Strickland--Representations/1
Ron Strickland
English 207: Representations
Syllabus Prepared February, 1998
3 Semester Credit Hours
Office: Stevenson 404Phone: 438-7907 / E-mail:
Office Hours: 9:00-10:00 MTW
WWW URL:
Required Texts: / Pip’s PacketReserve Texts: / Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
Aristotle, The Poetics
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Ariel Dorfmann, The Empire’s Old Clothes
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic
Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Henry Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
bell hooks, Black Looks
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema
Plato, The Republic
Others, TBA
Course Catalog Description
Prerequisites: Foundations of Inquiry, Language and Composition, Language and Communication. Theories of representation in the humanities and their relation to Western and some non-Western literary, artistic, and mass media practices of representation.
Course Description
REPRESENTATION will build an awareness that what each of us understands as his or her “real” world and self is a function of how he or she represents this world and self, and how representations of the world and self circulate in larger cultural discourses. The course will provide a vocabulary with which to describe and discuss the historically and geographically diverse ways in which humanity has constructed representations of what it calls the “real” world and the individuals who are conscious of this world.
More specifically, we will study Western culture's dominant theories and practices of constructing representations of reality particularly in aesthetic discourses and contrast them to one specific non-Western tradition, in this case, traditional Islamic modes of aesthetic representation.
Goals Statement
At the end of the semester successful students in English 207 will have the following knowledge and skills:
Knowledge
1 Useable familiarity with the history of thought on the problem of representation in the human sciences in the Western tradition, from Plato to the present.
2 Useable familiarity with the standard vocabulary for treating the problem of representation in contemporary academic and critical discourses.
3 An awareness and useable familiarity for purposes of contrast and contextualization of the general assumptions of at least one non-western paradigm for understanding the problem of representation.
Skills
1 The ability to analyze an unfamiliar instance in any of several genres of representation and to say something about the representation’s rhetorical and aesthetic strategies, placing the representation in one or more appropriate social, cultural and historical contexts.
2 The ability to recognize significant conceptual and material boundaries between different modes of representation and to describe the effects of particular representations with respect to those boundaries.
3 The ability to articulate a critically informed, carefully reasoned position about the social and philosophical values underlying a particular instance or system of representation.
Representation in Relation to the General Education Program
Representation builds upon the interpretive and argumentational skills that students have acquired in Foundations of Inquiry and on the rhetorical skills that they have acquired in Language and Composition. It expands upon the techniques of interpreting works of the humanities that they have acquired in Language in the Humanities and upon their knowledge of relationships between society and the self acquired in Individuals and Society. It will do so by teaching students to interpret the diverse ways in which Western and non-Western works in the Humanities have constructed representations of society and the self. In this way, Representation prepares students to interpret works of representation in their future courses in Disciplinary Knowledge in Cultural Contexts and The Culture and Traditions of Asia, the Middle-East, Africa, Latin America or Indigenous Peoples of the World.
Assignments and Grading Formula:
In English 207 students will work together on group projects to compile annotated lists of electronic and textual resources pertaining to particular problems of representation in disciplinary fields closely related to their majors. The group project is not graded directly, but the annotated lists will be posted on the course web page and they will serve as background research for students’ major individual project, a formal essay or an html-based hypertext cluster on a particular problem of representation in their major discipline.
Formal Essay (6-8 pages) or hypertext ...... ….30%
Midterm Exam …………………………………………………………...25%
Final Exam …………...... …...... 25%
Class participation and e-mail micro-essays...………………….....20%
Reading and Discussion Schedule:
Week One / Introduction; Establishing E-mail Accounts
Prescription vs. Description: Lecture on Platonic and Aristotelian frameworks for understanding poetic representation
Reading: Plato, from The Republic
Week Two / Theoretical Contexts I
Mitchell, “Representation” from McLaughlin and Lentricchia, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study
Reading on Islamic Tradition of Aesthetic Representation, tba
Suggested further reading:
Eagleton, “Introduction,” from The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(Note: In the first two weeks my goal is to introduce students to a continuum of attitudes about representation, with Plato at one end resisting representation and Aristotle at the other end embracing it. We will also read and discuss an introductory text on Islamic aesthetic theory, and examine some examples of Islamic art and architecture in handouts and on the internet.)
Week Three / Theoretical Contexts II
Readings:
John Carlos Rowe, “Structure,” from Lentricchia and McLaughlin
In-class Video: The Day the Universe Changed
(Note: In the third week my goal is to introduce students to structuralism and poststructuralism as conceptual paradigms for understanding the relationship between reality and representation.)
