Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on Just a quick welcome to new students for the Spring 2024 term. You’ll find a ton of old material from past versions of the course if you scroll down, but here begins our work for this term! I look forward to meeting/seeing you later this month. Enjoy a happy/healthy New Year and break in the meantime.
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on I was thinking about how to demonstrate the way the “semiotic” processes are at work in some kind of poetry in ways that are more accessible to Anglo/American lit students than the Mallarme example Kristeva gives us. So here goes:
The end of Joyce’s Ulysses, narrated by Molly Bloom. The intense erotic energy of the “yesses” speak to the untrammeled pre-Oedipal polymorphous flows of desire that JK describes:
Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy …the last lines..
June 16th 2012 Bloomsday : the last lines of Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy to the backdrop of a Tribute Painting I painted this week…
And here’s Gertrude Stein, the great poet of the “semiotic” in JKs sense, giving an undulating “portrait” of Pablo Picasso:
Gertrude Stein reads If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso
Gertrude Stein reads her poem If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso.
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on While riding to work this morning, I thought about how Lacan’s reading of the “mirror stage” is hilariously conjured up by a joke the narrator relates in Alexandr Hemon’s marvelous novel, The Lazarus Project:
This is a classic instance of what Lacan calls “meconnaissance” (misrecognition), whereby the subject identifies with the idealized figure in the mirror (here, the “brawny, suntanned” man with the hot wife and scads of money) to substitute for the unbearable fact of his own frustrated, discontinuous, dislocated self (Mujo, like the narrator himself, is an immigrant who, Lazarus-like, is permanently alive and dead, between two worlds, already over and beginning again).
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on To help us contextualize the “mirror stage” essay, which narrates the formation of the ego and the advent of the “imaginary” in psychological life, check out this diagram:
This “knot” helps us see a few important things at once:
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on In case anyone’s not clear on the “rebus” analogy in Freud’s stuff on dreams, here’s an example: 
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on It’s that time. Here are the instructions for your midterm and a link to the template you’ll use to write the exam and upload to Dropbox:
Here’s the template. Good luck, everyone!
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on Here’s some more Gramsci for your cultural diet. The podcast The Dig recently featured the great Michael Denning, Professor of American Studies at Yale, who has written Gramscian analysis of US literature and culture for the past 30 years, including his magnificent book The Cultural Front. As a bonus, the second episode includes a riff on Althusser’s borrowing from and divergence from Gramsci about 3/4 of the way through. It’s a lot, but there’s a TON of stuff relevant to our course in here.
Gramsci & Hegemony w/ Michael Denning
Your browser does not support the audio tag. Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. Part one of an expansive two-part interview.
Gramsci, Organization, Crisis w/ Michael Denning
Your browser does not support the audio tag. Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. The second of a two-part interview.
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on Well, whaddya know: Antonio Gramsci made the news this week. The Chronicle of Higher Education is the premier “trade journal” of academica, where academics and university workers read about current goings-on. Here, the cultural studies critics Bruce Robbins is rehearsing an argument with the literary critic John Guillory, whose recent book Professing Criticism has spawned a vigorous debate on the role of politics in humanities teaching and writing in higher ed.
As you can see, Robbins invokes Gramsci’s distinction between “organic” and “traditional” intellectuals in order to clarify his objections to Guillory’s argument about the need for scholar/professors to work in a “self-authorizing” and autonomous way, rather than align themselves with political institutions and arguments (e.g., supporting Democratic Socialists of America or righting against the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe). Robbins believes that, although academics have generally been “traditional” intellectuals in Gramsci’s sense, aligned with a “neutral” institution (academia) that serves something “higher” than the partisan pursuits of capitalist accumulation and party politics, since the 60s, many academics have been plausibly “organic” to fundamental social groups.
We’ll talk more about these categories tomorrow, but I thought it was cool to find an unfolding argument in the ether that’s so perfectly targeted to our reading!
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on I’ll go over this in class today but wanted to share for anyone who misses or wants to review the review:
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on As promised, I wanted to alert you to a few things I’ve posted in the past for students with regard to Marx and Engels:
