Please share a one-paragraph proposal for your final paper, including a working title and the texts/theorists from the class that you envision working most closely with.
Working Title: Alive Criticism – T.S. Eliot on Nightwood
Theorists: T.S. Eliot
Proposal:
T.S. Eliot thought it an “impertinence” to add any introductory or explanatory remarks to Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood from 1936–and then did it anyway. In a note to the novel’s second edition in 1949, despite the “temptation which may present itself to any critic reviewing his own words,” he reaffirms his earlier estimation and resists revision. My paper focuses on Eliot’s introduction to Nightwood, specifically his assertion that Barnes’ poetic prose is “alive” and his resulting struggle, but ultimate arrival, at an “appreciation of its meaning as a whole.” The novel’s characters represent a group of societal outcasts in Paris and Vienna revolving around the ambiguous American Robin Vote. Felix, Nora and Jenny attempt to understand and control her. The self-proclaimed doctor Matthew meanwhile functions as a sort of therapist to the characters who are left in Robin’s wake and come to him for consolation. Eliot realized that instead of individual actors, the characters form a “whole pattern,” and especially the enigmatic Robin is only “alive” in relation to the others – much like the figure of the poet in Eliot’s earlier “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in which the poet is part of a whole, or later like the figure of the critic in “To Criticize the Critic.” I aim to show that the ‘wholeness’ and ‘aliveness’ Eliot bestows upon Barnes’ prose are related and do not only refer to the characterizations, but can also point to the almost painterly method of Barnes’ prose, and its place within the wholeness of poetry, or perhaps art in general, and criticism. I propose that Nightwood embodies Eliot’s literary criticism, and his own position within the genre, as criticism becomes ‘alive’ as well and continues through the novel by Djuna Barnes.
Joanna, I like the way you’ve framed and conceived your essay. I can see how Eliot’s introduction to Nightwood functions — as I think you are arguing — as a distillation of his critical commitments, which he brings to bear on Barnes’ work. I think what I’m wondering about a bit are the stakes of the essay. Is the goal, as you see it, to suggest that Nightwood epitomizes Eliot’s key arguments (about the importance of tradition and history), with the characters in the story functioning as the poet ideally would? if so, I might encourage you to push a bit on some of the bigger theoretical questions that might be present here. For instance, how do paratexts (including introductions) shape texts? What are the gendered implications—and practical affordances—of appending introductions by celebrated (male) poets onto a prose text authored by a woman? Are there ways in which you see Eliot as erring in his characterizations of Barnes’s novel; does her novel complicate or challenge his theories in important ways…? Etc. I’m not suggesting any of these questions is the one you *should* ask, only to give some examples of ones you might ask! (If you go with the first, Genette on paratexts is of course a good place to start…)
Title: Fetishism and Tragedy: Studying “Oedipus Rex” Through Freud
Author/Text: Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism”
Freud, in his essay “Fetishism”, focuses on how young boys tend to have a special relationship with their mothers because they come into the realization that they lack a penis. This so-called “fear of castration” is what causes this fetish to develop. Supposedly, this also makes boys be attached to their mothers and hate their fathers, which is what also happens in Sophocles’ famous tragedy, “Oedipus The King”. Even though fate has much to do with Oedipus’ situation, the protagonist murders his father and marries his mother, which could translate into what Freud believed about the mother-son relationship. I would like to focus on the Oedipal complex/fetishism part of the tragedy by looking at Freud’s studies, pretending that the story is not necessarily fictional, but true.
Exciting to hear about this interest in Freud, Zevi. However, I’m not sure from this description what you’ll be adding to Freud’s own studies of Oedipus? And what the payoff would be of the speculative exercise in the final sentence, which I don’t exactly follow. I’m afraid that pursuing this line of inquiry would lead you to a dead end…
So, I’m wondering if there’s another direction in which you’d like to take your analysis or application of Freud — or maybe another theorist or text or topic that is calling out to you…? Happy to chat more about it if it’s helpful!
