Spring 2021 English 525, Professor Bill Nericcio
Subterranean Imagination Challenge
So many students fret and stress
over writing assignments--but they
should not. I mean, after all,
this is an "English" class
and writing essays is as "English
class" as you can get. It would
be like freaking out if you walked
into your Chemistry lab and fainting
at the sight of a beaker, screaming
at the appearance of a test-tube.
Still, I get it.
But we can do things another way. We
do not have to be incarcerated by
tradition nor policed by conventions.
We can, for this class, with our
dazzling #americansubterranean superpowers,
write pieces that organically represent our
encounters with complex writers, artists,
critics, and directors in ways
that actually bring us pleasure.
I was going to consult the Oxford
English Dictionary on hedonism* but
the good old Wikipedia had a clearer
explication of the term:
*free! with your registration to SDSU--check out
hedonic, the root term for hedonism here.
So your main goal with this essay will be to
select a subject-area and objects (at least two
drawn from our required list of texts--film, book,
art, photography, television... ANY texts) that
give you pleasure to explore, that delight
your mind, that satisfy your unapologetic
curiosity.
Ok--so here are some prompts you are free to
use, adapt, warp, re-invent, reshape, mangle,
deconstruct, destruct, etc. Though, between
you and me, I hope you use the last prompt
as that one has the most value!
Good luck!
woven into the argument of the essay--the best online sources
for literature/cultural studies researches include Project Muse
and JSTOR. MLA-style or University of Chicago-style citations/
footnotes are cool (I prefer Chicago, but it really does not
matter to me).
INCORPORATE SPECIFIC IMAGES THAT HELP MOVE YOUR ARGUMENT
FORWARD--THESE IMAGES SHOULD BE CAPTIONED AND SOURCED IN
THE WORKS CITED OR VIA CAPTION.
PROMPTS
1.One of the most successful spelunkers of
the American Subterranean came from France--the
late great Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard's America
is all about the veneer of America, the facade of
American, even, the essential hypocrisy that sustains
America. Do a little more reading from Baudrillard's
oeuvre* and write an essay that uses at least two
primary, required texts/film/etc from our reading
to say something unique about what functions at
the surface and beneath the depths of Uncle Sam's
universe..
*This one is curious: America, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso, 1988; 1989. (English)
2. Redefine the concept of the "American
Subterranean" using your own focus/vision/insight as
you explode (replace?!) the term even as you
explore any two works we have or will encounter
this semester? Do feel free to focus
on works we have not gotten to yet in class.
3. Is there a sexual dimension in works appearing
after 1960 in the Americas? Explore our authors/directors
evolving notions of sexuality as they unfold of
in any two or three works we have read/watched/
experienced this semester.
4. Can a Painting talk to a Novel? A photograph
speak to a short story or essay? Compose an
essay that contrasts/compares a text this semester
that was written with one that owes its complexity
to some relationship with pictures (for example
Remedios Varo's painting that lurks at the core
of Pynchon's 'Lot 49). Ultimately your essay is a meditation
on the semantic and the semiotic conceived
simultaneously. The thematic focus? That is
up to you.
5.Take any three works we have read this semester
and determine what they have in common -- do bring
in outside research (reading recent treatments of these
works in contemporary criticism) so that your musings
are placed in context.
6.Literature and Existentialism--bring yourself
up to speed by selecting/reading a key work from
the existentialist tradition: by Wittgenstein,
Nietzsche, Camus, or Sartre. Use that philosophical
text and fuse it somehow with a work we have
read in class this term.
7. Erotic dimensions of the American Psyche--is the erotic
necessarily neurotic? Are neurotics erotic? Consider
the relationship between the erotic and the
psychological in any two works from the semester.
8. Literary Criticism/Film Criticism. Locate
scholarly articles on any two the artists/writers we
have experienced this semester. Try to find articles
that you are decidedly at odds with or that come up
short in ways you find annoying. Write an essay that
directly challenges the findings of these two scholars;
make sure to incorporate your own thesis in your essay.
9. Plunging into the Freudian Uncanny--read E.T.A.
Hoffman's "The Sandman." Then read Sigmund Freud's
essay on "The Uncanny." Then apply your discoveries
to one or more texts/characters/authors we have
encountered this semester.
10.Invent your own thesis focused on any works you
choose from our class plus any one work you want
to add in from another class or from your own
reading/screening/museum-going. Written proposal due
to me via email or in-class, typed, delivered
to me by noon Friday, March 19, 2021--if you hand-deliver,
be sure write your email on your submission so I can
get back to your right away.
11. Write an essay on the relationship between the
Freudian unconscious and one or more of the works we
have read this semester (or are going to read! you are
free to read ahead). For this essay, if you can, read
any essay written by Dr. Jane Gallop you find on JSTOR
or Project Muse or the database of your choice...
tough going, but Professor Gallop's brilliant analyses
pack a wallop!
Go have fun! I mean it!
ps: I had promised you some samples of killer
literary criticism -- here are some samples
by some of my fave critics ... in each case,
save for the last one, by me!, the essay left
a mark on how I approach writing criticism:
Invention, Memory, and Place
Edward W. Said
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 2000), pp. 175-192
...construction of a geographical space called the Orient, for instance, with scant attention paid to the actuality of the geography and its inhabitants-but also on the mapping, conquest, and annexation of territory both in what Conrad called the dark places of the earth and in its most densely inhabited and lived-in...
-
-
The "Blackness of Blackness": A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey
...The "Blackness of Blackness": A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey Henry Louis Gates , Jr. "Signification is the nigger's occupation." -rRADITIONAL1 "Be careful what you do, Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, And all of the other Gods of the Congo, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo...
-
-
"Draupadi" by Mahasveta Devi
..." Draupadi " by Mahasveta Devi Translated with a Foreword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Translator's Foreword I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation to the...
-
Wallace Stevens: Memory, Dead and Alive
...Dead and Alive HELEN VENDLER I WANT ence seen or as the TO defective, nostalgic REFLECT whether memory on memory it of is one's the in iterable emotional Wallace memory Stevens life, and - of both memory sense-experi- memory seen seen as defective, whether it is the iterable memory of sense-experi-...
Rendering L.C. | Susan Daitch meets Borges and Borges and more...1993, The Review of Contemporary Fiction48 Views18 Pages1 File ▾ -
- Other suggestions! If you are writing about culture--read more James Baldwin; also Michael Taussig
- Writing about film, J. Hoberman; about literature, John Leonard. or Gore Vidal, or Virginia Woolf ...
go write!
-
-
