Poststructuralism by Josh Eddy https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s en-us 2023-02-02 02:24:04 UTC 2023-02-11 00:40:31 UTC hello@padlet.com Chapter 1: "Introduction" by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan rhiannonfarr1 https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467908894
  • Post-structuralism: uses language & linguistics to argue “that all such orders [kinship systems to fashion] are founded on an essential endemic disorder in language and in the world that can never be mastered by any structure” (553).
  • A radical counter-movement to Structuralism formulated in the 1960s, questioning traditional methods and their rationale to describe the world.
  • Post-Structuralists claim “all such orders [signs seen as windows to trans-empirical worlds] are strategies of power and social control, ways of ignoring reality rather than understanding it” (553). 
  • Friedrich Nietzche (French) and Martin Heidegger (German) were both influential Post-Structuralists. Heidegger inspired the work of Jean-Paul Sarte whose text Being and Nothingness elaborates on themes that are foundations in Post-Structuralism, and becomes the major assumptions of thinkers like Jacques Derrida (554).
    • This set the tone of new French thought: classical reason banished alternative thought by labeling them as “madness.” Mystics were incarcerated due to the invention of Reason (guided by the Enlightenment).
      • Reason assisted capitalism by “permitting utility or usefulness to be calculated and objects and people to be identified, assigned categories, and controlled” (554).
      • General outline of Post-structuralism:
        • AGAINST:
          • Meaning, figuration, rigid structure, free play, conceptuality, resistance of the object, identity, endless difference, the relation to the other in general, making sense, the making sense of sense of non-sense, of universality, authority, the Party, the people, rationality, the social system, and so on (569).
        • Poststructuralism = postmodernism

    • Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) was another early Post-Structuralist book that allowed readers a chance to see Nietzche’s undermining the “rational ideal of knowledge and his caustic critique” of Christian’s ideology of placing spiritual meaning in and on everything (554). 
      • Deleuze published Difference and Repetition in 1968 and The Logic of Meaning in 1969 which extrapolate on Nietzche’s ideas of “play and the differences of force that constitute reality” (561). 
      • Difference and Repetition (1968) delves into the opposite study of Plato: no universal ideas, only appearances (but cannot be called appearances because they do not make anything truly appear).
      • The Logic of Meaning (1969) is about sense and meaning, and how it depends on “non-sense” (561). Language is unified through a nonsensical process that doesn’t “permit a differentiation between the world of matter and the world of language” (561). Deleuze’s argument is to make sense of the world by counter-moving this movement meaning towards “non-meaning, sense towards non-sense” (561).

    • Michael Foucault then published a book in 1966 titled The Order of Things (or Words and Things) which examines how rationalism changes over time, that the idea of “order” was a historical invention– that “Reason” exists to represent divide. 

    • Jacques Lacan published Ecrits (Writings) in 1966. For him, language was a crucial aspect to psychology/self-identity. 

    • Jacques Derrida published three books in 1967: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomenon.Derrida applies the “diacritical” principle that Saussure claims, to everything: that “there are no self-identical terms in language that stand on their own ;language consists of differences, not identities” (558).
      • “All being and all thought is similarly differential” (558).
      • Everything that exists as a thing that is known is only in so much as it is different from something else. To think it is what it exists as, you must “suppress and ignore the differentiating process that constitutes it” (558). 
      • Derrida asks of philosophy: is difference more original than identity? We cannot speak of truth without speaking of signification, differentiation, repetition, and non-identity– this is what is essential to meaning-making in language (560).
      • Derrida’s biggest claim is that writing (differance) is more “primordial” than speech and truth. Without it, there is no truth.
      • Essentially, these ideas that Derrida founded create a death sentence for Platonism and Hegelianism, which take the material/empirical world into “ideal meanings/truths that stand outside history” (560).

    • Julia Kristeva (radical author of Tel Quel ?) published Semiotike: Towards a Semanalysis (1969) and Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). She combines aesthetic and radical politics.
      • In Semiotike: Towards a Semanalysis (1969), she links Marx’s production notion to semiotics and shows French readers the work of Mikhail Bakhtin for the first time. 
      • In Poetic Language (1974), she claims that authors who undermine the order of signification ultimately “tap into a well” of “unordered language processes and unarticulated sounds” to gather new thoughts for society’s greater freedom and liberation from capitalism. 
        • “Experimental literature engages in deliberate disturbances of those orders” (562).

    • Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire (1972) and Luce Irigaray’s Speculum had affected how audiences viewed gay and feminist theory.
      • Hocquenghem argued that society’s fear of homosexuality is a simple way of “dealing with the subversive transversality of desire, the way all sexualities exist on a continuum of possibilities, none of which is more valuable or natural than another” (565). 
      • Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977) argues a feminist separatism lens, stating that women in the West have been viewed (philosophically) as “matter, body, physicality, fluidity, boundarylessness, irrationality, artificiality, and the like” (565). In both these books, Irigaray plays on the word “speculation” which (in philosophy) refers to the process of reasoning, but here it is to see a “speculum” of a male dominated theory. 
        • She encourages women to focus on the body instead of the philosophy (the object and subject, the truth and matter). 
    • Helene Cixous in her novel The Newly Born Woman argues a similar thing, that things are separated from one another (man and woman, nature and culture, logos and pathos). 

    • Jean Baudrillard published The System of Objects in 1968 which delves into how material objects developed into equivalent personal identities and commodities (567). This code dominates us, who we are, and there is no separation. 
      • Baudrillard argues that the socialist reformation movement shouldn’t be a shorter working day or week, it should be the abolition of capitalism as the system currently equates money to human life. 

    We are the world we live in without knowing it, without being able to know it. It cannot be known. "It can only be lived in knowingly" (574).


    ]]>     2023-02-03 17:45:41 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467908894     Chapter 2- "The Will to Power" by Frierich Nietzche rhiannonfarr1 https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467913311
  • Died before being able to publish this work, it being his biggest.
  • Published (?) in 1885-6
  • He claims there is no origin or goal of the world, no teleology

    • A lot of what I gather from Nietzche’s writings is that he believes there is no true meaning or potential depth behind words, that the reason things mean something is because we (as a society) put the meaning there. For example, in excerpt 513, he claims, “The inventive force that invented categories labored in the service of our needs, namely of our need for security, for quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, for means of abbreviation: ‘substance,’ ‘subject,’ ‘object,’ ‘being,’ ‘becoming’ have nothing to do with metaphysical truths. – It is the powerful who made the names of things into law, and among the powerful it is the greatest artists in abstraction who created the categories” (577). There is truly nothing behind the word “being,” but we as a people have created a meaning. What I gather from Nietzsche is that he sees people as things that strive for meaning, or strive for understanding.

    The introduction addressed that he believes people have a drive for knowledge and mastery. Maybe this is what that is?


    ]]>     2023-02-03 17:49:22 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467913311     Chapter 2 of Toolbox- "Authort/ity" rhiannonfarr1 https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467914132
  • To Nealon and Giroux, author/ity is “to be taken seriously and ever revered for your accomplishments” (11).
  • The difference between the two? One is canonized and one isn’t.
    • Canonicity “involves the list of accepted ‘great’ works that are deemed worthy of continued scholarly attention” (11). 
  • Author access:
    • Lack of historical data on authors does not necessarily disadvantage a text.
    • Examples: William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Beowulf 
  • It does help to have the background of an author, of course, but it does not diminish the meaning of the work if there is not one (a.k.a. Beowulf) or there is little to no historical data (a.k.a. Shakespeare & Chaucer).
  • Author function: 
    • Author-function is defined as a “guarantee of meaning” of the literary text (16). 
    • Often used as a way to gate-keep different forms of discourse on a text.
  • Death of the author:
    • The “opportunity to free up the multiplicity of meanings in and around a text” (18). 
    • Nealon and Giroux state the meaning is “no longer found but rather produced” (18).
    • Line between art and artist?
      • Can we do this when the artist is still alive? (Kanye, J.K. Rowling, Colleen Hoover)

  • Where do we go from here? How can we continue to challenge “author/ity”? Is it able to be challenged?

    • ]]>     2023-02-03 17:50:01 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467914132     Chapter 6- "The Death of the Author" edgarronguerra https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467976415 Based on the previous work of Derrida, the implication of the author being just one point of reference for a text emerged. This particular idea would be of significance to Barthes' work.