“If only he would speak!”: Muteness, Gender, and Power in Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse”
Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” opens with Mrs. Ramsay’s speech: “‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow.'” The affirmation is briefly left suspended, hovering over the ensuing description of her son’s joy at the news, before it is quickly interdicted by the authoritarian Mr. Ramsay: “‘But,’ said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, ‘it won’t be fine.'” Inspired by Barbara Johnson’s “Muteness Envy,” I’d like to trace Woolf’s gendered utterances and silences as forms of power throughout the novel; identify the moment, or decision, towards speech within the ruminating consciousnesses (at dinner, on William Bankes: “He wanted somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself. He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his chair, looked at this person, then at that person, tried to break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut it again”); and the posture of silence utilized by the novel itself (Mrs. Ramsay’s death occurring within bracketed asides, gesturing towards the relegation of verbal, or written, language as the privileged narrative device, which could relate to Rancière’s “The Thread of the Novel”).
This all sounds really intriguing, Alice! As I mentioned, I have an essay (from years ago) that theorizes the withholding of female characters through the lens of Johnson’s essay — happy to share it, if only to give you further ideas for potential bibligraphy. I think there’s also a really interesting tension to be explored between the silences within Woolf’s novels and her own prolific output as a critic — i.e. someone who publically held forth on social and political issues of her day even as she became known (maybe not always rightly) for noevls that prioritized inwardness. Anwyay, lots of fascinating stuff here, looking forward to seeing it all come together!
note: I know this is trying to do way too much! But posting anyway:
Working Title: “The Cute and the Eerie: Horror and Utopia in Ryan Trecartin’s Video Art”
Theorists: José Muñóz, Lee Edelman, Mark Fisher, Freud (The Uncanny), 2 outside articles on Ryan Trecartin (by Kareem Estefan and Wayne Koestenbaum)
Proposal: Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981) is an American artist and filmmaker whose video work, known for its frenetic pacing and manic editing, has received praise and recognition for foreshadowing our current moment, over which the micro-video format and influencer culture rule. However, there is much more to unpack with Trecartin’s work, particularly in relation to the burgeoning phenomenon of online “brain rot.” Why is brain rot so engaging and upsetting? And in what ways can we read the uncanny and queer utopia into it?
In this paper I will attempt to read Trecartin’s video work through a Freudian lens, charting the uncanny in the filmmaker’s use of overloaded-with-familiar-signifiers dialogue, costume, and mise-en-scéne. Humor, in the Freudian sense (understood as veiled aggression), will be analyzed also in relation to queer failure/utopia/lack of futurity (Muñoz and Edelman), as a precursor to the mainly queer-coded internet culture at large in our present moment.
Coco, this sounds really fascinating! Having checked out some of Trecartin’s work, I think the approach you described (and that we discussed in person) seems really promising — I can see the uncanny resonance of the surfeit of ‘familiar’ signifiers in his work. (I also saw a quote about how Trecartin cites the “music videos his babysitters’ put on” as a source of inspiration—the return of (repressed) infantile fantasies?) I’ll be interested to hear more about how you see the humor/latent aggression of the videos related to the to the failure/utopia piece. Just anecdotally, I can say that the overdetermined aesthetic of the pieces I watched *feels* pretty doom-y and no-future-y, like the internet just collapsing on itself…
Apropos of this week’s readings, I also found myself thinking about Sontag’s comment about pop art — that it’s so explicit and blatent, it preempts interpretation. Is that what’s happening here, or is it the opposite — the superimposition and recontextualization of images that *should* be blatent becoming un-interpretable from another angle? Or is this legible only to an interpretive community fluent in (queer) online culture? (Disregard this line of thought if it’s not helpful!)
Finally, I’m not sure how you’ll end up working with the idea of the “cute” in your title, but if you do I’d make sure to check out Sianne Ngai’s theorization of cute-ness in Our Aesthetic Categories. Or maybe there’s another aesthetic category you’d like to propose here, in place of cute?
(The following is not final whatsoever; in fact, I would like to leave open the possibility that I may end up scratching this entirely upon further research. But, at the moment, this is the general direction that I’m headed toward.)
