Final Project
There are two options for the final project. The first is a bit more "prefab" and synthetic of the material we read together. The second is more self-directed and individually tailored. My hope is that you choose a path that plays to your strengths as a reader and writer and allows you to explore more about what theorists/theories/schools of thought most deeply inform your understanding of texts and the world they reference.
option one: synthetic grab-bag
Students who choose this option will choose two from the following list of questions and develop responses to each in brief essays of about 1500 words each, similar to our blog posts but longer and more carefully considered, cited, and written. Successful responses will provide close readings of texts we read and use parenthetical citation. I won't require a Works Cited, since I assume you'll be citing the same texts in the same editions that we read together in class. Responses should be well-organzied, with clear introductions and good transitions.
- How has this course changed the way you read and write? What critic/s or school/s do you find particularly compelling? What makes that critic/school more compelling that competing models/theories/approaches? Knowing what you now know about theory, what questions can you ask of texts that you hadn’t previously asked?
- Take a look at this image, created by the artist Luis Kamnitzer. What does this object tell us about subjectivity? What happens to us when we encounter it? That is, how might it transform us to realize that our selves are bound to mirrors/sentences/writing? Lacan is an obvious starting point, but you might also think about Nietzsche, Saussure, Johnson, Althusser, Fanon, Du Bois, Lacan, Zizek, or Mulvey, among others. Pick a few who seem most urgent; for god's sake don't try to write about all of these folks!
- As I hope you've noticed, I organized the course around three major "discourses" or frames for interpreting social reality, each of which originated between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth. The midterm asked you to trace the development of one of these discourses. This time, I'd like to to tack a different way, arguing against this logic. Using at least three thinkers from at least two of the three course units, demonstrate how later thinkers "cross over" and mix elements of structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalytic theory. For example (and feel free to use these), you might show how Lacan mashes up de Saussure's structural linguistics and Freud's arguments about "unconscious" activity being the center of selfhood. Or you might show how Althusser combines Marx's thinking about ideology with Lacan's narrative of "subject formation." Or Spivak's combination of Gramsci's thinking about the "subaltern" and the "intellectual" with Derrida's "deconstructionist" thinking about representation and its limits. Or...
- We started the course way back in January with Nietzsche's polemic about "truth" in representation, in which Nietzsche insists that all representation via concepts and/or language is a species of "lying." In a well-considered essay, extend or refute this argument, defending your position with the work of at least three theorists from the course. You might, for example, move with Nietzsche's grain by thinking about "centers" and their problems with Derrida or the problems of recovering the "speech" of subaltern subjects with Spivak. You might think about the distortion field of "race" with Du Bois, Fanon, Achebe, and/or Rankine. You might, in contrast, insist on the stubborn reality of things and people with Marx, especially in his writing on "alienation" or on the "fetishism of commodities," or on the Real that subtends our conscious speaking and imagining for Lacan or Zizek, or the way material conditions give rise to "cruel" affects or "ugly" feelings for Berlant or Ngai. Or...
option two: theoretical deep dive
Students who choose this option will choose a small body of work (minimum 100 pages) that extends some aspect of the course reading, read it, and submit copious notes on their reading of at least 1500 words in aggregate. You're free to choose anything you like: you could read more deeply in a book-length text that we excerpted (e.g., Capital, The History of Sexuality, The Interpretation of Dreams, Ugly Feelings or Cruel Optimism; you could read a work that jumps off from one of the texts we read (Foucault's work on "biopower" might lead to the work of a theorist we didn't read together, like Agamben's Homo Sacer or Mbembe's Necropolitics); you could also read several related pieces by different theorists on a shared theme (e.g., the "critical race theory" that grows out of the work of Fanon, Achebe, and Du Bois). Student who want to take this path should propose a topic by Monday April 28th, so I can make sure I agree with you on the scale and relevance of what you want to read and write about. The "output" can be very informal: I just want to see evidence that you've read the work and made connections between the work and the course material. I'm not interested in summaries, but rather in impressions: specific passages or moments that you found interesting or problematic, specific arguments or ideas that are relevant to your literary-critical work or sense of the wider world.