    Roland Barthes’ writing and ideas are heavily influenced by Derrida’s. Barthes argues that the figure of the “Author” is a modern figure that has dominated literary criticism and history. In contemporary culture, he argues, the figure of the Author has become tyrannical when it comes to determining the meaning of a text. The meaning of a text becomes the Author themselves, with no room for disagreements or other interpretations. As such, Barthes invites the reader to challenge this notion of the Author as the most important aspect of a literary text. Instead, he invites the reader to transform this concept into that of the Scriptor, the writer. No more is the meaning of a text tied to an Author-God figure who could determine what it was, making the literary text a one-dimensional entity. Furthermore, criticism has been the search for this one meaning in a text that is intimately associated and related to the Author figure. 

    ]]>     2023-02-03 18:44:10 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467976415     Chapter 7- "From Work to Text" edgarronguerra https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467981729 Barthes describes an epistemological shift when it comes to our understanding of Literature as a discipline. As Barthes mentions, “The combined action of Marxism, Freudianism, and structuralism compels us, in literature, to relativize the relations of scriptor, reader, and observer (critic).”

    Inspired by Marxism, Freudianism, structuralism, Barthes makes a distinction between a work and a text when it comes to thinking of literary writing. This is an epistemological shift, where one conceives of the literary text as a part of a network of other texts. It is located in language, instead of being a mere commodity like the work, and it has a plurality in its meaning by which it can’t be reduced to simply a single one imposed by the Author God. As Barthes mentions, "The plurality of the Text depends, as a matter of fact, not on the ambiguity of its contents, but on what we might call the stereographic plurality of the signifiers which weave it (etymologically, the text is a fabric.” 


    ]]>     2023-02-03 18:49:04 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467981729     Chapter 8- "Writing" edgarronguerra https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467985278 Johnson, in this chapter, goes through an overview of the theoretical “revolution” in France in the 1960’s. Following some of Derrida’s ideas, Johnson challenges the notion that reading is about merely finding the one single meaning hidden within a text. Instead, the notion of meaning becomes more complex (opens up the possibility for there to be multiple) and not one-dimensional. As such, it is important to read what is on the page and not focus too much on the notion of finding a hidden meaning in it. 

    ]]>     2023-02-03 18:51:59 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467985278     edgarronguerra https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467989592 Josh Eddy

    Ronnie Guerra

    Rhiannon Farr

    Patrice Donnelly ]]>     2023-02-03 18:55:27 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2467989592     Chapter 4 - Difference! patricedonnelly https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468550038 INTRODUCTION TO THE ESSAY "DIFFERENCE!"

    Background

    The essay entitled "Difference" by Jacques Derrida, an Algerian-French philosopher (1930-2004), was first published in 1968. Drawing on the works of Nietzche, Heidegger, and Saussure, he claims that it is spatial and temporal movement that makes all thought and all reality possible (474). As we read in Rhianna's post on Nietzche, a German philosopher (1844-1900), words were considered empty vessels until people imbued them with meaning, and that meaning had purpose that could shift over time. Saussare (1857-1913) a Swiss linguist, argued "in language there are only forms" (474). He regarded the 'form' lacked substance. Over time, the form would shape the identity and substance through a network of other forms, each different than the other. We make sense of the identity of each form because of the differences between them as they operate within a network (474). 

    As an aside, considering pragmatically how humans learned to communicate through a written or oral alphabet/sound-based language, the first few words had to have evolved in context and must have stood out in contrast to one another. Some first words probably had connections to sounds that evoked common emotions, which would give them a kind of substance, but the language itself grew to be filled with other words and expressions that were not inherently emotional, rather were intellectual/creative. For example, the word 'book' does not have a corresponding emotional sound and only had meaning attributed to it in comparison to 'magazine,' as an example, or through a 'definition' which is actually a compilation of several 'different' words in this sense. The development of languages, therefore, I am thinking, involve an ongoing interplay between the emotional and the intellectual. There is an aspect of 'truthfulness' in words being rooted to shared emotional meanings, however, we have more than that in our languages. Meaning is attributed through a cultural process.

