A few more reading notes to come...

Hi everyone,

As promised, I'll post here a few notes about the articles by Barthes, Guillory, and Bloom a bit later this morning.

A good site on postmodernism

This is a site that's linked to from the Postmodern Thought site I mentioned a couple of months ago on the blog (in my post about Jacques Derrida). If you scroll down the page, you'll find a good table outlining some of the primary differences between Modernism/Modernity and Postmodernism/Postmodernity.

Discussion Question: Answers to a few questions about the final....

On Dec 9, 2004, at 6:12 PM, Julia Kristeva wrote:

hey paul,
i really appreciate it that you are going to post up some notes about guillory,
bloom and barthes. i am a bit confused about them and their exact thoughts.

i have a feeling that i missed class when we talked about spivak. i read it and have a few questions...

Thanks. I'm hoping to get to posting some stuff in the next couple of hours.

You're absolutely right about Spivak in that we never read it, it turns out. That remained on the list from my 086 class over the summer. I deleted it from the blog article list a couple of days ago, but forgot to mention it to everyone. :( Sorry about that!

We talked about the Barthes at a number of points in the course, but without ever getting around to reading the article until now. I've included some important quotes from the article in the blog entry about intertextuality, but will talk a bit more about Barthes shortly on the blog.

I'm also going to add part of our conversation to the blog, as I'm sure many of you have the same questions.

Ondaatje article links

The blog entry from earlier in the term fails to mention that these are available online from the library's electronic reserves page.

To find them, simply follow this link and then choose "View Course Reserves" under the Do It Yourself menu. Then, search under my name and you'll find links to PDF versions of the three texts. I've assigned them for my English 086 students, but you might like to look at these as well.

Discussion Question: Barthes, Guillory and Bloom (in progress)

Hi everyone,

Just a quick follow-up to our limited in-class discussion of Barthes, Bloom and Guillory.

BARTHES:
As I mentioned earlier, we've talked about Barthes article at many points throughout the semester, but here are a few key points to remember. Barthes, as you'll be reminded from my posting on intertextuality, talks about any text is made up of all texts that have come before it. The author is not a solitary, genius figure who pulls all of the text out of thin air, but rather someone who pulls together all of the things he or she has absorbed and arranges them in a somewhat new form. Barthes argues that it is the reader's job not to "decipher a text" but to "disentangle" it. (reread the last full paragraph on 256)

He says that it is in the reader and not in the author that the text finds its "unity," that the reader is the place where everything comes together. This leads to the most famous line of the article: "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author" (257).

Guillory: The Canon as Cultural Capital (excerpt from his book Cultural Capital)

Guillory's argument isn't so much an attack or a defence of the traditional literary canon, but rather an examination of many of the problematic assumptions that are part of that argument.

First, he talks about "school culture" as the thing which always "remains invisible within this debate [. . . ]. School culture [, he argues] does not unify the nation culturally so much as it projects out of a curriculum of artifact-based knowledge an imaginary culture of the nation-state."

This "imaginary culture" has little relation to the real national "culture," in the ethnographic sense of the word, that is to say the nation's "common beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes" (220). "Culture" when used in the canon debate usually refers to a sense of "refinement" or high culture. He argues that the canon debate often projects our own national culture as a direct extension of Western Culture and that the introduction of "multiculturalism" and non-canonical works into the curriculum is somehow an attack on "the 'great works' of Western civilization" (220).

What Guillory argues though is that this debate sets up a false opposition between the Western tradition and multiculturalism, mostly because these "great works" are in fact "deracinated" artifacts that have been entirely removed "the actual circumstances of their production and consumption" (221) in such a way as to suggest that Homer, Dante, Rousseau, and Tolstoy, for instance, have more in common with each other than with their own cultural and historical contexts. Not only that, they are often taught in translation as "great works of literature in English" (221).

"The function imposed upon schools of acculturating students in 'our' culture often thus requires that texts be read 'out of context,' as signs of cultural continuity, or cultural unity." (222)

Harold Bloom "Elegiac Conclusion"

(this article is the epilogue to Bloom's book The Westen Canon in which he talks about what he believes to be the 100 or so most important works of Western culture)

Bloom's article is a great illustration of what Guillory shows to be the problematic assumptions made in the debate between the "Westen Canon" and the threat of the invasion of "professors of hip-hop" and "multiculturalists unlimited" (225).

He also states in this article that "the strongest poetry is cognitively and imaginatively too difficult to be read deeply by more than a relative few of any social class, gender, race, or ethnic origin" (227) and that those scholars who have become focused on theory "resent literature, or are ashamed of it, or are just not all that fond of reading it" (228).

The love and appreciation of "great" literature is what he argues we should be teaching.