Week Four / Modernism and Realism
Readings:
Auerbach, from Mimesis, tba
Aristotle, from The Poetics, tba
Eagleton, chapter on Kantian aesthetics
(Note: In the the fourth week we will examine the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of high modernist aesthetic discourse on its own terms.)
Week Five / Readings:
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Greenblatt, “The Word of God in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
(Note in week five we will look at some critical analyses of modernism, with two essays chosen for their historical spread—Benjamin writing about early 20th-century culture and Greenblatt writing about early 16th-century culture.)
Week Six / Postmodernity I
Readings:
Harvey, chapters on Modernity, Taylorism and Fordism
Eagleton, “Art after Aushwitz”
(Note: in the sixth week we focus on the emergence of statistics and demographics as modes of representating “the human”; we will look at the ways that high modernist aesthetic discourse developed both against and in complicity with the logic of statistics and demographic representation.)
Week Seven / Postmodernity II
Readings:
Harvey, chapter on Jonathan Raban’s Soft City and Cindy Sherman’s photography
(Note: This week we will examine some specific examples of postmodern representations.)
Week Eight / Postmodernity continued
Midterm, First Paper Due
Week Nine / Representation in Contemporary Popular Culture: Film
Readings:
Laura Mulvey, from Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema
In class video, excerpts from Hitchcock’s Psycho
(Note: in weeks 9-14 we will examine several strategies and effects of representation in film and advertising, with especial attention to the ways these strategies function to produce gendered and racialized subjectivities and how these gendered and racialized identities function to make “class” relatively invisible in post-industrial, post-national culture.)
Week Ten / Representation in Contemporary Popular Culture: Film
Readings:
bell hooks, from Black Looks
Frantz Fanon, from Black Skins, White Masks
In class video, excerpts from Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead
(Note: In these examples I am interested especially in analyzing a conventional mise-en-scene from Griffith’s film that became ubiquitous in later Hollywood cinema. In Griffith’s film, a small group of white people are besieged in a rural cabin by a black mob. The Klu Klux Klan come to the rescue. In Romero’s 1960’s cult classic, the racial politics of this mis-en-scene are reversed, as a black man fights off a mob of white zombies. Students will recognize the situation from countless Hollywood films.)
Week Eleven / Representation in Contemporary Popular Culture: Film
Reading:
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “The Geopolitics of Desire in Diva”
In class video, excerpts from Beneix’s Diva
(Note: Jean-Jacques Beneix’s Diva is a beautiful and very popular nouveau-film noir French film of the mid-1980’s in which the plot turns on whether Europeans or Japanese capitalists are going to control the “voice” of an African-American opera singer. We’ll examine some standard film strategies in relation to it, as well as the ways race, gender, nationality and culture are represented in the film.)
Week Twelve / Representation in Contemporary Popular Culture: Drama and Documentary Journalism
Anna Deveara Smith, Fires in the Mirror
Reading:
From the Discussion Guide to Fires in the Mirror
(Note: Anna Deveara Smith’s Fires in the Mirror is a one-woman performance on video—first performed on stage—which blurs the boundaries between documentary film journalism and stage drama as it considers the gulf between the ways two communities understand two related deaths. The video is used by some sections of foundations of Inquiry, and it comes with a useful packet of readings and discussion questions for students.)
Week Thirteen / Representation in Contemporary Popular Culture: Advertizing
Readings:
Henry Giroux, “The United Colors of Benetton,” from Disturbing Pleasures
Materials from the Benneton Web Site
Other handouts tba
(Note: Benetton is among the most daring and most self-consciously avant-garde postmodern advertisers. Giroux and other cultural critics have written some very perceptive critiques of their campaigns. We will look at the evolution of the Benetton campaigns, noticing how they began with a sort of representation of “coca cola multiculturalism” in the 1980’s and moved toward a very aggressively postmodern postcolonial and “post-political” representation in later ads—as, for instance, the ad showing a black woman nursing a white baby with full frontal nudity. We will also examine the differences between the Benetton ads that run in Europe and those that run in the U. S.)
Week Fourteen / Representation in Contemporary Popular Culture: Advertizing
Readings:
Kurz and Deshpande, “Trade Tales” (On the representational strategies of The Body Shop)
(Note: this is another opportunity to examine the new wave of “corporate responsibility” advertising. Kurz and Deshpande focus on the disjuncture between the ways The Body Shop is represented in internal corporate documents to be circulated among employees and the ways the company is represented in advertising and in founder Anita Roddick’s auto-biography.)
Week Fifteen / Review
Appendix: Grading Standards for English 207
Grading Standards for Classroom Participation and Micro-essays
In English 207 class participation and micro-essays are an important element of the class, and constitute a relatively small portion of the class grade (20%). Here are some guidelines:
For an A grade for class participation and micro-essays:
1 The student will have been always well-prepared for class and will have taken a leadership role in class discussions, and
2 The student will have produced thought-provoking micro-essays, engaged with the issues at hand, and submitted by the deadlines stated on the syllabus.
