Close Reading Closed Reading

Nothing Below is Required for this Course. You Are Free to Stop Reading Here and Now.

Becoming a "better" reader will not make you a better person. Reading closely is about a desire to understand and appreciate the work. It is not about getting "the most" out of your experience.

"This Film Does Not Exist" NY TIMES JANUARY 13, 2023 On Jodorowski's plans for Tron and A.I. imaging of film.

Ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr. and with a foreword by Anton Jäger & Daniel Zamora No Politics but Class Politics. (2023)

Joan W. Scott, "Blasphemy Is Not a DEI Issue" The Hamline case does not illustrate a tension between diversity and academic freedom. January 17, 2023

Vienna and Schubert: 'Death and the Maiden' String Quartet - Professor Chris Hogwood CBE

"The greatest pieces of music are called classics simply because at a first hearing--that is terribly...very complicated to work out what's going on or even more complicated to explain to yourself why it's going on--even to hear it has to be heard several times. Probably after first hearing, immediately go back and hear it again, and on repeated hearings repeated things come to light."

To learn how to understand a piece of music, a philosopher said, you have to hear it twice.

A conductor of baroque music said you have to listen to repeated hearings before you understand it.

"How full of meaning and significance the language of music is we see from the repetition of signs, as well as from the Da capo which would be intolerable in the case of works composed in the language of words. In music, however, they are very appropriate and beneficial; for to comprehend it fully, we must hear it twice."

"We can’t imagine what’s next, except that it will surely involve more make-work for more administrators, whose proliferation has driven much of the rise in college tuition and student debt. For 16,937 students, Stanford lists 2,288 faculty and 15,750 administrative staff."

--"The Stanford Guide to Acceptable Words
Behold the school’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative."
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 19, 2022

"WALKING AMONG THE UNIVERSITY’S RUINS" 3.8.2022

Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

Stefan Collini , "Exaggerated Ambitions" Vol. 44 No. 23 · 1 December 2022

To see what’s really going on, it helps to get close. NY Times series

Unlocking the Secrets of Blue Notes

Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Losing

Le radeau de la Méduse

1818 / 1819 (1e quart du XIXe siècle)

Géricault, Théodore
France, École de

Marcel Proust, la fabrique de l’œuvre : au cœur de la création25 octobre 2022

・ Par Sophie BenardExhibition “Marcel Proust, la fabrique de l’oeuvre” (Marcel Proust, the Making of the Work) 100 Years of Ulysses I ARTE.tv Documentary

"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It is almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn't America."

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States: 1953 ‐ 1961 "Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire." June 14, 1953

"I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.

And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field."

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

--William James

Disruptive Behavior:

"Perhaps I may give you a more vivid picture of repression and of its necessary relation to resistance, by a rough analogy derived from our actual situation at the present moment. Let us suppose that in this lecture-room and among this audience, whose exemplary quiet and attentiveness I cannot sufficiently commend, there is nevertheless someone who is causing a disturbance and whose ill-mannered laughter, chattering and shuffling with his feet are distracting my attention from my task. I have to announce that I cannot proceed with my lecture; and thereupon three or four of you who are strong men stand up and, after a short struggle, put the interrupter outside the door. So now he is ‘repressed’, and I can continue my lecture. But in order that the interruption shall not be repeated, in case the individual who has been expelled should try to enter the room once more, the gentlemen who have put my will into effect place their chairs up against the door and thus establish a ‘resistance’ after the repression has been accomplished. If you will now translate the two localities concerned into psychical terms as the ‘conscious’ and the ‘unconscious’, you will have before you a fairly good picture of the process of repression. . . . At first sight it really seems impossible to trace a path from repression to the formation of symptoms. Instead of giving a complicated theoretical account, I will return here to the analogy which I employed earlier for my explanation of repression. If you come to think of it, the removal of the interrupter and the posting of the guardians at the door may not mean the end of the story. It may very well be that the individual who has been expelled, and who has now become embittered and reckless, will cause us further trouble. It is true that he is no longer among us; we are free from his presence, from his insulting laughter and his sotto voce comments. But in some respects, nevertheless, the repression has been unsuccessful; for now he is making an intolerable exhibition of himself outside the room, and his shouting and banging on the door with his fists interfere with my lecture even more than his bad behaviour did before. In these circumstances we could not fail to be delighted if our respected president, Dr. Stanley Hall, should be willing to assume the role of mediator and peacemaker. He would have a talk with the unruly person outside and would then come to us with a request that he should be re-admitted after all: he himself would guarantee that the man would now behave better. On Dr. Hall’s authority we decide to lift the repression, and peace and quiet are restored. This presents what is really no bad picture of the physician’s task in the psycho-analytic treatment of the neuroses."

