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Johnson lecture and asynchronous activity

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

As promised, here’s a 15 minute lecture on Johnson:

Johnson480p

Brief lecture unpacking Barbara Johnson’s “Melville’s Fist” for 306 students

After you’ve finished reading and watching, please post on one of the following questions, which will serve as your Blog Post #3:

  1. What kind of reader is Billy? What kind is Claggart? How does Johnson use Saussure’s theory of signifier/signified to clarify this difference?
  2. On 2268-9, Johnson reads the plot of BB against the grain: that is, as if Claggart were right and Billy were guilty of a willful mutiny. What is the point of this? What does it say about BB that either reading is equally defensible?
  3. How does Johnson distinguish, on one hand, a “difference within” and, on the other, a “difference between” in her discussion of Vere’s act of judging? What does Melville’s text tell us about these two different kinds of differences?
  4. What does the example of Vere suggest about our commonsensical notion that judges are “above politics”: that is, that they decide on guilt/innocence independently of the practical effects of this judgement (2275)?
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Blog Post #1 all-stars

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

When time permits, I’ll do this all term. I found these posts especially strong for one reason or another. None is perfect, whatever that means, and they’re not necessarily the “top four,” since it’s harder to rank mini-essays than, say, hot sauces or forty-yard-dashes. But they’re all good and worth reading as helpful examples of how to balance summary and speculation:

  • Eliza:  https://engl702spr25.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/02/04/truth-deception-and-reality/
  • Pashtrik: https://engl702spr25.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/02/02/a-foundation-of-lies/
  • Benjamin: https://engl702spr25.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/02/03/stubborn-as-a-bull/
  • Gigi: https://engl702spr25.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/02/04/nietzsche-through-the-eyes-of-the-beholder/
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Foucault, Borges, Nietzsche

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on
Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things is an enormously influential theory of how the West has constructed its own “ways of knowing” by obscuring the contingencies of certain knowledge and projecting a fantasy of a pure, objective knowledge. Foucault borrows heavily from Nietzsche in his distinctive “genealogical” method of narrating history. We can see some of the influence of Nietzsche’s work here in ways that anticipate much of what we’ll talk about in the future. Foucault’s book begins with a riff on a passage from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Here is the first page more or less in full:
The point, of course, is not the obvious and chauvenistic one: what a zany people those Chinese are!? The point, rather, is more like “what must our Encyclopedias look like to the Other? How are our regimes that make “data” and its analysis seem so transparent and objective equally absurd and humorous and continent when looking in from the outside?
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