Title: Bakhtin and Heteroglossia, Levinas and Discourse: On Centrifugal Otherness in the Novel
Theorists: Bakhtin, Levinas, Blanchot, possibly a quick glance at Buber and Rosenzweig, and then those relevant from secondary literature
If it can be argued that there holds legitimate resemblances between Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia” and Levinas’s “discourse” (where the latter is founded upon the distinction between the Saying and the Said) – and I argue that this is indeed the case – and if heteroglossia is the characteristic stylistic feature of the novel, Levinasian discourse may also be situated, by virtue of its likeness to Bakhtinian heteroglossia, in the distinctive language of the novel. This is to say that the exchange between the Same and the Other in the ethical face-to-face may be applied to the dynamisms of the literary language characteristic of the novel, and even of literature more generally. The face-to-face of Levinas is embedded “in” the very makeup of literary language: the “space of literature” à la Blanchot or, rather, the space of the novel in particular, is a locus whereby the infinity of the Other may rupture totality by virtue of the discourse characteristic of its language, much in the same way that, for Bakhtin, the heteroglossic character of the novel exhibits the centrifugality of decentralizing forces that make up its style. Thus, one of the fundamental elements of Levinas’s philosophical project indeed has quite a lot to say about the novel, even though neither of his magnum opera – Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974) – offer little to no commentary on the matter.
This is really interesting, Alex. So, if I’m understanding, you’re suggesting that something analagous takes place in these two spaces of discursive encounter — the one literary/novelistic (Bakhtin) and the other embodied (Levinas)? Discourse is of course a very important word for Bakhtin, too, so I think that term could “work” for both, and then you could tease out its different connotations and stakes in each case, and of course, the “dialogic” could be in play here, too…
On a related note, I think I mentioned it in class, but there’s a line from Bakhtin’s Speech Genres and Other Late essays that feels relevant here: “For the word (and consequently for a human being) there is nothing more fatal than the lack of response.” May have a PDF of the essay if you’re curious!
I don’t have a working title yet. My final paper will investigate the Yorgos Lanthimos film Dogtooth through the lens of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” and Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” Though I haven’t found much supporting evidence or critical discussion about it, I think that Louis Aragon’s work called “Suicide” can provide a useful framework for discussing some of Nietzsche’s observations on language. I’m also intensely interested in the part of “On Truth” that discusses the arbitrary nature of gendered articles, like der Baum, though I don’t know if digressing into such ‘big swing’ territory will be helpful. Other inner texts are more works from Camila Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet, and I’m intrigued by Hoffman, to whom Grudova is greatly indebted. “The Golden Pot” and “Councillor Krespel” are exciting and incredibly imaginative stories. Where do the gothic, the uncanny, the unnerving, the horrifying diverge? What has language and potentially its repetition (maybe chance to incorporate Baudrillard’s unreality simulacrum model) to do with such divergences? How are severe structures of repression portrayed in Dogtooth reflective of some overarching quality of the uncanny/repetitive/entrancing/abstracting qualities of language. Stay tuned to find out!
Intriguging stuff here, Peter! As I think I mentioned, Dogtooth seems like a really interesting testing ground for Nietzsche’s essay, in particular. I’ll admit I’m less compelled by “The Uncanny” as a lens here, only because the film (at least in my memory?) doesn’t seem to satisfy some of its pre-requisites. One other possible pairing here, giving your interest in the arbitrarily gendered nature of language would of course be Saussure, which could work nicely with “On Truth and Lying…” I’d probably also caution against introducing too many primary texts/case studies (if that’s what you mean by “inner texts”) and to stay with Dogtooth—or to develop a clear rationale as to WHY these diverse texts. As stated here, I’m not totally clear about how the questions about the uncanny/gothic relate to the questions about language and signification. So, that may be the big thing you either need to resolve, or it may be the impetus to shift in one direction or another. It can be so tempting in an end-of-semester paper to want to do *all the things* but sometimes hard choices are needed! And if I can help by talking through some of this more, just let me know!