For a B grade for class participation and micro-essays:
1 The student will have made frequent and productive contributions to class discussions.
2 The student will have produced thought-provokiong micro-essays, engaged with the issues at hand, and submitted by the deadlines stated on the syllabus.
For a C grade for class participation and micro-essays:
1 The student may have been silent for most of the time in class discussions, speaking only when directly called upon.
2 The student may have neglected to submit some micro-essays, or may have been habitually late in submitting micro-essays.
For a D grade for class participation and micro-essays:
1 The student will have been silent almost always during class discussions, and will have been often unprepared when called upon.
2 The student will have missed or will have been late in submitting most micro-essays.
For an F grade for class participation and micro-essays:
1 The student will always have been unprepared for class, and will have been silent during class discussions.
2 The student will have neglected to submit and/or will have been late in submitting most of the assigned micro-essays.
Grading Standards for English 207 Formal Essay and Essay Exams
In General:
Complexity and range of analysis, significance of conclusions, logic and coherence of arguments, etc. are the focus of my grading. However,
rhetorical development and writing style are inseparable from these features.
Essays should be free of spelling and grammatical errors. Use the spelling and grammar checkers on Microsoft Word 7.0 before you print your final draft of the essay. Note that the spelling checker will not catch homonyms used out of context. Also note that since the grammar checker is designed for business writing it will suggest that you change some sentences and phrases (because they are long, for instance) that are quite acceptable for academic analysis.
The A essay exhibits these strengths:
1 Has a controlling sense of purpose.
2 Synthesizes information, draws inferences and makes analogies which show insight into the topic.
3 Maintains a consistent awareness of audience.
4 Has unified organization with an engaging introduction, graceful transitions, and a substantial conclusion.
5 Has a clear thesis developed thoroughly with specific details, examples, reasoning.
6 Uses precise word choice and appropriate and effective variation in sentence structure, emphasis, and figures of speech.
7 Is free from serious errors in standard English and from common stylistic weaknesses (ineffective use of passive voice, inexact word choice, inappropriate shifts in tense and person, wordiness).
8 Further, the A paper is often distinguished from the B paper by a more assured prose style, more creativity in form or content, more subtlety in rhetorical strategy.
The B essay exhibits most of these strengths:
1 Has a controlling sense of purpose and a consistent clarity of exposition.
2 Synthesizes information, draws inferences and makes analogies which show insight into the topic.
3 Maintains a consistent awareness of audience.
4 Has unified organization with an engaging introduction, graceful transitions, and a substantial conclusion.
5 Has a clear thesis developed thoroughly with specific details, examples, reasoning.
6 Uses precise word choice and appropriate and effective variation in sentence structure, emphasis, and figures of speech.
7 Has few if any serious errors in standard English or stylistic weaknesses (ineffective use of passive voice, inexact word choice, inappropriate shifts in tense and person, wordiness).
The C essay exhibits these characteristics:
1 Displays a sense or purpose, which may not be consistently met.
2 Is logical, but rarely presents distinctively insightful or thought-provoking perspectives.
3 Displays a sense of audience and usually addresses that audience.
4 Is organized well enough to be easily readable, with a beginning, middle, and end.
5 Has a clear thesis, reasonably developed with some specific details and examples.
6 Has adequate but undistinguished word choice and sentence structure.
7 Contains almost no serious errors in sentence boundaries, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
The D essay may exhibit some but not all of the following weaknesses:
1 Fails to rise above the obvious in content, substitutes repetition for development, or relies too heavily on a secondary source.
2 Lacks a clear or appropriate sense of audience.
3 Has lapses in clarity.
4 Has lapses in organization; shows weakness in introduction, transition, and/or conclusion.
5 May have a single subject but no controlling idea.
6 Lacks variety in sentence structure and/or precision of word choice.
7 May have several errors in Standard English: mixed construction (confused sentences) sentence boundary errors: run-on sentences, unjustifiable sentence fragments, comma splices, agreement error (subject/verb; pronoun/antecedent) inappropriate shifts in tense, voice, mood, punctuation errors and excessive misspellings.
The F essay exhibits some of the following weaknesses:
1 Lacks substantive content.
2 Lacks any consistent sense of audience.
3 Consistently lacks clarity.
4 Lacks unified organization; lacks adequate introduction, transitions and/or
substantive conclusion.
5 Lacks a clearly-defined thesis and/or a controlling idea.
6 Has frequent errors in Standard English (see list for D paper, item 7).