    Another influential philosopher for Derrida was Heidegger, a German philosopher (1889-1976). Heidegger was a highly influential contributor to the phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. Heidegger's philosophical writings is a cornerstone of Derrida's ideas, in particular the concpet of 'being.' Simply put, Heidegger's ideas culminated in his magnum opus Being and Time (1927), in which he asserts fundamental principles of existentialism. Among them is the idea that time can only be understood from a finite or mortal vantage point. Being-in-the-world implies both a present and a past sense. His work is regarded as highly complex and one of the most influential texts written within the 20th century.

    A few definitions may be helpful before reading an introduction to the essay, below, and then looking at a quote from the essay in the next column.

    Referring to the Oxford Dictionary of English language, phenomenology is the study of consciousness and objects of direct experience; hermeneutics is a branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation of texts, especially the Bible and literature; and existentialism is a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.

    Finally, the metaphysical tradition, as we will read, pertains to a pursuit of a fundamental and singular/original truth in language. Metaphysics is the branch of philosphy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space.

    Introduction to Jacques Derrida: Difference!

    In his essay, Difference!, Jacques Derrida contends that our thoughts and perceptions, like language, are governed by similar processes (474). Ideas have no substance of their own, but only in context and comparison/contrast with other ideas found in a network do they obtain their substance. In order to shatter the idea that there is a fundamental truth to language, that is the creation/development of language, Derrida uses two 'axes:' time and 'space.' (okay, I love this part!) Every 'present' moment is shadowed by the passing of the moment, or death of the moment, as it quickly becomes the past, and every 'present' moment also bears the future present moments towards which it is moving (474-75). Therefore, when we think of anything, it is impossible to grasp it just within the given 'present' moment.  With respect to space, the second axis, within any space that helps to identify the thought or perception, that process is inextricably linked to differences within that same space (475). Hence, there is no singular truth about language that does not involve difference. 

    Derrida concludes the essay with the topic of 'confluence of ideas' (475). Everything in existence is relationally connected (475). While we can analyse specific parts, we cannot understand the parts apart from the process of relation and differentiation (475), that is, they are not 'pure' entities. This is also referred to as "textual" in that all parts refer to other parts. 

    Comparing thought to writing, if we consider the traditional definition of writing as a representation of mental speech (the word represents a particular syllabic set of sounds), we can similarly think of concepts as 'graphic' representations of thought involving a spatial-temporal movement of 'differences' (475). Movement, which invokes both axes of time and space, is essential to all aspects of Derrida's writings. 

    Lastly, Derrida famously notes that concepts are known in opposition to one another, such as "the intelligble and the sensible, nature and culture, the ideal and the physical" (475). Derrida, known as a 'deconstructionist' which involves understanding the relationship between text and meaning, however, goes beyond a limited "deconstruction" of binary opposition. Although an analysis of binary oppositions can serve as an illustrative guide to difference, Derrida seeks to to ultimately question the "values and assumptions of the metaphysical philosophical tradition" pertaining to thought and perceptions (475). 


















      

    ]]>     2023-02-04 17:08:45 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468550038     The Difference in "Differance" patricedonnelly https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468606671 Derrida's essay on "Difference!" looks at the word 'difference' by comparing it with a term he coins, 'differance' with an 'a', noting that the sound of the word in French is the same. One can only know what is meant if one sees the written word.

    Derrida coins the term "differance" with an 'a' to mean both "difference" and "deferment" in time.

    "Differance [note the 'a'] is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be "present," appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element" (483).

    "There is no essence of differance [note the 'a']; not only can it not allow itself to be taken up in the as such of its name or appearing, but it threatens the authority of the as such in general, the thing's presence in its essence" (492).

    "For us, difference [note the 'e'] remains a metaphysical name; and all the names that it receives from our language are still, so far as they are names, metaphysical. This is particularly so when they speak of determining differance as the difference between presence and present..." (493). There is then further reference to existential ideas. 

    It is by coining a new term in contrast to the term 'difference' that Derrida's ideas of space and time, of movement in ideas, become most evident, and where he branches out beyond the limited binary oppositions that are nevertheless still key for deconstructionists. 