The last shot of Medium Cool is taken from the end of first shot of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt:

Godard took for his idea for doing the titles in voice-over in the opening shot of Contempt from the end titles of Orson Welles Magnificent Andersons

This 1965 film comedy portrayed a female president for the first time in screen history.
Kisses-My-President

Email them in a one word document to me at [email protected]. Send the word doc as an attachment. Do not send google docs or pdfs. I recommend you have the text or film open as you write your discussion questions.

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE (Please expect adjustments to be made in the schedule from time to time; all changes will be announced both in class and on the class email listserv.)

This course will examine the difference between paraphrasing a text and reading it closely, beginning with the New Critics, focusing primarily on William Empson, and ending with the notion, posed by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, that reading closely means arriving at an impasse, at “unreadability,” and hence closure. We will also read Stephen Booth’s celebrated Yale edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a masterpiece of close readings (without reading) that productively frustrates any reader’s attempts to make use of it. We will read not only what is in the text but what isn't. How do you read chapters that are declared missing by the author? How do you read a poem that calls forth a pun the poem does not make? Three short papers. Co-leading class discussion twice during the semester. Readings will include canonical literature as well as canonical works of literary criticism and literary theory. Discussion questions on the films or readings due the day before each class. Weekly quizzes.

"Insofar as the technique and the product lead us to dismiss the losers in the rankings, we are obviously using them to blind ourselves to the future possibilities of those losers and to the fact that hierarchies seldom remain un changed. In the other direction, however, I find it hard to imagine that many of the things that we care about-loving someone as opposed to some other one, preferring this critic to that, even choosing to read this book rather than that-would be possible without comparison. For it is hard to imagine judgments without comparison, as John Barrell suggested when he maintained that Western society since the eighteenth century had made evaluation-the perception of the value of this as opposed to that-the most common of common activities."

Repetition, AND the LIMITS of RESEMBLANCE: Imitation; Counterfeit; Homage; Caricature Parody; Satire
Reader Response: Stanley Fish: Is there a book in this class? Is there a book in book history (now that the History of the Book)?

Denunication is not criticism. It is not even thought. It's the herd mentality. You don't have to go to college to become a keyboard social justice warrior fighting for representation. "Representation" is a bourgeois mirage, an empty-headed concept that has nothing to do with political representation. If no one ever used a racial slur or just plain mean word again, the country would be only have more authoritarian thanks to authoritarian speech police you, not any less racist or more democratic. If more films were directed by "members" of "oppressed groups" and more people were to watch a film because it was made by a member of an oppressed group, not because it was good, nothing about the country related to health care, minimum wage, equal pay by gender, mass incarceration, the war on drugs, defense budgets, the number of foreign wars, police militarization, and so on, would have changed. You might be able to get a job at the CIA, however.

What is read? The book, the (rhetoric of the page (blanks spaces), the edition (book history); rare books; punctuation; sheet music

"I would be glad enough if the book simply served to make people want to read Richardson and argue with my case."

Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (1982), viii ("progressive?" [yes]; "feminist"; "genuinely subversive elements")

Talking of Hitchcock in the spaced-out fourth chapter, where the froth of film and music clips has largely subsided, Mr. Godard says ''we've forgotten why Joan Fontaine leans over the edge of the cliff and what it was that Joel McCrea was going to do in Holland,'' and so on, ''but we remember a handbag, but we remember a bus in the desert, but we remember a glass of milk.''

Loop Narrative / Thematic Structure (Visualizing, Spatializing works of art that can only be experienced in linear time.)

Some people like answers more than they do questions. I call that Q & A Criticism. Here is an example Franco Moretti's book The Bourgeois: "And one wonders: Why these scenes of almost mythical brutality . . . ? Why does Gesualdo risk his life like that? He does it, because he is terrified that his wealth may disappear, a fear that is always with him . . . ."