For modernism onward, animality or beastliness was taken as a potent site of alterity that could help one escape the strictures of humanist subjectivity. Meanwhile, these same signifiers also function as a shorthand for the limit case of subjugation. How might these tensions be embedded in aesthetic practices that are indebted to this lineage? I take as my case study the major 1980s Industrial band Skinny Puppy. SP and industrial music more broadly statedly emerge from the lineage of modernist art practice, and share many of the posthuman gestures to forge a path away from the norms of commercial music. Moreover, Skinny Puppy integrates animality into their performance through a vocal style predicated on grunts and growls and stage performances that include a mock vivisection. I argue that these performance practices maintain the tension between subjugation and escape, while also imbibing an ethical dimension that complicates the animal signifier. Considering SP’s deep engagement with animal activism, I suggest that their performance practices draw from both modernist aesthetics (especially Artaud), as well as the aesthetics of empathy and identification utilized by the early anti-vivisectionists who birthed the contemporary animal rights movement. I’m not yet sure my ultimate point but I want to play with the dyad of power and subjugation taken up by B. Johnson and further consider the role of affect and identification in performance practices and beyond (Muñoz?)
This sounds promising, Dana! I imagine you’re well-versed in animal studies, but one recent book that might be of interest for its focus on ethics is Sanaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (New Press, 2018). I’m also wondering if any strands of ecocriticism might be of use here? Just off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Erin James’s work, which has explored the empathy and identification in relation to non-human/animal characters (e.g. a 2019 article in Poetics Today on “Nonhuman Fictional Characters and the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis”). One suggestion in terms of structure and argumentation: While I don’t think you need to trace the full “lineage” of aesthetic practices linking modernist engagements with animality to SP’s, I would suggest at least a brief capsule overview that can both illuminate and in so doing make a case for this genealogy which may not be self-evident to readers…
Let me know if I can offer any support going forward, and looking forward to seeing how this evolves!
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14 Comments
Joanna
Working Title: Alive Criticism – T.S. Eliot on Nightwood
Theorists: T.S. Eliot
Proposal:
T.S. Eliot thought it an “impertinence” to add any introductory or explanatory remarks to Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood from 1936–and then did it anyway. In a note to the novel’s second edition in 1949, despite the “temptation which may present itself to any critic reviewing his own words,” he reaffirms his earlier estimation and resists revision. My paper focuses on Eliot’s introduction to Nightwood, specifically his assertion that Barnes’ poetic prose is “alive” and his resulting struggle, but ultimate arrival, at an “appreciation of its meaning as a whole.” The novel’s characters represent a group of societal outcasts in Paris and Vienna revolving around the ambiguous American Robin Vote. Felix, Nora and Jenny attempt to understand and control her. The self-proclaimed doctor Matthew meanwhile functions as a sort of therapist to the characters who are left in Robin’s wake and come to him for consolation. Eliot realized that instead of individual actors, the characters form a “whole pattern,” and especially the enigmatic Robin is only “alive” in relation to the others – much like the figure of the poet in Eliot’s earlier “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in which the poet is part of a whole, or later like the figure of the critic in “To Criticize the Critic.” I aim to show that the ‘wholeness’ and ‘aliveness’ Eliot bestows upon Barnes’ prose are related and do not only refer to the characterizations, but can also point to the almost painterly method of Barnes’ prose, and its place within the wholeness of poetry, or perhaps art in general, and criticism. I propose that Nightwood embodies Eliot’s literary criticism, and his own position within the genre, as criticism becomes ‘alive’ as well and continues through the novel by Djuna Barnes.
