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)?

Greetings to students in my ENGL306/COMPL301 this term. I look forward to meeting you Monday. Note that all the other posts on this site were written by myself and prior students, who have left their work here for your benefit.

As before, I’d like to give a shout-out to a few top-notch posts from this round. I’ve selected for quality and also for coverage: I’m really happy that so many of you wrote about texts we hadn’t yet discussed together! So check out:

• Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams: Lei’s on Freud and dreams nicely mixes anecdote and summary of argument to give a vivid sense of how “dream thoughts” are transformed.
• Lacan’s “mirror stage” essay:
  • Anna H nicely links the productivity of the mirror vis a vis the developing subject.
  • Ayesha gives a bang-up reading of the whole argument, with an emphasis on Lacan’s tricky concept of “meconaissance” or “misrecognition”
• Meltzer’s piece on “unconscious”:
  • James digs into the tricky relationship between Freud’s thought and Lacan’s revision/return.
• Freud on the “fetish”:
  • Lizzie explores the “purgatorial” space of the fetish (and dig the title!)

Two-pronged shout-out here:

1. There’s a useful documentary on the Kanopy interface on the life and work on Fanon. The production is a bit cheesy in the manner of all “dramatizations,” but the talking head work by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha and cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall is news you can use.
2. More broadly, Kanopy is an amazing and underutilized resource accessible to Hunter students. It’s a big collection of films of all kinds, especially strong in documentaries and educational materials. For me, and for many English major nerds, I suspect, the crown jewel is a big chunk of the Criterion Collection archive of classic films, spanning early cinema (Chaplin, Keaton) to more recent “new classics” from across the globe. It’s a bit of a hassle to sign up, but once you do, you can access via iOS/Android/laptop/Roku or whatever.

I just wanted to give a shout-out to some exemplary posts this time around. I’m really impressed with your hard work and creative thinking and could have picked almost anyone’s work this time. But these stood out for various reasons, so check out:

• Lizzie’s discussion of Marx and “alienation,” which gets at Marx’s attempt to move beyond “idealism” and link the mental and material aspects of “alienation” in labor.
• Lei’s fascinating reading of the video game “What Remains of Edith Finch.” The game features a sequence in which we “play” alienated labor–with disastrous results–in ways that amount to a mode of ideological critique.
• Evelyn and Tenzin took on Benjamin: Tenzin’s post explains the workings of “aura” beautifully and Evelyn’s unpacks Benjamin’s borrowing from Freud to posit an “optical unconscious” that photography and film render available for our analysis.
• Ayesha and James glossed Althusser (and props for tackling this tough text prior to our discussion!): Ayesha emphasized the ideological force of schooling and James, taking a different tack on the same topic, wonders what Althusser would do with the phenomenon of “woke” liberals and leftists in the academy teaching students to question the dominant order, just like we’re doing right now!