I prefer to hear someone ask one new question that leads to more questions than to hear 1,000 plus people give new answers to an old question. I call this this kind of criticism Q & Q Questioning. For an example, see the last paragraph of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

Basic Terms of Music (including scale, melody, harmony, time signature, rythm, downbeat, fugue, among others)

Flash Gordon Also, The Artist (2011) escape from the torture room in film in the film

A science of the signifier (even if still in process of develop- ment), that is, has taken its place in the work of the period and its purpose is less the analysis of the sign than its disloca- tion. With regard to myth, and though this is a work that is yet to be carried through, the new semiology - or the new mythology - can no longer, will no longer be able to, separate so easily the signifier from the signified, the ideological from the phraseological. It is not that the distinction is false or without its use but rather that it too has become in some sort mythical: any student can and does denounce the bourgeois or petit-bourgeois character of such and such a form (of life, of thought, of consumption). In other words, a mythological doxa has been created: denunciation, demystification (or demythification), has itself become discourse, stock of phrases, catechistic declaration; in the face of which, the science of the signifier can only shift its place and stop (provisionally) further on - no longer at the (analytic) dissociation of the sign but at its very hesitation: it is no longer the myths which need to be unmasked (the doxa now takes care of that), it is the sign itself which must be shaken; the problem is not to reveal the (latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but to fissure the very representation of meaning, is not to change or purify the symbols but to challenge the symbolic itself.

There is too much here to try to unravel. But here are some of the threads: The words “inadvertently” and “automatically,” however recon- dite, are ordinary; there are ordinary contexts (nontechnical, nonpolitical, nonphilosophical contexts) which are normative for their use. It may be that half the speakers of English do not know (or cannot say, which is not the same) what these contexts are. Some native speakers may even use them interchangeably. Suppose the baker is able to convince us that he does. Should we then say: “So the professor has no right to say how ‘we use’ ‘inadvertently,’ or to say that when we use the one word we say something different from what we say when we use the other”? Before accepting that conclusion, I should hope that the following consideration would be taken seriously: When “inadvertently” and “automatically” seem to be used indifferently in recounting what someone did, this may not at all show that they are being used synonymously, but only that what each of them says is separately true of the person’s action. The decanter is broken and you did it. You may say (and it may be important to consider that you are already embarrassed and flustered) either: “I did it inadvert- ently’’ or “I did it automatically.” Are you saying the same thing? Well, you automatically grabbed the cigarette which had fallen on the table, and inadvertently knocked over the decanter. Naming actions is a sensitive occupation. It is easy to overlook the distinction because the two adverbs often go together in describing actions in which a sudden movement results in some mishap. Suppose the baker does not accept this explanation, but replies: “I use ‘automatically’ and ‘inadvertently’ in exactly the same way. I could just as well have said: ‘I grabbed the cigarette inadvertently and knocked over the decanter automatically.’” Don’t we feel the temptation to reply: “You may say this, but you can’t say it and describe the same situation; you can’t mean what you would mean if you said the other”? But suppose the baker insists he can? Will we then be prepared to say: “Well you can’t say the one and mean what I mean by the other”? Great care would be needed in claiming this, for it may look like I am saying, “I know what I mean and I say they are different.” But why is the baker not entitled to this argument? What I must not say is: “I know what words mean in my language.” Here the argument would have pushed me to madness. It may turn out (depending upon just what the dialogue has been and where it was stopped) that we should say to the baker: “If you cooked the way you talk, you would forgo special implements for different jobs, and peel, core, scrape, slice, carve, chop, and saw, all with one knife. The distinction is there, in the language (as implements are there to be had), and you just impoverish what you say by neglecting it. And there is something you aren’t noticing about the world.”

T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"
Reader Response: Stanley Fish: Is there a book in this class? Is there a book in book history (now that the History of the Book)?

2012--the transition from analog broadcasting to digital; the end of the cathode ray television set.

"One should never bear grudges against people, never judge them by the memory of one unkind act, for we can never know all the good resolves and effective actions of which their souls may have been capable at another time. And so, even from the simple point of view of foresight, we make mistakes. For no doubt the bad pattern we observed on that one occasion will recur. But the soul is richer than that, has many other patterns which will also recur in the same man, yet we refuse to take pleasure in them because of one piece of bad behavior in the past."

A ‘Chronicle’ investigation tracks how a decision to silence professors emerged from the depths of bureaucracy. Sept 7 2022

Nothing Below is Required for this Course. You Are Free to Stop Reading Here and Now:

If to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers.

Gerard Manley Hopkins burned his poems when he entered a seminary. See William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

"No matter how scandalous and unsavory the Derrida-Heidegger-Trakl encounter may seem, therefore, it may well be that the encounter has - as Merleau-Ponty said of the artwork - most of its life still ahead of it.

It may be that the new waves of scandal lapping against the shores of Heidegger's life make it less likely than ever that students will want to take up Heidegger's and Derrida's readings of Trakl, especially in the United States, where Puritanism continues to reign in the academy, in our political life, and in our military detention."

