Welcome to American Authorship Seminar

1. Roll

2. Syllabus and the Structure/Logic of the Course.

3. Questions?

4. For Next Time:
Obtain all the required texts and read Bennett's Introduction, and Chapters 1 and 2.

5. Intoduction to the idea of authorship using Wikipedia: "author" "Revision history of Author, "Wikipedia: How to read an article history"

6. How does the example of Wikipedia define a vision of "authority, language, subjectivity, and knowledge"?

• list some words/ideas
• apply to each critical term
  
  

Welcome to American Authorship Seminar

1. Roll

Questions?
On your printed syllabus under "Grades," change the last item from Participation 15% to "Seminar Presentations: 20%"

For Next Time:
As soon as I receive it, I will send you the URL of Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?" Print, read, and annotate it for next Tuesday.

Also write and bring in a discussion question concerning "What is an Author?" I will ask you to bring in such a question for every assigned reading this semester.

Reports, Projects, Discussion Questions
On Tuesday, we'll talk more about the reports, the research project, and the days of leading discussion.

Today, I will talk about the requirement for you to bring discussion questions to class.

Roland Barthes "The Death of the Author" and "From Work to Text"

Reports
If we were having reports today, I would certainly have suggested that someone choose "Poststructuralism" as a topic to give us a way in to Barthes.

Such a report would have covered some of the major ideas of postmodernism and tried to link these ideas to some specific passages and term in the texts we read.

Poststructuralism, for instance, rejected certain traditional ideas (and ideals) about meaning in favor of others:

• it rejected the idea of meaning based on "origins" in favor of an idea of meaning based on the competition of discourses.
• it rejected the idea of order based on binary oppositions (good/evil, us/them) in favor of the idea of ruptures of history,
• it rejected the conception of the individual as a unified, self creating identity, in favor of a decentered "subject"
  
  

Poststructuralism responded to traditional wisdom as represented by the structuralism of Claude Levi Strauss, as well as by traditional humanism (which assumes a centered individual--such as an individual author).

If we as poststructural literary critics reject the centered identity in favor of a decentered subject, isn't it hypocritical, then, to focus our criticism on individual authors?

pg. 52.9: quotation after break ending with "ready-made lexicon"

Thus text is not an artifact of writing, but a space. Humanity is not an essential thing, but a space of multiple, competing possibiilities which has no center.

Discussion Questions

. What makes a good discussion question?

• attempts to open up the text rather than closing it down
• attempts to provide a way into the logic of the text by focusing on a word, a moment, a specific passage
• calls attention to an apparent gap or blind spot in our reading, which the author may in fact have anticipated elsewhere
• plays one text off another, gets them to "speak" to one another
  
  

Example: Barthes has been criticized for replacing the tyranny of the author with the tyranny of the reader: see 54.7. What does he mean by "unity?" Is the reader's "unity" less tyrannizing than the author's?

Group Work

Get into pairs or threesomes and come up with a question about these two Barthes essays.

Roll

Questions?

For Today You Were To:
As soon as I receive it, I will send you the URL of Michel Foucault's "What is an Author?" Print, read, and annotate it for next Tuesday.

Also write and bring in a discussion question concerning "What is an Author?" I will ask you to bring in such a question for every assigned reading this semester.

For Text Time:
Read Mikhail Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel," pages 259 to break on 324.

Seminar Presentations
See the handout. We will sign up using the Wiki "Presentation Sign Up" on Moodle

Foucault's "What is an Author" (The Author Function)

Roll

Questions?

For Today You Were To:
Read the Introduction, and Chapters 1 and 2 of Andrew Bennett's The Author.

For Text Time:
Read Chapters 3 and 4 of Andrew Bennett's The Author.

Seminar Presentations
See the handout.

Seminar Projects
I will give you a copy of the handout today.

Bennett's Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2

Resources
"Turkish Medieval Song" from Michael Wood's Homer Singer of Tales (In Search of the Trojan War).

Roll

Questions?

For Today You Were To:
Read Chapters 5 and 6 of Andrew Bennett's The Author.

For Text Time:
Read Sydney Smith: "Who Reads an American Book?" (1820)

Washington Irving: "The Author's Account of Himself," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Stratford-on-Avon" and "Christmas" (1821)

Bennett's Chapters 5 and 6
Page 70: "allegories of reading" ...the ways that the work of authors rhetorically constructs images or models of authorship and readership. How social authority is invoked--how the "singer" presents him/herself as a "seer" as well as "craftsman" (36).

What is the "Question of Literature"?

Resources

• "Turkish Medieval Song" from Michael Wood's Homer Singer of Tales (In Search of the Trojan War).
• "More News from Nowhere" Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (lyrics)

Roll

Questions?

For Today You Were To:
Read Sydney Smith: "Who Reads an American Book?" (1820)

Washington Irving: "The Author's Account of Himself," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Stratford-on-Avon" and "Christmas" (1821)

For Text Time:
Read Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"

Reports

• Washington Irving and American Authorship (Maxwell)
• Literary Nationalism (Patrick)

Discussion-Leading Dates
These are now included on the online schedule

Irving Readings