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
Joanna, I like the way you’ve framed and conceived your essay. I can see how Eliot’s introduction to Nightwood functions — as I think you are arguing — as a distillation of his critical commitments, which he brings to bear on Barnes’ work. I think what I’m wondering about a bit are the stakes of the essay. Is the goal, as you see it, to suggest that Nightwood epitomizes Eliot’s key arguments (about the importance of tradition and history), with the characters in the story functioning as the poet ideally would? if so, I might encourage you to push a bit on some of the bigger theoretical questions that might be present here. For instance, how do paratexts (including introductions) shape texts? What are the gendered implications—and practical affordances—of appending introductions by celebrated (male) poets onto a prose text authored by a woman? Are there ways in which you see Eliot as erring in his characterizations of Barnes’s novel; does her novel complicate or challenge his theories in important ways…? Etc. I’m not suggesting any of these questions is the one you *should* ask, only to give some examples of ones you might ask! (If you go with the first, Genette on paratexts is of course a good place to start…)
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
Title: Fetishism and Tragedy: Studying “Oedipus Rex” Through Freud
Author/Text: Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism”
Freud, in his essay “Fetishism”, focuses on how young boys tend to have a special relationship with their mothers because they come into the realization that they lack a penis. This so-called “fear of castration” is what causes this fetish to develop. Supposedly, this also makes boys be attached to their mothers and hate their fathers, which is what also happens in Sophocles’ famous tragedy, “Oedipus The King”. Even though fate has much to do with Oedipus’ situation, the protagonist murders his father and marries his mother, which could translate into what Freud believed about the mother-son relationship. I would like to focus on the Oedipal complex/fetishism part of the tragedy by looking at Freud’s studies, pretending that the story is not necessarily fictional, but true.
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
Exciting to hear about this interest in Freud, Zevi. However, I’m not sure from this description what you’ll be adding to Freud’s own studies of Oedipus? And what the payoff would be of the speculative exercise in the final sentence, which I don’t exactly follow. I’m afraid that pursuing this line of inquiry would lead you to a dead end…
So, I’m wondering if there’s another direction in which you’d like to take your analysis or application of Freud — or maybe another theorist or text or topic that is calling out to you…? Happy to chat more about it if it’s helpful!
Alice Ascoli (she/her)
“If only he would speak!”: Muteness, Gender, and Power in Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse”
Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” opens with Mrs. Ramsay’s speech: “‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow.'” The affirmation is briefly left suspended, hovering over the ensuing description of her son’s joy at the news, before it is quickly interdicted by the authoritarian Mr. Ramsay: “‘But,’ said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, ‘it won’t be fine.'” Inspired by Barbara Johnson’s “Muteness Envy,” I’d like to trace Woolf’s gendered utterances and silences as forms of power throughout the novel; identify the moment, or decision, towards speech within the ruminating consciousnesses (at dinner, on William Bankes: “He wanted somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself. He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his chair, looked at this person, then at that person, tried to break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut it again”); and the posture of silence utilized by the novel itself (Mrs. Ramsay’s death occurring within bracketed asides, gesturing towards the relegation of verbal, or written, language as the privileged narrative device, which could relate to Rancière’s “The Thread of the Novel”).
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
This all sounds really intriguing, Alice! As I mentioned, I have an essay (from years ago) that theorizes the withholding of female characters through the lens of Johnson’s essay — happy to share it, if only to give you further ideas for potential bibligraphy. I think there’s also a really interesting tension to be explored between the silences within Woolf’s novels and her own prolific output as a critic — i.e. someone who publically held forth on social and political issues of her day even as she became known (maybe not always rightly) for noevls that prioritized inwardness. Anwyay, lots of fascinating stuff here, looking forward to seeing it all come together!
Coco Fitterman
note: I know this is trying to do way too much! But posting anyway:
Working Title: “The Cute and the Eerie: Horror and Utopia in Ryan Trecartin’s Video Art”
Theorists: José Muñóz, Lee Edelman, Mark Fisher, Freud (The Uncanny), 2 outside articles on Ryan Trecartin (by Kareem Estefan and Wayne Koestenbaum)
Proposal: Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981) is an American artist and filmmaker whose video work, known for its frenetic pacing and manic editing, has received praise and recognition for foreshadowing our current moment, over which the micro-video format and influencer culture rule. However, there is much more to unpack with Trecartin’s work, particularly in relation to the burgeoning phenomenon of online “brain rot.” Why is brain rot so engaging and upsetting? And in what ways can we read the uncanny and queer utopia into it?