To counter widely circulated allegations, let it be stated here explicitly that the dedication of Being and Time mentioned on page 16 of the Dialogue remained in Being and Timeuntil its fourth edition of 1935. In 1941, when my publishers felt that the fifth edition might be endangered and that, indeed, the book might be suppressed, it was finally agreed, on the suggestion and at the desire of Niemeyer, that the dedication be omitted from the edition, on the condition imposed by me that the note to page 38 be retained— a note which in fact states the reason for that dedication, and which runs: "If the following investigation has taken any steps forward in disclosing the 'things themselves', the author must first of all thank E. Husserl, who, by providing his own incisive personal guidance and by freely turning over his unpublished investigations, familiarized the author with the most diverse areas of phenomenological research during his student years in Freiburg" (Being and Time, Harper & Row, 1962, 489).

Fireworks are apparitions par excellence. They are an empirical appearance free of the burden of empirical being in general which is that it has duration; they are a sign of heaven and yet artefactual; they are both a writing on the wall, rising and fading away in short order, and yet not a writing that has any meaning we can make sense of.

One of the most important books on a chapter of American History you never ever knew about:

Barbara Johnson, "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida," Yale French Studies, 1977, No. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (1977), pp. 457-505

Why Should You Be for Free Speech? (If you are truly for free speech, then you are by definition a free speech absolutist. There is no such thing as "hate speech.") If you are against free speech, then you are an authoritarian who runs with the herd, not a free thinker. You shouldn't be taking literature courses.

Shant Mesrobian gives an illuminating account of an authoritarian Biden voter's contempt for progressives starting at 54:02 and ending at 56:32.

"We had expected the great world-dominating nations of white race upon whom the leadership of the human species has fallen, who were known to have world-wide interests as their concern, to whose creative powers were due not only our technical advances towards the control of nature but the artistic and scientific standards of civilization - we had expected these people to succeed in discovering another way of settling misunderstandings and conflicts of interest. Within each of these nations there prevailed high norms of moral conduct for the individual, to which his manner of life was bound to conform if he desired to take part in a civilized community. . . .

A human being is seldom altogether good or bad; he is usually 'good' in one relation and 'bad' in another, or 'good' in certain external circumstances and in others decidedly 'bad'. It is interesting to find that the pre-existence of strong 'bad' impulses in infancy is often the actual condition for an unmistakable inclination towards 'good' in the adult. Those who as children have been the most pronounced egoists may well become the most helpful and self-sacrificing members of the community; most of our sentimentalists, friends of humanity and protectors of animals have been evolved from little sadists and animal-tormentors.

Now that the TV show COPS has been cancelled, it should be replaced by a show called STOPPED. Each episode of STOPPED would show iphone videos of black people who have been murdered by police or who have talked their way out of an illegal stop with guns drawn by cops. Payment for videos that haven't gone viral but can be posted after the show airs. Copyright belongs to the original video recorder.

Modern Fears (Pilotpriest Come True Version) (Original Motion Picture Sound) 2021

Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) —with 80s Miami Vice pink opening titles

1980s --"postmodernism" stockpiling of images; last decade of high fashion. "Pastiche" versus "parody" Frederic Jameson

Maurice Blanchot on the vicious circle, writing in vicious circles. "Noli me legere"

UF Policies on Student Conduct and Resources (UF requires faculty to post these on their syllabi):

UF students are bound by The Honor Pledge which states, “We, the members of the University of Florida community, pledge to hold ourselves and our peers to the highest standards of honor and integrity by abiding by the Honor Code. On all work submitted for credit by students at the University of Florida, the following pledge is either required or implied: “On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid in doing this assignment.” The Honor Code (http://www.dso.ufl.edu/sccr/process/student-conduct-honor- code/) specifies a number of behaviors that are in violation of this code and the possible sanctions. In adopting this Honor Code, the students of the University of Florida recognize that academic honesty and integrity are fundamental values of the University community. Any individual who becomes aware of a violation of the Honor Code is bound by honor to take corrective action. A student-run Honor Court and faculty support are crucial to the success of the Honor Code. The quality of a University of Florida education is dependent upon community acceptance and enforcement of the Honor Code.