     ]]>     2023-02-04 19:13:53 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468606671     "Author/ity" 558nx4rd6h https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468627220 In chapter one, Nealon and Giroux said that “everything is suspect.” I was reminded of this idea in the first paragraph of chapter two when it says that “school curricula…are a pretty clear indication of what a society believes constitutes ‘really useful knowledge’” (9). Particularly when talking about history and social studies classes in high school, I find the curricula to be highly suspect. As a result, the idea of hegemonic interpretations became a throughline as I read chapter two. One of my favorite books on American history is James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, where he explores the power dynamics that resulted in what makes it into public school textbooks and what doesn’t. As the chapter made a distinction between a “writer” and an “author” being “canonicity” citing the different status of “author” James Joyce and “writer” Stephen King, I asked the question of historicity. I previously argued in my senior undergrad project that Stephen King deserved literary merit, or using Nealon and Giroux’s term, the title of “author.” And a reason why critics today denied him that legitimacy or “authority” is due to a lack of foresight into the historical and cultural impact of King’s writings, being too close to the author, similar to the change in reception to Shakespeare between his contemporaries and later critics. I think historicity tied directly to hegemonic selection of “canonicity” also contributes to the reason Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God '' is part of the American literary canon versus starting with Native American texts and traditions. I do think we are moving in a direction of acknowledging the writings of Indigenous Americans into the canon, at least at the collegiate level. But if we are seeking the answer to “[w]ho finally decides what the poem means?” posed on page 15 of the text, we have to consider who is making the interpretive decisions. I was pleased to see Nealon and Giroux explore Barthes’s  “Death of the Author” as I think such an observation highlights the evolution of who holds the interpretive power. On page 17 the authors note that in the “eighteenth century…the author was granted total sovereignty over meaning.” But with Barthes’s  “death of the author” and other more modern lenses of critical theory, like reader-response and close-reading, the power is democratized. 


    ]]>     2023-02-04 20:03:37 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468627220     Chapter 9 - "Lear's After-Life" 558nx4rd6h https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468627969 John Joughin's article "Lear's After-Life" explores Shakespeare's King Lear using both a post-structuralist lens, primarily through Derrida, and a "deconstructive analysis" to explore why Lear's significance lasts into the twentieth century and beyond. Joughin begins by proposing that in the broad sense, a text's longevity is due to the "ability to unsettle existing conventions and to defamiliarize habitual perceptions" throughout the generations, bringing "readers back to crucial points of analysis or interpretative ambiguity" (536) - a point similarly made by Susan Searls Giroux in "The Theory Toolbox." Focusing in on King Lear, Joughin claims that the text's "afterlife" is particularly due to the "image of Lear holding the dead Cordelia in his arms" (538). This scene becomes something the audience doesn't just watch but is "crucial to our experience of the play "due to its "uncanny...spectacle of 'inexpressible horror'" (538). 

    The text covers a number of critical takes on the specific scene I mentioned above. Citing Samuel Johnson, Joughin says "there is a lasting sense of injustice surrounding Cordelia's death" felt by the audience. Making a post-structuralist point, he adds that the scene is beyond reason and consequently "threaten[s] the critic with a relinquishment of intellectual control" by depicting what Robert Eaglestone describes as "these [uncanny] moments when our sense of our selves and our relation to the logos is interrupted and put into question that the ethics of literature are at their clearest" (540). Joughin makes the point that this pathetic appeal disrupts a rational, critical response to the text, leaving it open for interpretation based on experience or "a sense of witness" (540). As a result, Joughin quotes Eaglestone again, who says, "'[t]here can be no final reading, no last word'" (540). In other words, due to the "affective intensity" of the scene, the text lives on, "constitut[ing] the 'afterlife' of Shakespeare's play" (541). 

    Joughin moves the conversation to King Lear's being "our contemporary" in a nihilistic framework as a tragic story that "offers a shadow narrative of the despair and nihilism of late modernity" (543). He observes that recent adaptations of the play take a "nihilistic interpretation" (543). Comparing Shakespeare to Beckett, Joughin says such an approach suggests "we are faced with the possibility that drama has lost its therapeutic function and its ability to rekindle community" (544). Joughin uses Richard Halpern's observation on King Lear to claim the effect becomes that "theatrical spectatorship is no longer a special case but depressingly ubiquitous" as modern audiences seek a vicarious sensation among everything, everywhere, all at once. 