In this paper I will attempt to read Trecartin’s video work through a Freudian lens, charting the uncanny in the filmmaker’s use of overloaded-with-familiar-signifiers dialogue, costume, and mise-en-scéne. Humor, in the Freudian sense (understood as veiled aggression), will be analyzed also in relation to queer failure/utopia/lack of futurity (Muñoz and Edelman), as a precursor to the mainly queer-coded internet culture at large in our present moment.
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
Coco, this sounds really fascinating! Having checked out some of Trecartin’s work, I think the approach you described (and that we discussed in person) seems really promising — I can see the uncanny resonance of the surfeit of ‘familiar’ signifiers in his work. (I also saw a quote about how Trecartin cites the “music videos his babysitters’ put on” as a source of inspiration—the return of (repressed) infantile fantasies?) I’ll be interested to hear more about how you see the humor/latent aggression of the videos related to the to the failure/utopia piece. Just anecdotally, I can say that the overdetermined aesthetic of the pieces I watched *feels* pretty doom-y and no-future-y, like the internet just collapsing on itself…
Apropos of this week’s readings, I also found myself thinking about Sontag’s comment about pop art — that it’s so explicit and blatent, it preempts interpretation. Is that what’s happening here, or is it the opposite — the superimposition and recontextualization of images that *should* be blatent becoming un-interpretable from another angle? Or is this legible only to an interpretive community fluent in (queer) online culture? (Disregard this line of thought if it’s not helpful!)
Finally, I’m not sure how you’ll end up working with the idea of the “cute” in your title, but if you do I’d make sure to check out Sianne Ngai’s theorization of cute-ness in Our Aesthetic Categories. Or maybe there’s another aesthetic category you’d like to propose here, in place of cute?
Alex Riedel
(The following is not final whatsoever; in fact, I would like to leave open the possibility that I may end up scratching this entirely upon further research. But, at the moment, this is the general direction that I’m headed toward.)
Title: Bakhtin and Heteroglossia, Levinas and Discourse: On Centrifugal Otherness in the Novel
Theorists: Bakhtin, Levinas, Blanchot, possibly a quick glance at Buber and Rosenzweig, and then those relevant from secondary literature
If it can be argued that there holds legitimate resemblances between Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia” and Levinas’s “discourse” (where the latter is founded upon the distinction between the Saying and the Said) – and I argue that this is indeed the case – and if heteroglossia is the characteristic stylistic feature of the novel, Levinasian discourse may also be situated, by virtue of its likeness to Bakhtinian heteroglossia, in the distinctive language of the novel. This is to say that the exchange between the Same and the Other in the ethical face-to-face may be applied to the dynamisms of the literary language characteristic of the novel, and even of literature more generally. The face-to-face of Levinas is embedded “in” the very makeup of literary language: the “space of literature” à la Blanchot or, rather, the space of the novel in particular, is a locus whereby the infinity of the Other may rupture totality by virtue of the discourse characteristic of its language, much in the same way that, for Bakhtin, the heteroglossic character of the novel exhibits the centrifugality of decentralizing forces that make up its style. Thus, one of the fundamental elements of Levinas’s philosophical project indeed has quite a lot to say about the novel, even though neither of his magnum opera – Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974) – offer little to no commentary on the matter.
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
This is really interesting, Alex. So, if I’m understanding, you’re suggesting that something analagous takes place in these two spaces of discursive encounter — the one literary/novelistic (Bakhtin) and the other embodied (Levinas)? Discourse is of course a very important word for Bakhtin, too, so I think that term could “work” for both, and then you could tease out its different connotations and stakes in each case, and of course, the “dialogic” could be in play here, too…
On a related note, I think I mentioned it in class, but there’s a line from Bakhtin’s Speech Genres and Other Late essays that feels relevant here: “For the word (and consequently for a human being) there is nothing more fatal than the lack of response.” May have a PDF of the essay if you’re curious!
