Hi, thanks for much improved attendance this week. Next week is the last week of the seminar course and I'm afraid we have got behind with our readings.
I also regret that we have not spent enough time hearing your ideas and responses. I blame myself partly for being worried that the session will not achieve its potential if I don't fill it with 'delivery', but I also think that either smaller class sizes or a longer course would give us what the English call 'elbow room' to get to know everyone better and develop the important speculative conversation that SHOULD arise from anything titled 'seminar'.
At least I hope that the sessions you have attended, the handouts, the nblogs and exchanges with your peers will give you the grounds for making essays which are genuinely informed and engaged with the theme of The Subject and that you can take care to compose your essays so that they produce something of lasting value to you and to the debate.
Tonight's Barthes text proves to be still rich in its assertions, even if it can now be perhaps historicised as a 'classic' postmodern text. It's a wonderful investigation of writing by a writer, but its aims are much wider as it aims to deconstruct the 'Author' function in the broadest sense and as it applies to every artifact valued as of cultural significance. It would be wonderful to put all our mythological assumptions about e.g. the paintings of Van Gogh through this essay -as a kind of grinder - and see how or view of Van Gogh might be changed as a result!
We also managed to mention at least a few other important literary works not referred to by Barthes, including: Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, W.G Sebald's Austerlitz, and Dennis Potter's TV drama Karaoke.
Next week there are two texts we can try to look at (though time is certainly short. I'm ashamed to ay they are on 'Female Sexuality' (Jacqueline Rose) and the 'Queer' Subject (Judith Butler). ashamed because it seems I left these themes til last and almost left them out, but I believe I proceeded through the choice of texts in way that was meant to build a dynamic and historical line of thought which would culminate in these two texts.
Obviously we will be able to use them to discuss Gender, and Sexuality (referred to in the Silverman essay too), but they can also expand Barthes' notion of the Performative (not to be confused with 'Performance') Subject as well as introduce us to ideas of 'the body' that have been on the edge of the seminar but not yet really confronted. I will do my best to write a short gloss of each of the outstanding texts here on this blog and refer to them at least at the start of next week's session.
Just for interest's sake here is a little coincidental quote about the Subject as a body drawn from Hilary Mantel's review of a new book on hypochondria:
"Some of us, mostly men, regard our bodies as machines, and service them when they begin to grate and creak, or when they spluter to a halt by the roadside. Some treat their bodies like lovers, to be flattered and indulged, second-guessed and placated in the hope that they will thrive. All of us treat them as other; they are not our essential selves, they are what we drag around with us, a suitcase or steamer trunk with dubious, ever-shifting contents, a piece of luggage we didn't pack ourselves."
We must really hear from you and your essay ideas next week THE FINAL WEEK OF 'EXPLORING THE SUBJECT' 2009. Please bring a sketch, bullet points or outline and maybe a few images to illustrate if possible. DON'T BE AFRAID. Last year I had a terribly empty session after all these weeks of hard work because students simply felt intimidated enough by the fear of presentation to make them stay away -a great waste of a valuable opportunity.
We are all at the seminar to support each other and exchange ideas and time is so short that the spotlight won't be on you and your ideas for very long and you will certainly gain form the experience. It really doesn't matter how developed or undeveloped your essay project is, I guarantee it will be worth airing it next week, and once others know what you are interested in they will have a chance to discuss it wth you, if not in the seminar itself them informally afterwards.
Going through the ideas is also a nice way of reviewing the course, gong back to the essay questions, booklist etc. so please attend, encourage others to attend, and prepare a little to share with the group. Then we can celebrate that the end of the course is nigh and go off to complete our essays as a response to these weeks of rich content and concentration.
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