Week 12 — Sedgwick and Affect II

Hi class, actually — no blog post required — just focus on your research presentations. But use these questions as a guide to reading and discussion:

Option 1: Sedgwick and Ngai (on p. 166-7, 180, 185-) discuss the political potential in negative affects like shame and disgust. How did you understand these discussions? Were they convincing to you, either on a personal or more political level?

Option 2: Sedgwick discusses performativity on p. 3-7. This may be a new concept for many of you. But if it interests you, I invite you to ruminate on the performative phrase, “Shame on you!” How does this performative utterance resonate with Sedgwick’s later discussion of shame and identity in chapter 2 of Touching, Feeling (on Henry James).

Option 3: Consider the discussion of James and his digestive problems in chapter 2. Do any of the previous texts we’ve read (Cohen, Douglas, Kristeva, Ngai) illuminate the passages that Sedgwick quotes?

Week 11 — Materiality and Affect 1

Option 1: In very different ways, Herring and Bennett shift the focus to the “lives” of objects and what happens when we treat material objects as though they possessing a social/political meaning. Discuss the positive or negative repercussions of this in Herring, Bennett, or both texts.

Option 2: Ngai discusses the poetics of disgust and claims that it goes mostly undiscussed in prevailing literary and psychoanalytic theories (bear in mind that this article is 14 years old). Do you agree with her? Do the many theoretical (and literary) texts we’ve read thus far support or dispute Ngai’s argument?

Option 3: Ngai describes disgust as “turning away” from an object in repulsion rather than moving toward it in desire. Yet as we saw with Herring, a collector’s excessive desire for an object (or over-attachment to a category of objects) can be perceived by outsiders as disgusting. Is there a contradiction in this? Explore some of the tensions between positive and negative affect (e.g., desire versus disgust) in Herring or some other text we’ve read thus far in the course.

Week 11 – Art and Art History

Open blog prompt 1: The artists’ writings and manifestoes (and the artists described by Foster) all address the subject of waste, but in very different ways. Which did you find most striking, most resonant?

In your writing, you may wish to connect one of the artist’s works to one of the previous weeks’ readings (e.g., Kristeva on abjection, Gidwani on the economic principles of trash, etc.).

You may also wish to consider what these artists’ visualization or performance of waste brings to the fore. What might they help us perceive visually or phenomenologically that we might not appreciate intellectually?

Alternately, what are the politics of using waste in the artistic sphere?

 

 

 

 

Week 9 — Prospectus

Class, please email me the prospectus of your final project by Friday, April 1.

These guidelines in writing a prospectus may be useful as a guide. You do not need to follow them to the letter, as they are for a specific class. But the overall advice is useful. This online guide is also useful in writing a prospectus and abstract.

Your prospectus should be approximately one typed page, single-spaced or 1.5-spaced — two or three meaty paragraphs. Your prospectus should: 1. Sketch your topic and argument, including a provisional thesis or research question; 2. Identify the primary texts and secondary literature you will discuss — and how you will use them to support your argument; and 3. Include a short bibliography, in MLA style. (If you quote a text,- you should also cite the page number in MLA style.)

I’ve uploaded a friend’s prospectus for a dissertation to the Sample Writings folder on Dropbox. (It’s for a longer project and contains only a draft bibliography, but gives you some sense of writing at the graduate level.)

Week 10 — Ecology

Prompt possibility one: In the readings for this week, how do unspoken ideas about race, class, gender, or some other some other social structure (nation? geographic location? language?) undergird our conceptions of nature and the environment? What was the most surprising way this week’s readings prompted you to rethink nature?

More open-ended blog prompt: Respond to an interesting passage in one of the readings that you would like to discuss in class.

Week 8 — waste and stigma: race, gender, sex

Choose one  prompt and respond in the comments.

Prompt 1: How do this week’s readings complicate associations between waste (in literal or metaphoric forms) and what Erving Goffman calls “spoiled identity”? Is this association only negative? Do any of the authors give us a way of viewing this association as powerful or useful? How so?

Prompt 2: Do either the Bond Stockton or Butler excerpts cause you to read Kristeva’s theory of abjection differently? How so?

Prompt 3: Is Sedgwick and Moon’s linking of waste and fat convincing? What are the benefits of this linkage and what are the limitations? What does it allow you to apprehend about waste that you hadn’t previously? (Also feel free to comment on the unusual form of the essay.)

Week 7 — journalism and ethnography

Hi class, my prompts this week are a little more open-ended. Choose whichever questions are most interesting to you in the prompts.

Prompt option 1: Both Nagle and George spend a fair amount of time narrating how they came to their writing topics. Why do you suppose they do this? What are the advantages and drawbacks to this approach? What does it bring to the fore in their writings and what does it overlook or veil?