    Yet, Joughin still considers the death of Cordelia to be a "special case" (545) due to the scene's ability to "impose itself on the gaze as an enduring image" (546). Using Lear's own words, Joughin identifies the uncanny when Lear says, "'I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever'" (548). This shows an unsettling revelation that the forever and the now are intermix and unchangeable in conjunction with the unending regret Lear feels in his inaction. 

    Lastly, Joughin compares Lear's inaction to Cordelia's inaction at the beginning of the play. Lear's inaction is antithetical to the love he felt for Cordelia, leading to his lament. Yet, Cordelia's inaction is a direct result of her love for her father. Joughin cites philosopher Gillian Rose as saying "to grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and other, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds" (550). Joughin connects this back to the end of the play once more, observing the same "sentiment...in the play's closing stanza" (550). The result is the audience's acknowledgement of King Lear's presentation of "a universe of greys" as well as the audience's "surviving" of the play, causing them to "express the unimaginable" as a key part of the "afterlife" of the play (551). ]]>     2023-02-04 20:05:43 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468627969     Chapter 10 - "Allegories of Reading in Alice Munro's 'Carried Away'" 558nx4rd6h https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468628196 Miriam Marty Clark embarks on a truly post-structural analysis of Alice Munro's "Carried Away"  in her representation of multiple readings of the text rather than the text's "universality" (555). She distinguishes her own point of view to Munro's fiction as looking at how her stories are "linked to the vast world of print and develops within the recognizable institution of writing" (556). Observing a deep connection between the writerly and the readerly, Clark seeks to address the allegory of "the politics of the library and the ethics of reading" (556). She claims that textual interconnection throughout Munro's works is less about "serve[ing] to dramatize and master fundamental ambivalences within the stories" as explored by Ildiko de Papp Carrington. Rather, Clark claims that the allusions are part of a bigger idea Munro seeks to explore in her fiction.

    Clark identifies the proliferation of reading and places of reading within Munro's fiction which are "about readers" (556). Thus, reading becomes commonplace for those characters, yet it puts them at odds with the rest of the community. Clark claims that this conflict is illustrated through the allusions which Munro uses to not just make meaning for the reader, but as an illustration of meaning-making for the characters as they experience the texts themselves. In so doing, Clark claims that Munro makes "the act of reading...the subject of narration" (558). For example, Munro's story "Meneseteung" following the life of Almeda Joint Roth, uses "the newspaper...a book of poems, an autobiographical preface, a photograph, a note, and a tombstone" to tell the story (558). Clark claims that in doing so, Munro "moves representation...into the realm of discursive practice" commenting on the "political" through "narratives of gender, class struggle, and economic violence" (558).

    After a brief summary of "Carried Away," Clark focuses on the diverging realities that take place in the story, one where Jack dies and one where he lives. She sees these not as "parallel realities" but as "two simultaneous and ultimately irreconcilable allegories of reading" (559). The reality where Jack dies illustrates a divergence from himself as a reader and every other part of himself, that which is actualized through "posted rules...and the factory whistle" (560). His intellectualism is at odds with and never fully realized due to "the life of the body, its labor and its wages" (560). Yet, when the body dies, so does the intellectual. When the reality of Jack's reappearance emerges, it "ruptures the story" to a degree that conventional understanding of a text is disrupted, forcing a "rereading and a rewriting of the past" (560). This actualizes itself outside the story for critical interpretation going forward. 

    Clark then identifies another allegory within the text, focusing on the library, itself, "which functions to organize and reproduce culture and to authorize reading" (560). Through a capitalist perspective, Clark identifies libraries and books as "modes of production and consumption" (560). Even the librarian, Louisa, is seen by the characters as a commodity, based on her looks, her style, and her status, as seen in Arthur Doud's attraction and subsequent marriage to Louisa. His role as reader becomes less about the intellectual, like Jack, and more about the "renegotiation of patriarchal power for postwar capitalism" (561), contrasting Louisa's attraction to the intellectual through Jack. Lastly, Clark connects these diverging attitudes towards companionship, calling the attraction to the intellectual as "female hysteria" supposed by Carrington, who "made a convincing case for this scene as a hallucination, the 'psychological aftermath'" of Jack's demise (562). Clark ends by observing a paradoxical nature of Munro's story that reinforces hegemonic power structures and disrupts them through "a sense of the liberator and subversive power of books and reading" (562).