Peter
I don’t have a working title yet. My final paper will investigate the Yorgos Lanthimos film Dogtooth through the lens of Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” and Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” Though I haven’t found much supporting evidence or critical discussion about it, I think that Louis Aragon’s work called “Suicide” can provide a useful framework for discussing some of Nietzsche’s observations on language. I’m also intensely interested in the part of “On Truth” that discusses the arbitrary nature of gendered articles, like der Baum, though I don’t know if digressing into such ‘big swing’ territory will be helpful. Other inner texts are more works from Camila Grudova’s The Doll’s Alphabet, and I’m intrigued by Hoffman, to whom Grudova is greatly indebted. “The Golden Pot” and “Councillor Krespel” are exciting and incredibly imaginative stories. Where do the gothic, the uncanny, the unnerving, the horrifying diverge? What has language and potentially its repetition (maybe chance to incorporate Baudrillard’s unreality simulacrum model) to do with such divergences? How are severe structures of repression portrayed in Dogtooth reflective of some overarching quality of the uncanny/repetitive/entrancing/abstracting qualities of language. Stay tuned to find out!
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
Intriguging stuff here, Peter! As I think I mentioned, Dogtooth seems like a really interesting testing ground for Nietzsche’s essay, in particular. I’ll admit I’m less compelled by “The Uncanny” as a lens here, only because the film (at least in my memory?) doesn’t seem to satisfy some of its pre-requisites. One other possible pairing here, giving your interest in the arbitrarily gendered nature of language would of course be Saussure, which could work nicely with “On Truth and Lying…” I’d probably also caution against introducing too many primary texts/case studies (if that’s what you mean by “inner texts”) and to stay with Dogtooth—or to develop a clear rationale as to WHY these diverse texts. As stated here, I’m not totally clear about how the questions about the uncanny/gothic relate to the questions about language and signification. So, that may be the big thing you either need to resolve, or it may be the impetus to shift in one direction or another. It can be so tempting in an end-of-semester paper to want to do *all the things* but sometimes hard choices are needed! And if I can help by talking through some of this more, just let me know!
Dana
For modernism onward, animality or beastliness was taken as a potent site of alterity that could help one escape the strictures of humanist subjectivity. Meanwhile, these same signifiers also function as a shorthand for the limit case of subjugation. How might these tensions be embedded in aesthetic practices that are indebted to this lineage? I take as my case study the major 1980s Industrial band Skinny Puppy. SP and industrial music more broadly statedly emerge from the lineage of modernist art practice, and share many of the posthuman gestures to forge a path away from the norms of commercial music. Moreover, Skinny Puppy integrates animality into their performance through a vocal style predicated on grunts and growls and stage performances that include a mock vivisection. I argue that these performance practices maintain the tension between subjugation and escape, while also imbibing an ethical dimension that complicates the animal signifier. Considering SP’s deep engagement with animal activism, I suggest that their performance practices draw from both modernist aesthetics (especially Artaud), as well as the aesthetics of empathy and identification utilized by the early anti-vivisectionists who birthed the contemporary animal rights movement. I’m not yet sure my ultimate point but I want to play with the dyad of power and subjugation taken up by B. Johnson and further consider the role of affect and identification in performance practices and beyond (Muñoz?)
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
This sounds promising, Dana! I imagine you’re well-versed in animal studies, but one recent book that might be of interest for its focus on ethics is Sanaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (New Press, 2018). I’m also wondering if any strands of ecocriticism might be of use here? Just off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Erin James’s work, which has explored the empathy and identification in relation to non-human/animal characters (e.g. a 2019 article in Poetics Today on “Nonhuman Fictional Characters and the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis”). One suggestion in terms of structure and argumentation: While I don’t think you need to trace the full “lineage” of aesthetic practices linking modernist engagements with animality to SP’s, I would suggest at least a brief capsule overview that can both illuminate and in so doing make a case for this genealogy which may not be self-evident to readers…
Let me know if I can offer any support going forward, and looking forward to seeing how this evolves!