Prompt option 2: Nagle makes reference to several academic theorists in her writing, including Marcel Mauss and Wayne Brekhus. What does her use of these theorists add to her analysis? Does Nagle’s use of these theorists differ from how other writers we’ve read draw on academic theory?

Prompt option 3: Nagle argues that it is important to bring to light what is often invisible to us (the necessary labor of the sanitation worker). What is her justification for this? How is this argument compelling or uncompelling? Does it apply to the other readings we completed for this week? Can you think of a counter-argument?

Prompt option 4: Write two medium-length discussion questions for Trashed by Derf Backderf, tying it to some other reading we’ve done in the course.

Week 6 blog prompt and note on readings

Just a quick note about this coming week’s class:
1. We’ll be reading an excerpt from Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives, which Kevin will be reviewing. It picks up on the economic discussion from last week but is more accessible and emotional in tone.
2. We’ll also be reading pieces about a new subject: ruins. First read Aimee von Bokel’s article about artists’ installations in ruined spaces in NYC. It’s very short — only two pages. Aimee will be joining us at the end of this week’s session to discuss the article as well as her work on urban politics, gentrification, and African American heritage sites in NYC.
3. I added one reading: Andreas Huyssen’s essay “Nostalgia for Ruins,” because it offers a comprehensive introduction to the topic. Read as much of it as is useful to you. He discusses the politics of nostalgia in modernism. He also offers a fascinating analysis of the drawings of Piranesi, whose “prisons and ruins can be read as allegories of a modernity whose utopia of freedom and progress, linear time and geometric space they not only question but cancel out.”
4. The Anik Fournier essay “The Ruin in the Age of Junkspace” updates some of Huyssen’s ideas to contemporary New York City (such as the High Line and related art–architecture projects). The crucial pages are 45-48, 55-57, and 60-61. Her discussion of the piers on the west side and Gordon Matta Clark’s work offers a nice complement to von Bokel’s essay.
5. Gaston Gordillo’s Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction offers a non-Eurocentric perspective on ruins. Pages 1-11 are most crucial, but the philosophical discussions that follow are also interesting.
Blog prompts: Choose one! (and let me know which one you are responding to):
Blog prompt 1 (sociological): Aimee von Bokel argues that two recent art installations (set in an abandoned public school and hospital) provide testimony to a previous economic regime that made a serious “economic investment in a robust and healthy industrial workforce.” As aestheticized ruins, however, the installations “transform the two buildings — constructed as real, material resources — into…cultural capital.” Draw on Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives to describe von Bokel’s claim in greater depth. That is, explain the “neoliberal” turn, from strong public investment toward individual liability.
Blog prompt 2 (aesthetic): Von Bokel seems to be arguing that the aestheticization of once public resources (hospitals, schools) masks the social problems underlying their abandonment (defunding, etc.) — rather than making a clear critique of the social problems. She seems to be suggesting that art—or at least these particular artworks—mystifies rather than reveals social problems. Draw on either the Huyssen or Fournier pieces to argue for or against von Bokel. Can the aesthetization of ruins ever be a form of critique? Or are ruins always amnesiac and politically sedative?
Blog prompt 3: Generate two discussion questions for von Bokel. In at least one of your questions, draw on another essay in your response (Bauman, Huyssen, Fournier, Gordillo). You may also bring in a specific artwork or other public work that adds texture to or complicates her assertions about the artworks she discusses. (For example, do Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Gramsci Monument” in the South Bronx or Theaster Gates’ public art works in Chicago offer a different way of thinking about waste, ruination, and public disinvestment?)

Week 5 — economies of waste and recycling

Class, for this week, please generate three meaty discussion questions and post them in the comments of this post. Try to generate one discussion question for each article (Reno, Gidwani, Waldrop). To make the question more substantial, begin it with a claim or quote from the essay in question. (If quoting, cite the page number using MLA style.)

Week 4 blog prompt — Transatlantic Modernism

Option 1 — Do a close reading of the following passage from William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1923). (By close reading, I mean focus in on particular words and phrases and the way they build a symbolic pattern that supports the writer’s argument.) Quote one of the readings for this week (Tichi or Jones, for example) to explain how Williams conceives imagination and poetic composition in gendered ways, related to waste, efficiency, and flow.

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Option 2 — Compare the two versions of modernity presented this week: the earlier European versus the later American version. How are economy, waste, and artistic composition figured differently by Baudelaire and William Carlos Williams (or some other modern American artist-figure from the 1920-30s)? What does waste represent in each context, and is it more or less valued in the European or American context? Use quotes from at least one of the readings to support your argument.