There will be some required screenings for this class on W 9-11 in ROLFS 115. You may skip the screenings as long as you watch the assigned blu-ray edition of the film.
I am not on UF's canvas.
No cell phones, ipads, or laptops in use during class.
When you check out a DVD at the circulation desk in Library West, ask for a key to one of media center rooms. There are four: F203, F204, F205, and F206. These rooms are to the immediate left of the circulation desk. The elevator will be on your left and the rooms will be on your right as you approach your destination. (Do not go into the stacks.) The media center rooms are built for two, but three people can fit. You’ll just need to grab chairs nearby and bring them into the room. When you have finished viewing the DVD, just return it and the media center key back to the circulation desk.
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.
I remember well,
That once, while yet my inexperienced hand
Could scarcely hold a bridle, with proud hopes
I mounted, and we journeyed towards the hills:
An ancient servant of my father's house
Was with me, my encourager and guide: 230
We had not travelled long, ere some mischance
Disjoined me from my comrade; and, through fear
Dismounting, down the rough and stony moor
I led my horse, and, stumbling on, at length
Came to a bottom, where in former times
A murderer had been hung in iron chains.
The gibbet-mast had mouldered down, the bones
And iron case were gone; but on the turf,
Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought,
Some unknown hand had carved the murderer's name. 240
If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
"Historical, in fact philological, considerations have slowly but surely taken the place of profound explorations of eternal problems. The question becomes: What did this or that philosopher think or not think? And is this or that text rightly ascribed to him or not? And even: Is this variant of a classical text preferable to that other? Students in university seminars today are encouraged to occupy themselves with such emasculated inquiries. As a result, of course, philosophy itself is banished from the university altogether."
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.
Oblique Perspective in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors; Jacques Derrida on oblique reading in Passion: An Oblique Offering; Interviewing trauma victims Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
When film franchise titles go in the right and the wrong directions.
Blockers (2018) and the Sophisticated Vulgarity of Emojis. (See my Spring 2019 course on film trailers.)
Blockers, first ever partial film title with a (deniable) visual pun and sound effect, spelling out the true title, namely, Cock Blockers? (Cock-a-doodle-do? No, it's just a rooster, not a cock crowing.) Alternate title? Block Cock. Actually, the film seems to be about parental vagina blockers. Like parents designed elaborate chastity belts for their daughters to wear to the prom. The inversion of gender roles plays out when partying jocks make the two fathers chug beer up their asses in exchange for help blocking their daughters. The cut down title a metaphor for their symbolic castration? Moms cock block too, btw. The parents might want to watch Carrie to understand loss of virginity involves bloodloss; it's not bloodless. Another alternate title? Block the Cock. (It's just about the rooster. He is too loud.) Note the recurrent line "I'm in," as if taken from a heist or spy film (involving hacking--cracking the code-- as well as cracking the safe combination).
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 ideo- logical 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.
ROLAND BARTHES, "Change the Object Itself Mythology today," Image Music Text
Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath, pp. 165 -70.
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.”
"Socrates. I mean to say that as I was about to cross the stream the usual sign was given to me,-that sign which always forbids, but never bids, me to do anything which I am going to do; and I thought that I heard a voice saying in my ear that I had been guilty of impiety, and that I must not go away until I had made an atonement. Now I am a diviner, though not a very good one, but I have enough religion for my own use, as you might say of a bad writer-his writing is good enough for him; and I am beginning to see that I was in error. O my friend, how prophetic is the human soul! At the time I had a sort of misgiving, and, like Ibycus, "I was troubled; I feared that I might be buying honour from men at the price of sinning against the gods." Now I recognize my error."
"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."
We must instead put ourselves to the test: whether now and in the future we will read the texts and words of the genuine philosophers in a different way than we have previously; placing higher demands on ourselves, with an enduring will to question, and with a presentiment that there is something knowable before and beyond all science; we have to put to the test whether we have learnt to read. If we can affirm that we want to read in a different way and more meditatively, then we have done enough for the moment.