    ]]>     2023-02-04 20:06:25 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468628196     Chapter 5 - "That Dangerous Supplement" patricedonnelly https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468669489 Introduction to "That Dangerous Supplement"

    In Of Grammatology (1967) Derrida writes about writing! "That Dangerous Supplement" is a section of the book concerning the term "supplement" used to describe writing in contrast to speech. "Supplement" was a term used by Rousseau, a Genevan philosopher (1712-1778) to characterize writing as a 'supplement' to speech (497). Derrida notes that the metaphysical tradition operated with a hierarchy of terms. One set described what was original, morally superior, conceptually prior, axiomatic, and so forth in comparison to terms that were about absence, death, dissolution, non-identity, artifice, technology, and representation (496). Writing was always considered a lesser aspect of language in comparison to speech, being less authentic than speech, while speech conveyed the immediate presence of the living mind (496). (As an aside, this is a new idea to me, and I am enjoying considering its implications.) For Jean-Jacques Rouseau, the most original form of language is speech; writing in comparison is a degradation, and therefore only speech can convey pure 'truth' (496). 

    Derrida sees a parallel between this comparison between writing and speech with traditional metaphysical ideas about truth and non-truth. However, he asserts that difference, rather than being part of the non-truth side of the equation, is in fact primary  and is essential for identity (496). Furthermore, with this idea, all hierarchies in metaphysics necessarily fall apart. 

    Bringing about this collapse through a close examination of text is called "deconstruction" (496). Furthermore, Rousseau's ideal speech cannot exist without 'articulation' which in a sense reveals that letters that comprise a word, which is writing, precedes speech. 

    Rousseau asserted that speech required a 'supplement' which was writing. Derrida in effect used this idea of the need for a supplement to challenge the primacy of speech. Instead, he argued, the fact that both speech and writing are interwined reveals a relational aspect, not an ordered hierarchical aspect.

    ]]>     2023-02-04 22:14:42 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468669489     Chapter 3 - "What is Becoming?" patricedonnelly https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468676353 "Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction; but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time" (471) - French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, (1925-1995) from the essay "What is Becoming?" published in The Logic of Sense (1989). His essay discusses the philosophical term 'becoming.' He writes

    • becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa" (471). 
    At the moment that Alice becomes larger than she was, she is also smaller than she becomes. 

    Deleuze builds his idea of becoming as a paradox on the dualism presented first by Plato, Classical Greek philosopher 438-347 BC, in which becoming can be defined by two bounds: 1) a bound in which measurements presuppose pauses in time during which a thing's state of becoming can be described, and 2) a pure bound in which a thing is always in a state of becoming, 'hot' is becoming 'hotter' infinitely. If a thing ceases or pauses in growth or change it is no longer becoming at that moment in time. 

    "The paradox of this pure becoming, with its capacity to elude the present, is the paradox of infinite identity" (472).

    Deleuze refers to Alice and her continual reversals in space and time and her forgetting her own name as creating an infinite identity.  

    One can also consider many dualisms, such as what is sensible, understood through the senses, and what is intelligible, what is understood through the mind. However, this and other dualisms are not the same as the Platonic dualism of becoming. The latter is rather a more secretive distinction, not that of the model and the copy, but of the copy and the simulacra (472). Simulacra is defined as copies of things that had no original or that no longer have an original. 

    The proper name maintains connections between self, God, and the world. When becoming leads to the infinite identity, a paradox is revealed in which good sense as the only direction, and common sense as the assignation of fixed identities are both destroyed through paradox. 
    ]]>     2023-02-04 22:44:40 UTC https://padlet.com/558nx4rd6h/yj1cj9vn5g0gdb0s/wish/2468676353