 the obscene machine gender, ethnicity, & visual culture Spring 2007 | sdsu | eyegiene.sdsu.edu | professor w. nericcio | e493 Wednesdays from 4 to 6:40 in SS 1401 | memo@sdsu.edu | 619.594.1524 info on CFA possible strike this semester office hours! new and improved! bill nericcio, A & L 273, tuesdays from 1:20pm to 3:20 pm memo@sdsu.edu mark young, A & L 260, mondays from 10 am to 12 noon young12@rohan.sdsu.edu
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years and years, eyegiene.sdsu.edu's
English
493 has unfolded as an exploration of cinema and
literature—their connections, interactions, collusions,
etc. etc.—and we will honor that tradition in Spring 2007; however, we
will bring other new kinks to
our exploits as well.For example, our experimental (not to say chaotic!) seminar will spend a lot of time on a very simple question: do we create fiction or does it create us? Do literature and film, as the cliché goes, depict or render or recreate “reality,” or are they machines with a peculiar nature, rendered artifices that alter the very nature of being.  It
may well be that after close observation, the obscene machines of
literature and film
reveal themselves to be nothing more and
nothing less than an attempt by humans to immortalize themselves in
living facsimiles—ersatz, seductive mannequins in whose forms we
create and recreate our psyches! The machines we "forge," become
the factories of our own metamorphosis-- Holy Ovid, Batman! Throughout
the semester, in the books, films, art, and photography we
consume feverishly—allowing the influenza of textuality to
consume our imagination—we will confront various odd, curious,
bizarre, and perverse (yikes) writers and artists who have created
various odd, curious, bizarre, and perverse characters: "women" and
"men," "gay" and "straight," "black," "white," "mexican," and "asian."
The beauty  or the uncanniness of these
figures, the thing they share in common, is that each, in its own way,
transcends the category that it "represents." Man as "the obscene
machine"—the printed word (the novel, essay, and poetry) and
film will emerge during the course of the semester as a remarkable
semiotic and semantic factory of sorts, a voyeuristic while rhetorical,
rhetorical while voyeuristic asylum. Weekly we will wrestle with twin
media that represent in the course of entertaining, and entertain in
the course of forging the very ether that makes thought possible.This will very much be a course in "cultural studies," sensitive at once to the machinery of race and class, gender and ethnicity, desire and destruction while also remaining highly sensitive to formal, critical issues regarding the play of word and image. Our seminar is open to ALL majors of all ranks--freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors are welcome to come give us a test drive. |
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humberto eco cristina
rivera garza
william
nericcio century of the wind frida kahlo diary of frida kahlo frida kahlo | diego rivera dover art stickers flor garduño inner light: still life and nudes the hurt business: early works plus [+] oliver mayer tortilla flat john steinbeck |
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films include  peter
greenaway
the pillow book hal hartley flirt orson welles touch of evil king vidor gilda friz freleng speedy gonzales shorts (various) |
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 These sites are required reading for the seminar  course blog experiment 1 | the obscene machine course blog experiment 2 | the tex[t]-mex galleryblog This second blog is more directly related to the graduate seminar I am also teaching this term; however, as it is connected to the project of one of the required texts, I am placing it here as a resource. |
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| LOGISTICS Office Hours My regular office hours from Spring 2007 are on Tuesdays from 1:20pm to 3:20pm; my office is located in Arts and Letters 273--second floor, end of the hall. Though there are many undergraduates in this class, I hope that each of you will make the time to introduce yourself at least once during the course of the semester. You are also welcome to make an appointment with me if these hours are not convenient--email me at memo@sdsu.edu or call 619.298.4903. Office Hours are a key element of the university experience--basically, if you don't take advantage of them, you may well be stuck with a "high school" mentality where "talkin' to da teacher" outs you as an inveterate "brown-noser." However, this is a university and office hours--where you are free to engage in discussions and ask questions pertinent to the class--are an essential part of the collegiate intellectual experience. Graduate Teaching Assistant Mark Young is a second-year graduate student in our amazing Graduate Program in English; with loads of experience and the imagination and energy of a wizard, he brings his intellectual superpowers to our seminar. Seek him out while you have the time! Young's office hours are in A & L 260, the pacific review offices, mondays from 10 am to 12 noon young12@rohan.sdsu.edu The Professor Much too much about your would-be ringleader is here. Seminar Preparation You come to class having finished the reading--finished finished; it does not refer to skimming, scanning, googling a summary, etc. It means you enter our class having carefully read, taken notes, written down questions in preparation for our class sessions--if there is a reading for a given day, you walk in having spent a fair amount of time not only completing the reading, but also having thought about what you have read; if we are screening a film, perhaps you will have spent some time beforehand at imbd.com or other WWW info-trough having looked up info on the film, director, actors etc. Class sessions will very much rely on exchanges between students and professors and our graduate teaching assistant. Without careful preparation, why come to class? Attendance Because we meet only once a week, attendance in this seminar is essential. If you intend to miss more than TWO classes during the term (or you know yourself to be a dyed in the wool slacker), do please consider adding another class and giving this one a pass. Grades Your grade will be based on just about everything: attendance, participation (questions and contributions to class discussions), quiz-grades (quizzes will occur only if I get the sense that the class is acting like 10nth-grade stooges), in-class writing surprises, and the final exam. The grade breakdown is as follows: 24% Riveting Participation and Attendance 25% Horrible, Surprising Quizzes 25% The Big Scary Exam 25% The Big Scary Essay 1% Chutzpah, Drive, Ganas, Will... Essays and Writing Assignments 25% of your grade is provided by your "horrible, surprising quizzes." Also included in this category are two substantive entries on the obscene machine blog. As I have said IN class several times during the semester, these entries need to be substantitve AND derive/focus/develop/challenge ideas that have been bounced around in our class. You will be turning out printouts of this work on April 25, 2007, so you should have your commentaries posted, as I have to review them before letting them "out the corral" and up on the internet. Your BIG SCARY ESSAY, also constituting 25% of your final grade, should be conceived as an original, amazing, riveting, if not dramatic piece of analysis. DO TAKE CHANCES on your essays and don't be shy about incorporating captioned, cited images if they assist with your argument. The Final Exam Your final challenge for the term will be a comprehensive exam that will take place on May 2, 2007 at 4pm in West Commons 220; your exam is a "traditional" final exam in that all required readings and screenings may be covered in its pages. This "Big Scary Exam," as it was called above in the original course syllabus, is "closed book." All you need to bring that Tuesday afternoon are a couple of good pens, your imagination, and your memory--do this, and you will be a rad, successful, obscene undergraduate machine! |
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books include...