Please add your questions about our reading/s this week in the comments below!

Hi all! Since I will not be able to zoom with you all as planned during my conference travel next week, we decided to shift to an asynchronous discussion for week 9. I very much do not want to give short shrift to any of our readings on feminist theory and thinking this week, so we’ll do our best to structure a lively conversation using our class google doc. To that end, I’ve added some instructions to p. 2 of the doc about how we’ll proceed. In essence, I’ll ask everyone to post a passage from one of our readings; to include some brief commentary on it; and to add…

Please see my email yesterday for details. Zoom link here and in that message!    

Please post your questions about the Week 8 readings as a comment below.

Todorov Presentation Bakhtin Presentation From Barthes, S/Z (1970): “Or again: each code is one of the forces that can take over the text…one of the voices out of which the text is woven. Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is ‘lost’ in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voices (of the codes) becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect…” From Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences” (Speech Genres & Other Late Essays): “There is neither a first nor a…

Please add your question about one or more of our readings for Week 7 as a comment below.

Tim Aubry, Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures (Harvard UP, 2018) Andy Hines, Outside Literary Studies (U of Chicago P, 2022) Faye Halpern, “Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention,” Narrative 30.1 (2022) 47-66. Jonathan Kramnick, Criticism and Truth: On Literary Method (U of Chicago P, 2023) John Guillory, On Close Reading (U of Chicago P, 2025)* *Tim Aubrey, “The Rise and Fall—and Rise?—of Close Reading” (review of Guillory’s Book) Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant, Close Reading for the 21st Century (Princeton UP, 2025) (Forthcoming)* Several episodes from The American Vandal, season 8 (“Criticism LTD”), including 2.5 (“The Racist Industrial Complex“) and 2.6 (“The Chicago Fight“)…

Please add your question about one (or more) of our readings for Week 6 as a comment below.

Franz Kafka, “A Country Doctor” (1917) André Breton, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali (a nice round-up and discussion of the surrealism-psychoanalysis connection) Le Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1928) (not a “filmed dream,” but one that “profits by a mechanism analogous to that of dreams”) Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) (dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalì)  8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) Twin Peaks (1989) (Cooper later interprets his own dream) Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) and Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001): the return of primitive beliefs surmounted…  

Please post your question about one or more of our assigned readings from Freud and/or Nietzsche as a comment below.