An academic honesty offense is defined as the act of lying, cheating, or stealing academic information so that one gains academic advantage. As a University of Florida student, one is expected to neither commit nor assist another in committing an academic honesty violation. Additionally, it is the student's duty to report observed academic honesty violations. Violations of the Honor Code and academic dishonesty will not be tolerated. Specifically, instructors will rigorously pursue incidents of plagiarism of any type or incidents of referring to any unauthorized material for any class requirement. Before submitting any work for this class, please read the policies about academic honesty at www.dso.ufl.edu/judicial, and ask the instructor to clarify any expectations you do not understand.

Students with disabilities requesting accommodations should first register with the Disability Resource Center (352-392-8565, www.dso.ufl.edu/drc/) by providing appropriate documentation. Once registered, students will receive an accommodation letter which must be presented to the instructor when requesting accommodation. Students with disabilities should follow this procedure as early as possible in the semester.

Students are expected to provide professional and respectful feedback on the quality of instruction in this course by completing course evaluations online via GatorEvals. Guidance on how to give feedback in a professional and respectful manner is available at https://gatorevals.aa.ufl.edu/students/. Students will be notified when the evaluation period opens and can complete evaluations through the email they receive from GatorEvals, in their Canvas course menu under GatorEvals, or via https://ufl.bluera.com/ufl/. Summaries of course evaluation results are available to students at https://gatorevals.aa.ufl.edu/public-results/.

University support services are available to students who are experiencing significant distress and/or personal emergencies. As appropriate please contact:

Health and Wellness

U Matter, We Care: If you or a friend is in distress, please contact [email protected], 352 392-1575, or visit the U Matter, We Care website so that a team member can reach out to the student in distress.

Counseling and Wellness Center: Visit the Counseling and Wellness Center website or call 352-392-1575 for information on crisis and non-crisis services.

Student Health Care Center: Call 352-392-1161 for 24/7 information to help you find the care you need or visit the Student Health Care Center website.

University Police Department: Visit the UF Police Department website or call 352-392-1111 (or 9-1-1 for emergencies).

GatorWell Health Promotion Services: For prevention services focused on optimal wellbeing, including Wellness Coaching for Academic Success, visit the GatorWell website or call 352-273-4450.

Sexual Assault Recovery Services (SARS): Student Health Care Center, (352) 392-1161.

Academic Resources

Library Support: Various ways to receive assistance with respect to using the libraries or finding resources.

Teaching Center: Broward Hall, 392-2010 or 392-6420. General study skills and tutoring.

Writing Studio: 302 Tigert Hall, 846-1138. Help brainstorming, formatting, and writing papers.

Sugar: The Bitter Truth (2009)

Two examples of the same convetion from two seasons of the same show. Which one is better? There is only one answer.

Abridge the description below: Cut it down from 468 words to less than forty words:

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

A science of the signifier (even if still in process of development), that is, has taken its place in the work of the period and its purpose is less the analysis of the sign than its dislocation. With regard to myth, and though this is a work that is yet to be carried through, the new semiology - or the new mythology - can no longer, will no longer be able to, separate so easily the signifier from the signified, the ideological from the phraseological. It is not that the distinction is false or without its use but rather that it too has become in some sort mythical: any student can and does denounce the bourgeois or petit-bourgeois character of such and such a form (of life, of thought, of consumption). In other words, a mythological doxa has been created: denunciation, demystification (or demythification), has itself become discourse, stock of phrases, catechistic declaration; in the face of which, the science of the signifier can only shift its place and stop (provisionally) further on - no longer at the (analytic) dissociation of the sign but at its very hesitation: it is no longer the myths which need to be unmasked (the doxa now takes care of that), it is the sign itself which must be shaken; the problem is not to reveal the (latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but to fissure the very representation of meaning, is not to change or purify the symbols but to challenge the symbolic itself.

