Last night attendance was poor, which surprised me as the previous week I felt we ended on a high note and felt we may have deepened the commitment to the seminar.
Perhaps there was some other important event taking place? Hopefully students will return next week and stay on-board for the last few sessions.
We are turning towards the close of the seminar now and so talking and thinking about our essays. some students seem to run a mile from this issue but it is really just an opportunity to form a response to what is taught rather than passively accept it.
Each new generation of students builds their responses to these materials and through their responses goes on to become the next generation of artists, teachers and experts. For this reason, undergraduate essays are crucial in beginning to assert your own opinions and positions and find your own voice.
Furthermore, if we start sketching and discussing the essay early enough it becomes less a mountainous chore (it's only 2,000 words) and more of a slowly accumulating project (if we give our tasks plenty of time in which to emerge, then time does some of the work for us I find).
The programme is supposed to be a seminar not a lecture series, and so, every opportunity to hear students' responses is welcome. Last night, partly aided by reduced numbers I must say, we did manage to start hearing about students' choice of questions and way to possibly answer them.
Ideally we will hear from everyone and ideally all students should be able to contribute ideas to each other's project in a seminar atmosphere of mutual support and interest.
The other thing we did last night was to briefly gloss the texts by Equiano and Fanon. Really these chats can only open a few more windows into the texts, and, as I have said before, I highly recommend going back to the texts following such a discussion as doing so produces a surprisingly fruitful new encounter with the text and develops understanding and confidence about just what reading really means and how you can use it (CRUCIAL!!)
At the end of the session I gave out a handout on Saussure (re last week's discussion of Structuralism) and a handout of the famous Barthes text 'The Death of the Author' to help us discuss Writing and the Subject next week.
Next week I think we will start with a thorough REVIEW of the course (so please look down through the whole blog, including clicking on 'OLDER POSTS' at the very bottom of the Blog below). We can hear a little more about students' essay progress etc. and discuss the Subject Writing as raised by Barthes.
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