Heidegger, Martin Interpretation of Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation
Haase, Ullrich
Sinclair, Mark
Unzeitgemäss ist auch diese Betrachtung, weil ich etwas, worauf die Zeit mit Recht stolz ist, ihre historische Bildung, hier einmal als Schaden, Gebreste und Mangel der Zeit zu verstehen versuche, weil ich sogar glaube, dass wir Alle an einem verzehrenden historischen Fieber leiden und mindestens erkennen sollten, dass wir daran leiden. Wenn aber Goethe mit gutem Rechte gesagt hat, dass wir mit unseren Tugenden zugleich auch unsere Fehler anbauen, und wenn, wie Jedermann weiss, eine hypertrophische Tugend - wie sie mir der historische Sinn unserer Zeit zu sein scheint - so gut zum Verderben eines Volkes werden kann wie ein hypertrophisches Laster: so mag man mich nur einmal gewähren lassen. Auch soll zu meiner Entlastung nicht verschwiegen werden, dass ich die Erfahrungen, die mir jene quälenden Empfindungen erregten, meistens aus mir selbst und nur zur Vergleichung aus Anderen entnommen habe, und dass ich nur sofern ich Zögling älterer Zeiten, zumal der griechischen bin, über mich als ein Kind dieser jetzigen Zeit zu so unzeitgemässen Erfahrungen komme. So viel muss ich mir aber selbst von Berufs wegen als classischer Philologe zugestehen dürfen: denn ich wüsste nicht, was die classische Philologie in unserer Zeit für einen Sinn hätte, wenn nicht den, in ihr unzeitgemäss - das heisst gegen die Zeit und dadurch auf die Zeit und hoffentlich zu Gunsten einer kommenden Zeit - zu wirken.
Michel Foucault's reply to George Steiner's review of Foucualt's The Order of Things (George Steiner, “The Mandarin of the Hour—Michel Foucault,” New York Times Book Review February 21, 1971), “Monstrosities in Criticism” Diacritics 1, no.1 (1971) 57-60
"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."
We must instead put ourselves to the test: whether now and in the future we will read the texts and words of the genuine philosophers in a different way than we have previously; placing higher demands on ourselves, with an enduring will to question, and with a presentiment that there is something knowable before and beyond all science; we have to put to the test whether we have learnt to read. If we can affirm that we want to read in a different way and more meditatively, then we have done enough for the moment.
Heidegger, Martin Interpretation of Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation
Haase, Ullrich
Sinclair, Mark
Unzeitgemäss ist auch diese Betrachtung, weil ich etwas, worauf die Zeit mit Recht stolz ist, ihre historische Bildung, hier einmal als Schaden, Gebreste und Mangel der Zeit zu verstehen versuche, weil ich sogar glaube, dass wir Alle an einem verzehrenden historischen Fieber leiden und mindestens erkennen sollten, dass wir daran leiden. Wenn aber Goethe mit gutem Rechte gesagt hat, dass wir mit unseren Tugenden zugleich auch unsere Fehler anbauen, und wenn, wie Jedermann weiss, eine hypertrophische Tugend - wie sie mir der historische Sinn unserer Zeit zu sein scheint - so gut zum Verderben eines Volkes werden kann wie ein hypertrophisches Laster: so mag man mich nur einmal gewähren lassen. Auch soll zu meiner Entlastung nicht verschwiegen werden, dass ich die Erfahrungen, die mir jene quälenden Empfindungen erregten, meistens aus mir selbst und nur zur Vergleichung aus Anderen entnommen habe, und dass ich nur sofern ich Zögling älterer Zeiten, zumal der griechischen bin, über mich als ein Kind dieser jetzigen Zeit zu so unzeitgemässen Erfahrungen komme. So viel muss ich mir aber selbst von Berufs wegen als classischer Philologe zugestehen dürfen: denn ich wüsste nicht, was die classische Philologie in unserer Zeit für einen Sinn hätte, wenn nicht den, in ihr unzeitgemäss - das heisst gegen die Zeit und dadurch auf die Zeit und hoffentlich zu Gunsten einer kommenden Zeit - zu wirken.
Why an annotated annotated edition versus a critical edition?
Why not just read a "raw" version of a text, like on Gutenberg? Or on a kindle? Why is is a critical ppparatus, and what is it for? Why do DVDs have extras on them? What is a Criterion edition of a film?
Why not just wacth a film? What does it mean to watch or read critically?
1. Detective as critic (Ginzburg on Clues)
Annotated Poe
2. Reader as walker or forager or flaneur
Annotated Emerson
3. Text as Monster Annotated Frankenstein
Philology
Text as lacking; in need of repair; as wounded, in need of surgery.
A restored edition (like Clarissa third edition title page).
