English 2331 - Survey of World Literature 11:00 version
Welcome to the course. The main purpose of the site is to provide you with .pdfs of all the readings in the course. You are, of course, welcome to purchase the texts or print them out, but if you find yourself digitally adept, feel free to simply use the .pdfs. A brief word of caution on that, however, is that there are times when a web address for the .pdf moves or is removed.
Also contained on the site are the various assignments you will have during the course, discussions of the periods we are covering, and other material. These will be stable, but many find it best to print them out.
From Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992).
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Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated –overpopulated– with the intentions of others. Expropriating I, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process... As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other... The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes one’s "own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language... but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own (p.294)
From Roman Jakobson in "Modern Russian Poetry: Velimir Khlebnikov", in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. E.J.Brown, Oxford University Press, 1973, pp 58-82.
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The object of a science of literature is not literature, but literariness—that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature. Until now literary historians have preferred to act like the policeman who, intending to arrest a certain person, would, at any opportunity, seize any and all persons who chanced into the apartment, as well as those who passed along the street. The literary historians used everything—anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they created a conglomeration of homespun disciplines.
From Ngugi wa Thing'o "The Quest for Relevance" in Decolonising the Mind Oxford University Press, 1981 p 93
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"African children who encountered literature in colonial schools and universities were thus experiencing the world as defined and reflected in the European experience of history. Their entire way of looking at the world, event he world of the immediate environment, was Eurocentric. Europe was the centre of the universe. The earth moved around the European intellectual scholarly axis. The images children encountered in literature were reinforced by their study of geography and history, and science and technology where Europe was, once again, the centre. This in turn fitted well with the cultural imperatives of British imperialism."
Week 5
From Simon Gikandi "Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality" in The South Atlantic Quarterly 2001 p628-9
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"These questions are made even more urgent by the realization that while we live in a world defined by cultural and economic flows across formally entrenched national boundaries, the world continues to be divided, in stark terms, between its "developed" and "underdeveloped" sectors. It is precisely because of the starkness of this division that the discourse of globalization seems to be perpetually caught between two competing narratives, one of celebration, the other of crisis.
For Draw/Write #2, pick either Ngugi or Achebe.
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Change step 3 to these instructions:
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Step Three:
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On a separate sheet, visually represent how this passage would be understood with the geography and culture of Texarkana. Basically, locate the passage not in Africa but here in East Texas AND make sure you include how it either fits or changes the theme of the story in at least your writing about it, but in your drawing as much as you can.
Week 6
From Jacques Derrida "The Truth that Wounds" in "Sovereignty's in Question" p167-8
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"That is another dimension of violence, different from the one I was just speaking of: the risk of saturating, of suturing. One can also take the risk, and it is an interesting risk, of writing about a poem something of which the signatory was, at the bottom, unaware, did not mean, did not master -- in any case, would have been surprised to hear said of his own poem. I do not know what Celan would have thought of my reading. I have no idea, but the desire to surprise him with the gesture of my reading is not foreign to me. If I do something, it must be something that appraises of surprises, teaches something to the reader but also the I that signs the text. You saw that the position of I and You is complicated in this poem. Who is I? Who signs this poem? What is the literary signature and what is the non-literary signature of this poem? It is very difficult to say. Even impossible. Hence, an interpretation that surprises presupposes violence with regards to the conscious signatory of the poem: you meant what you did not know you wanted to say; you will have said more than you think or something other than you think. That is what analysis is, be it deconstructive or not. You said something you do not think you said or that you did not mean to say. It is violent, that's true."
For Draw/Write #3, pick either Arimah or Emelumada
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Change step 3 to these instructions:
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Step Three:
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On a separate sheet, visually represent how this passage represents something Arimah or Emelumada might not have meant or is might be something they did not think they said.
Week 7
For Draw/Write #4, pick either Guibert or Laroui
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Change step 3 to these instructions:
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Step Three:
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You certainly can use theory if you want, but you don't have to do so this time. Instead think about how the text you didn't choose provides either a similar or different image. Guibert is a French author setting his story in Morocco and Laroui is a Moroccan author setting his story in France. It would seem Derrida, Gikandi, or any other would be helpful, but necessary,
Week 8
Frans Masereel "The Passion of a Man"
"L'Idee" by Maria Bartosch
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Bartosch is animating "L'Idee" by Frans Masereel
Week 9
From Michel Foucault "Madness and Civilization" 14
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"In farces and soties, the character of the Madman, the Fool, or the Simpleton assumes more and more importance. He is no longer simply a ridiculous and familiar silhouette in the wings: he stands
center stage as the guardian of truth-playing here a role which is the complement and converse of that taken by madness in the tales and the satires. If folly leads each man into a blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of his truth; in a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the
madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception; he utters, in his simpleton's language which makes no show of reason, the words of reason that release, in the comic, the comedy: he speaks love to lovers, the truth of life to the young, the middling reality of things to the proud, to the insolent, and to liars. Even the old feasts of fools, so popular in Flanders and northern Europe, were theatrical events, and organized into social and moral criticism, whatever they may have contained of spontaneous religious parody."
