20080915

Nunc etiam, o amici

In other news, I've set the weekend of the 8th of November (i.e. noon on Friday the 7th to noon on Monday the 10th) to do my written comps. That should be enough time to finish that booklist. I've also finished:
  • The Owl and the Nightingale
  • Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious.
  • Patricia Clare Ingham. “Making All Things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia.”
  • Karma Lochrie. “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages.”
  • Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Medieval Identity Machines.
  • Hilário Franco. “La construction d’une utopie: l’Empire de Prêtre Jean.”
And will read
  • Daniel Birkholz. “Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint.”
  • William Burgwinkle. “Utopia and Its Uses: Twelfth-Century Romance and History.”
  • John Ganim. Medievalism and Orientalism.
this week, and probably reread the Canterbury Tales next week. Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes is still on my desk, as are a number of other books (Getting Medieval, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, Chaucerian Polity, usw) which I will eventually get around to reading.

Bloch's getting better, actually, now that I'm out of the "Here's why Freud and Jung are wrong in great and circular detail" section. Rereading Jameson's Political Unconscious was great, really, in part because he said a lot of things I'd forgotten he'd said in that book, and in part because his section on ideology and utopia (Chapter Six) had a lot of useful things that will make it into the diss.
From The Didactic Edge

So we're almost a month into the semester here at UAF, and this time around I'm teaching Honors World Literature to 1650. Ideally, this means I get a batch of students who are "smarter" than regular students; whether it actually means that I'm not sure. I will say that discussions have been better than usual, as have papers. I'll get to the latter in a minute, but first, here's what I'm doing this term.

I've decided that, in addition to the university-defined goals of this course (reading, understanding, and writing about literature), my students will also discuss the utopian content of world literature. To that end, we started off with two theoretical essays--Lyman Tower Sargent's "The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited" and Ernst Bloch's "The Wishful Landscape Perspective in Aesthetics"--which established not only some of the generic utopian conventions, but also that what I'm looking for is not the utopian form so much as the utopian spirit, Bloch's "Not-Yet-Conscious" or "Anticipatory Illumination." They seemed to take to this pretty well, I think, and our recent discussions of Gilgamesh, Plato, Aristotle, Sappho, and Callimachus have borne this out, not in the least because the theory has allowed them to approach the material they know (Gilgamesh, the Apology of Socrates) as fresh.

I've also included a writing component instead of quizzes this term. The writing assignment is due every three weeks, and students are asked to write 2-3 pages over one of the works we've discussed over that three-week period. I've also provided them with three ways that they can respond to that literature:
  1. Explain the utopian function in the work you have chosen. Identify the structural and/or narrative features of the text evoke hope, and propose ways we can use that hope content today.
  2. Take two non-consecutive passages of a larger work (or two shorter poems by the same author) and discuss what these passages have in common and why that common theme is important to our understanding of the work as a whole.
  3. Other than the approach I took in class, what critical perspective might also be useful for the work you’ve chosen (historical, feminist, postcolonial, etc.—see the “Critical Perspectives” handout on Blackboard)? Explain why this approach will be useful and provide a brief example of that reading.
Astute readers may recognize option two as a variant of Dr. Virago's "Crux Buster," which I tried to good effect last Spring in the English Lit Survey course.

I got their first response papers on Thursday, and have graded 14 of them (about 34% of the total [NB: I love my spreadsheet gradebook, because it lets me engage my bourgeois love for facts and figures!]) so far. A number of them responded to Gilgamesh, and of those, what they've said has ranged from expected mediocrity (vague thesis statements, insufficient evidence, etc.) to moments of blinding clarity. I've had well-written considerations of the value of Gilgamesh as a utopian figure, as well as a meditation on the Apology of Socrates that led into civic engagement and global unity. They haven't all been perfect, either—some of them have had trouble with the theory component—but it's a work in progress on both sides of the pedagogical divide.

So that's my teaching semester so far. I'm looking forward to the rest of it, honestly, and I'm hoping that the exercise will not only help my students become better (dialectically engaged, philosophically complex, socially aware) human beings, but--in the best academic tradition--will help me get a further handle on what I mean by utopianism.

20080903

Update on Reading List

The score is still Jacob 2, List 3 in the first half.

As of this moment, I have read (or re-read) the following:
  • Caedmon’s Hymn
  • Bede’s Story of Caedmons’ Hymn
  • The Battle of Maldon
  • Genesis A and B
  • Dream of the Rood
  • Guthlac A
  • The Phoenix
  • The Wanderer
  • The Seafarer
  • The Wife’s Lament
  • Deor
  • The Gifts of Men
  • The Fortunes of Men
  • Cotton Vitellius A.xv (Nowell Codex only):
  • Wonders of the East
  • The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
  • Beowulf
  • The Three Dead Kings
  • Winner and Waster
  • Pearl
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  • Troilus & Criseyde
  • House of Fame
  • King Horn
  • Sir Orfeo
  • Several Lyrics and Ballads
  • Vincent Geoghegan. Utopianism and Marxism.
  • Louis Marin. Utopics: the Semiological Play of Textual Spaces.
  • Tom Moylan. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia.
  • Lyman Tower Sargent. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.”
  • Sheila Delany. Chaucer’s House of Fame: The Poetics of Skeptical Fideism.
  • Jacques Le Goff. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages.
I have also read some things that are not on my list but probably should have been:
  • Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
  • Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia
I am in the midst of reading (or re-reading) the following:
  • The Owl and the Nightingale
  • Geoffrey of Monmoth, History of the Kings of Britain
  • Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
  • Ernst Bloch. The Principle of Hope. (all of it)
  • Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious.
  • Patricia Clare Ingham. “Making All Things New: Past, Progress, and the Promise of Utopia.”
  • Karma Lochrie. “Sheer Wonder: Dreaming Utopia in the Middle Ages.”
On the other hand, these I still have left to read (or wossname):
  • Life of St Christopher
  • Judith
  • La3amon, Brut
  • Mandeville’s Travels
  • Bevis of Hampton
  • Richard Coer de Lyon
  • Piers Plowman
  • The York Register of Corpus Christi Drama
  • Canterbury Tales
  • Fredric Jameson. Archaeologies of the Future.
  • Susan Stewart. On Longing.
  • Phillip Wegner. Imaginary Communities.
  • Daniel Birkholz. “Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint.”
  • William Burgwinkle. “Utopia and Its Uses: Twelfth-Century Romance and History.”
  • Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Medieval Identity Machines.
  • Hilário Franco. “La construction d’une utopie: l’Empire de Prêtre Jean.”
  • John Ganim. Medievalism and Orientalism.
  • Michael Uebel. Ecstatic Transformation.
Of them all, the following may show up in my dissertation:
  • Ernst Bloch's stuff
  • The House of Fame
  • Winner and Waster
  • Pearl?
  • Louis Marin?
  • Delany
  • The four articles from JMEMS
  • Both Jamesons
  • Cohen
  • Ganim
  • Uebel
None of the Old English stuff, or the early middle English stuff, or the Malory is going to make it in, because I'm limiting myself to the 14th century in England. This isn't to say I haven't had good ideas about that stuff—actually, I've started a wiki file just for Future Projects—but I do want to get done with the dissertation before I die.

To add to that, I've just received through ILL Slavoj Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes, which is so interesting that everything else may get put on hold.