This is just to welcome you to English 306/COMPL 301 this semester. Take a look around: you can get a sense of the assignments and expectations via the syllabus and what we’re read and when via the schedule. Feel free to reach out via email with any questions, and I look forward to meeting you later this month.

Here is a 30 minute audio lecture hitting some of the high points of the Spillers piece for today. I also recommend the Wikipedia entry on Spillers. Weirdly, it doesn’t say much about her career beyond the “Mama’s Baby” essay, but it gives a bang-up summary of the argument.

Your only assignment is to email me a brief (one-paragraph) comment or question on the reading. Here are some questions that you can answer, though you’re free to write about some other aspect if you like:

1. How does Spillers open the essay? What does it mean to be a “marked woman”? How does this opening compare with Fanon’s from earlier in the term?
2. What is the Moynihan Report? You might need to use Google or Wikipedia to get a quick sense. What are some of the ways Spillers confronts the conclusions of the Report regarding the “black family”?
3. What is distinctive about the shape of the black family that emerges from enslavement? How and why does it differ from the patriarchal structure of Western families, the structure assumed by Freud’s theory?
4. What is “monstrous” about black mothers in Spillers’ view? See p. 80. Is this a bad thing? What are some of the effects of the centrality of this maternal figure in the black family?

And for good measure, here’s the lecture on Peter Brooks’s essay from Tuesday. As with today’s class, if you haven’t already, you should email me a one-paragraph response to any of the study questions to stand as your participation grade for the day.

For Tuesday, we’ll be back in action. We’ll read an excerpt from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: I don’t have the right page numbers, since my copy is at the office, but you’ll find it in the Norton. I’m going to post the correct study questions right now as well. For those who have used their “skip,” you’ll need to submit your final blog post by Tuesday. Feel free to expand on your paragraphs on Brooks or Spillers for that assignment, if you like.

As promised, here’s a 15 minute lecture on Johnson:

Johnson480p

Brief lecture unpacking Barbara Johnson’s “Melville’s Fist” for 306 students

After you’ve finished reading and watching, please post on one of the following questions, which will serve as your Blog Post #3:

1. What kind of reader is Billy? What kind is Claggart? How does Johnson use Saussure’s theory of signifier/signified to clarify this difference?
2. On 2268-9, Johnson reads the plot of BB against the grain: that is, as if Claggart were right and Billy were guilty of a willful mutiny. What is the point of this? What does it say about BB that either reading is equally defensible?
3. How does Johnson distinguish, on one hand, a “difference within” and, on the other, a “difference between” in her discussion of Vere’s act of judging? What does Melville’s text tell us about these two different kinds of differences?
4. What does the example of Vere suggest about our commonsensical notion that judges are “above politics”: that is, that they decide on guilt/innocence independently of the practical effects of this judgement (2275)?

Greetings to students in my ENGL306/COMPL301 this term. I look forward to meeting you Monday. Note that all the other posts on this site were written by myself and prior students, who have left their work here for your benefit.

As before, I’d like to give a shout-out to a few top-notch posts from this round. I’ve selected for quality and also for coverage: I’m really happy that so many of you wrote about texts we hadn’t yet discussed together! So check out:

• Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams: Lei’s on Freud and dreams nicely mixes anecdote and summary of argument to give a vivid sense of how “dream thoughts” are transformed.
• Lacan’s “mirror stage” essay:
  • Anna H nicely links the productivity of the mirror vis a vis the developing subject.
  • Ayesha gives a bang-up reading of the whole argument, with an emphasis on Lacan’s tricky concept of “meconaissance” or “misrecognition”
• Meltzer’s piece on “unconscious”:
  • James digs into the tricky relationship between Freud’s thought and Lacan’s revision/return.
• Freud on the “fetish”:
  • Lizzie explores the “purgatorial” space of the fetish (and dig the title!)

Two-pronged shout-out here:

1. There’s a useful documentary on the Kanopy interface on the life and work on Fanon. The production is a bit cheesy in the manner of all “dramatizations,” but the talking head work by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha and cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall is news you can use.
2. More broadly, Kanopy is an amazing and underutilized resource accessible to Hunter students. It’s a big collection of films of all kinds, especially strong in documentaries and educational materials. For me, and for many English major nerds, I suspect, the crown jewel is a big chunk of the Criterion Collection archive of classic films, spanning early cinema (Chaplin, Keaton) to more recent “new classics” from across the globe. It’s a bit of a hassle to sign up, but once you do, you can access via iOS/Android/laptop/Roku or whatever.