For Draw/Write #5, pick any of the most recent texts
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Change step 3 to these instructions:
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Step Three:
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When you pick a passage, draw the "reason" in the passage for the first drawing and draw in the second picture why society "reasonably" sees it as "unreason."
Week 10
Week 11
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From Garcia Canclini's "Hybrid Cultures" p xxv
"I will start with a first definition: I understand for hybridization sociocultural processes in which discrete structures or practices, previously existing in separate form, are combined to generate new structures, objects and practices. In turn, it bears noting that the so-called discrete structures were a result of prior hybridizations and therefore cannot be considered pure points of origin. An example: currently there is a debate over Spanglish, born in the Latino communities of the United States and extended via the internet throughout the world, can be accepted, taught in university courses (as happens at Amherst College in Massachusetts), and become the object of specialized dictionaries. As if Spanish and English were languages unindebted to Latin, Arabic, and pre-Columbian languages."
For Draw/Write #6, pick any of the texts we've read AND you haven't written about yet
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Change step 3 to these instructions:
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Step Three:
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When you pick a passage, pick one that points to a lack of "pure point of origin." For example, I might pick a passage from Yoshimoto about how we expect artists to collaborate and participate in art or how a space is public or private such as the meeting for the date or the idea that all memories are sacred and should not be stripped away..
Week 12
From Jacques Derrida "Letter to a Japanese Friend" p 1.
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At our last meeting I promised you some schematic and preliminary reflections on the word "deconstruction". What we discussed were prolegomena to a possible translation of this word into Japanese, one which would at least try to avoid, if possible, a negative determination of its significations or connotations. The question would be therefore what deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be. I underline these words "possible" and "ought". For if the difficulties of translation can be anticipated (and the question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation, and of the language of concepts, of the conceptual corpus of so-called "western" metaphysics), one should not begin by naively believing that the word "deconstruction" corresponds in French to some clear and univocal signification. There is already in "my" language a serious [sombre] problem of translation between what here or there can be envisaged for the word, and the usage itself, the reserves of the word. And it is already clear that even in French, things change from one context to another. More so in the German, English, and especially American contexts, where the same word is already attached to very different connotations, inflections, and emotional or affective values. Their analysis would be interesting and warrants a study of its own.
For Draw/Write #7, pick any of the texts we've read AND you haven't written about yet
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Change step 3 to these instructions:
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Step Three:
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When you pick a passage, pick one that points signification, connotation, and most importantly "the reserves of the word[s]" Draw the signification, connotation, and the reserves.
Two opportunities to "save" you from Draw Write Hell
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Basically, if you do one or both of these, I will drop your lowest or two lowest Draw Write scores. Yes, this can mean the two zeros for the 7th and 8th ones that you didn't do, or it can mean that you tried all 8 and I drop the lowest one or two. If you're confused, ask me.
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Opportunity # 1: A survey (I'll take your word you did it, just send me an email that you did).
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My name is Halie Buckner. I am an IRB Certified Graduate Student at Texas A&M University - Texarkana.Through the guidance of Dr. Goldstein here at TAMUT, I am conducting a research project over The Digital Literacy Culture Change.
The purpose of this research is to look at the phenomenon of culture change in recent years as we have witnessed more technology integrated into the classroom. This phenomenon has led to the expectations that students are to come to the university being tech and net savvy since most students are now labeled as digital natives. However, there are many times that this is simply not the case because secondary schools around the nation have not integrated enough technology for students to be considered connoisseurs of digital literacy. I am looking at how digital literacy has changed the undergraduate classrooms.
If you have further question or concerns, please feel free to email me at any time at halie.ingram@ace.tamut.edu.
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Thank you for your consideration in this matter.
Halie Buckner
Texas A&M University - Texarkana
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The link to the survey is attached below.
Opportunity #2: Go see Molly Sweeney (again, email me that you did).
Week 13
Freud, 'Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality'
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They [the paranoid], too, cannot regard anything in other people as indifferent, and they, too, take up minute indications with which these other, unknown, people present them, and use them in their 'delusions of reference'. The meaning of their delusions of reference is that they expect from all strangers something like love. But these people show them nothing of the kind; they laugh to themselves, flourish their sticks, even spit on the ground as they go by - and one really does not do such things while a person in whom one takes a friendly interest is near. One does them only when one feels quite indifferent to the passer-by, when one can treat him like air; and, considering, too, the fundamental kinship of the concepts of ,stranger' and 'enemy', the paranoic is not so far wrong in regarding this indifference as hate, in contrast to his claim for love.
For Draw/Write #8, pick any of the texts we've read AND you haven't written about yet
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Change step 3 to these instructions:
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Step Three:
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One drawing of your passage should detail how the "paranoid" is wrong and one the way the "paranoid" is not so far wrong.