Pausing to leave a text in order to find out more about what is being discussed and described; going a source like wikipedia to find out a little bit about or going to youtube to listen to a piece of music; returning to the text where you left. The text returns to you; you may reread it; you may finally read it after all; you may learn even more. Thedor Adorno; Adorno and Mann correspondence; Mann, Genesis of Doktor Faustus: The Novel of a Novel; Schoenberg; you read books and articles; you listen to more performances of Beethoven, more recordings; your learn about pianists who perform the piece--Maurizio Pollini); you learn about the piano sonata; about the sonata and classical music; classical versus romantic music; late Beethoven--quarterts; deafness, and so on.)
You Already Know how to Read Film (Genre--you know what to expect) Example: Hostel (2005)
"Historical, in fact philological, consider- ations have slowly but surely taken the place of profound explorations of eternal problems. The question becomes: What did this or that phi- losopher think or not think? And is this or that text rightly ascribed to him or not? And even: Is this variant of a classical text preferable to that other? Students in university seminars today are encouraged to occupy themselves with such emasculated inquiries. As a result, of course, philosophy itself is banished from the university altogether."
Curtius, E. R. 1947. Die auslandiche wissenschaftliche Literatur der Kriegs- und Nachkriegsjahre ist mir bis auf verschwindende Ausnahmen nicht zuganglich gewesen. Auch die Bonner Universitatebibliothek ist seit 1944 in folge eines Bombenangriffs teils unbenuntzbar, teils verbrannt. Ich habe daher manches Zitat nicht meher vergleichen, manche Quelle nicht mehr einsehen konnen. Aber wenn die literature 'das fragment der Fragmente" ist (Goethe), muss ein Versuch wie der vorleigende erst recht den Charackter des Fragmentarishcen tragen.
During the war and postwar years, I lost sight of foreign literary criticism after it vanished and was thus inaccessible to me. Also, as a consequence of an air raid in 1944, parts of the Bonn University Library were unusable or burnt. I could no longer check various citations or consult many sources. But if literature is "the fragment of fragments" (Goethe), an attempt like this one in particular must exhibit a fragmentary character.] — "Vorwort," in Europaisches Literatur und Lateinische Mittelater, (my translation; not translated in the English edition of 195
Curtius, E. R. 1953. I have tried to show that humanistic tradition is from time to time attacked by philosophy. It may suffer a serious setback from these aggressions. Many signs seem to point to the fact that we are faced once more with an incursion of philosophers, existentialists... "Appendix: The Medieval Bases of Western Thought," European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, 592
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. "The University Without Condition," originally delivered as a Presidential Lecture at Stanford University in 1998. Its title was "The Future of the Profession or the University Without Condition (Thanks to the 'Humanities,' What Could Take Place Tomorrow)." This version can be found in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 24-57. A slightly altered version, recast as an essay, appeared as "The University Without Condition" in Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 202-37. The French original is L'université sans condition (Paris: Galilée, 2001).
When do you have to go outside the text in order to understand it? Philology (history through etymology)
Philology as entry into history and culture: Life / Sex Life / End of Life = life, sex, and death=civilization
When do you have to go outside the text in order to understand it? Philology (history through etymology)
Genetic Fallacy?
When and under what conditions does knowing something about a writer's biography or the time he or she was writing make a difference to your reading of what he or she wrote?
One fact that has to be assimilated by both Labour and the Democrats is this: when Bill and Hillary arrived in Washington in 1992 they had little money. Now, despite remaining notionally in public service throughout, they are worth many millions of dollars. Tony and Cherie Blair were not obscenely wealthy when they arrived in power in 1997. Today they are worth more than $75 million. Consider the working-class voters whom the Clintons or the Blairs exhorted to vote for them in the 1990s: they are probably worse off now than they were then. In effect the Clintons and Blairs surfed on their grievances and inequities, making themselves rich and leaving their voters in the dust. This hasn’t gone unnoticed, which is one reason the old politics is no longer working. http://www.lrb.co.uk/2016/11/14/rw-johnson/trump-some-numbers
Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is an aberration a consuming passion. No, I don’t take any drugs, I take books, of course I have certain preferences, many books don’t suit me at all, some I take only in the morning, others at night, there are books I don’t ever let go, I drag them around with me in the apartment, carrying them from the living room into the kitchen, I read them in the hall standing up, I don’t use a bookmark, I don’t move my lips while reading, early on I learned to read very well, I don’t remember the method, but you ought to look into it. They must have used an excellent method in our provincial elementary schools, at least back when I learned to read.
--Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina: A Novel, trans. Philip Boehm (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 1990), 57-58.
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