DUE ON SULLIVAN IF YOU DID NOT SUBMIT DS ON TUESDAY (AND IF YOU DID NOT ALREADY COMPLETE A PRIOR CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE)

Sigmund Freud, "Psycho-analysis"; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter" (online);
Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'"; *Slavoj Zizek, "Why Does a Letter Always Arrive at Its Destination?: Imaginary, Symbolic, Real"; for further reference (on Blackboard): Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of I"; Lacan, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious"; DS DUE OR SUBMIT CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE ON THURSDAY ON RESTUCCIA

Parker, Feminism (148-178); Frances Restuccia, "The Name of the Lily: Edith Wharton's Feminism(s)" (404-418); CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE DUE ON SULLIVAN IF YOU DID NOT SUBMIT DS ON TUESDAY (AND IF YOU DID NOT ALREADY COMPLETE A PRIOR CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE)

Wai-Chee Dimock, "Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth" (375-390); Parker, Queer Studies (179-210); optional/suggested: Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women" (on Blackboard);
CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE DUE ON DIMOCK IF YOU DID NOT ALREADY COMPLETE A PRIOR CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles"; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; DS DUE TODAY IF YOU DID NOT SUBMIT A CRITICAL SUMMARY-RESPONSE ON TUES.

see Bettie Sellers's poem, "In the Counselor's Waiting Room" (via pdf on Blackboard)

Showing of film Death and the Maiden or Glengarry Glen Ross in class (instructor out of town), but read this by today: especially Halberstam for some in class discussion with Eric Severn--Judith Halberstam, "Queer Temporalities and Postmodern Geographies'; Robert McRuer, "Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence"

Robert McRuer, "Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence"; Judith Halberstam, "Queer Temporalities and Postmodern Geographies" (for further reading, see also Halberstam, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Men, Women, and Masculinity" (2002, on Bblearn) ; Parker, Marxism (211-243); optional/recommended: Karl Marx, from the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof";

*Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) ; *Raymond Williams, "Dominant, Residual, and Emergent"; Parker, Historicism and Cultural Studies (244-269); Michel Foucault, "Panopticism"; DS#5 DUE TODAY OR ON THURSDAY

Jonathan Dollimore, "The Politics of Containment"; Louis Montrose, “New Historicisms” (pdf ‘handout’); Chopin, "The Story of an Hour" (see course website, under links to texts that Parker refers to); Dorothy Parker, "A Telephone Call" (see folder in our Bblearn site); DS#5 DUE TODAY IF YOU DID NOT SUBMIT AN ENTRY ON TUES.

Parker, Postcolonial and Race Studies (270-313); ESSAY #1 DUE (on The House of Mirth)

Renato Rosaldo, "Imperialist Nostalgia"; Rey Chow, "The Interruption of Referentiality: Poststructuralism and the Conundrum of Critical Multiculturalism"; further optional reading: Alan Lawson, "The Anxious Proximities of Settler (Post)Colonial Relations"(on Blackboard); DS#6 DUE TODAY

David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross; Richard Brucher, "Pernicious Nostalgia in Glengarry Glen Ross" or Anne Dean, "The Discourse of Anxiety" (Blackboard)

Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden; Pilar Zozaya Aritzia, "Alternative Political Discourses in Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden" (on Bblearn); DS#7 DUE TODAY OR ON THURSDAY

Dorfman, Death and the Maiden; Morace, Robert A. "The life and times of Death and the Maiden." Texas Studies in Literature & Language 42.2 (2000): 135-53. (on Bblearn) DS#7 DUE TODAY IF YOU DID NOT SUBMIT AN ENTRY ON TUES.

David Lindsay-Abaire, Good People ; DS#8 DUE TODAY

Parker, Reader Response and Afterword (314-336); begin viewing François Truffaut, The 400 Blows; Marilyn Fabe, chapter on Auteur Theory and the French New Wave, François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (2004, on Bblearn)

conclude viewing Truffaut's The 400 Blows; Herman Rapaport, (see Blackboard pdf) on Social Relations (Marx, Levinas, Nancy)- Rapaport refers briefly to Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener" available online at Project Gutenberg

5/1-3

Short fiction on Blackboard: Denis Johnson, "Emergency" (1992); Joshua Ferris, "The Dinner Party" (2008); brief recap of theory points