There is too much here to try to unravel. But here are some of the threads: The words “inadvertently” and “automatically,” however recondite, are ordinary; there are ordinary contexts (nontechnical, nonpolitical, nonphilosophical contexts) which are normative for their use. It may be that half the speakers of English do not know (or cannot say, which is not the same) what these contexts are. Some native speakers may even use them interchangeably. Suppose the baker is able to convince us that he does. Should we then say: “So the professor has no right to say how ‘we use’ ‘inadvertently,’ or to say that when we use the one word we say something different from what we say when we use the other”? Before accepting that conclusion, I should hope that the following consideration would be taken seriously: When “inadvertently” and “automatically” seem to be used indifferently in recounting what someone did, this may not at all show that they are being used synonymously, but only that what each of them says is separately true of the person’s action. The decanter is broken and you did it. You may say (and it may be important to consider that you are already embarrassed and flustered) either: “I did it inadvert- ently’’ or “I did it automatically.” Are you saying the same thing? Well, you automatically grabbed the cigarette which had fallen on the table, and inadvertently knocked over the decanter. Naming actions is a sensitive occupation. It is easy to overlook the distinction because the two adverbs often go together in describing actions in which a sudden movement results in some mishap. Suppose the baker does not accept this explanation, but replies: “I use ‘automatically’ and ‘inadvertently’ in exactly the same way. I could just as well have said: ‘I grabbed the cigarette inadvertently and knocked over the decanter automatically.’” Don’t we feel the temptation to reply: “You may say this, but you can’t say it and describe the same situation; you can’t mean what you would mean if you said the other”? But suppose the baker insists he can? Will we then be prepared to say: “Well you can’t say the one and mean what I mean by the other”? Great care would be needed in claiming this, for it may look like I am saying, “I know what I mean and I say they are different.” But why is the baker not entitled to this argument? What I must not say is: “I know what words mean in my language.” Here the argument would have pushed me to madness. It may turn out (depending upon just what the dialogue has been and where it was stopped) that we should say to the baker: “If you cooked the way you talk, you would forgo special implements for different jobs, and peel, core, scrape, slice, carve, chop, and saw, all with one knife. The distinction is there, in the language (as implements are there to be had), and you just impoverish what you say by neglecting it. And there is something you aren’t noticing about the world.”

Interview with cinematographer Gordon Willis fon the Criterion edition of The Parallax View

Knowing what you want before you shoot so little editing is needed (as opposed to dump truck filming leaving it all to the editor)

Film criticism at its dumbest? Do you really care who made a film? Do you have to like just because you need to show how woke you are? And is getting a film franchise for an action film the only goal for filmmakers?

Basic Terms of Music (including scale, melody, harmony, time signature, rythm, downbeat, fugue, among others)

Maurice Blanchot on the vicious circle, writing in vicious circles. "Noli me legere"

Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, Chapters 100 and 114 in Volume One and Chapter 29 in Volume .

One of the most important books on one of the most horiffic chapters in American History you never ever knew about:

Happy ending or sad ending: Dom and Darlene are going to go to
Budapest, then Dom changes her mind, then Darlene does not use her
ticket and does not board the plane. Cross cutting as Dom runs back to the gate. Music Carly Rae Jepsen "Run Away
with Me" on E.Mo.Tion album Darlene is in the
bathroom having a panic attack. So you think it's going to be a happy
ending. But last shot reveals the empty seat next to Dom. Music
still playing.

So students. You already know how to read by genre. Happy ending--or
shock from happy ending withheld. Only upbeat is Darlene calming down
and saying to herself in the mirror "I can take care of myself."

"It's policy." No exceptions. (No sovereignty either.) [Dark/Web] episode 7 (2019)

Direct Knowledge (Information; myth) vs. Oblique Knowledge ([Deniable] Analogy; Philosophy and Literature)

"The company eagerly cultivates an academic aura, and the facility is
referred to as its “campus.” The campus bookstore sells dozens of
business books, of the kind ubiquitous in airport newsstands. Typical
selections included The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle:
How to Become a Servant Leader (featuring a jacket blurb from the
Senior Vice President of Operations for Chik-fil-a) and Leading with
Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit. Alas, they did not have my
favorite managerial tome of all time, If Harry Potter Ran General
Electric: Leadership Wisdom from the World Of Wizards, which is a
genuine, honest-to-God book that you can look up and purchase."

Btw, don't even think of going to graduate school to get a Ph.D in English--or any other kind of--literature.

Dan Cohen, "The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper: University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves" The Atlantic May 2019

What is a "strong woman?" Who is a "strong woman?" A corporate oligarch funded by Wall Street and former prosecutor? Or a combat veteran funded by individual donors?

Hamlet, In Our Time Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the inspiration for Shakespeare's Hamlet, the play's context and meaning, and why it has fascinated audiences from its first performance.

There are in our existence spots of time,
          That with distinct pre-eminence retain
          A renovating virtue, whence--depressed                     210
          By false opinion and contentious thought,
          Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
          In trivial occupations, and the round
          Of ordinary intercourse--our minds
          Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
          A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
          That penetrates, enables us to mount,
          When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

To understand how I have designed and planned this course, please be sure to look at

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, "Scrips and Scribbles," MLN, Vol. 118, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 2003), pp. 622-636.

Consider everything I say as parts of the contents of a time capsule from long ago that has yet to be opened, much kess indexed and archived.

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Sugar: The Bitter Truth (2009)