Saturday 31 December 2011
Tuesday 20 December 2011
A hot Barthes
Bit of a problem today with a Muslim student who thought I was making an adverse statement about the author of the Qu'ran during a class on Roland Barthes' 'Death of the Author'.
If ever this theory should apply to anything, it has to be to this issue wherein a text's meaning is constantly misinterpreted with disastrous consequences.
But then again, why should he take on board any Western theory?
If ever this theory should apply to anything, it has to be to this issue wherein a text's meaning is constantly misinterpreted with disastrous consequences.
But then again, why should he take on board any Western theory?
Wednesday 14 December 2011
Oh, why bloody bother...
One of the most important theorists of all modernity and the students couldn't give a flying Foucault. I give in…
Maybe I should have started the lecture with the story of when he was found tripping off his tits in a New York sauna and Edmund White was called in to rescue him…
That might have sparked their interest.
That might have sparked their interest.
Labels:
Edmund White,
Foucault,
Modernity,
Queer
Friday 9 December 2011
Punk Freud
Today I gave the lecture on the Freud key text, 'Family Romances'.
I wandered and blathered for three hours about the relationships between ourselves and our parents; about the emotional separation of us from our parents and about how our perception of our parents changed as an essential part of emotional maturity.
I talked about childhood trauma and how as adults we see those traumas reenacted within children that we know - yet fail to remember ourselves as traumatised children. Of how we've suppressed those major traumas and rages within ourselves; rages so catastrophic at the time yet now somehow diffused when remembered as adults.
I noticed a random, smiling student who looked to me as if the penny had dropped; that he'd perhaps reached some sort of theoretical epiphany. Yes - this would be it - he would explain his reading of the text back to class who will have already enthusiastically grasped it. He would continue with his explanation of Sigmund the Great; getting it all wrong but having been carried away by the joy and hubris of that first ever discovery - expanding enthusiastically but incorrectly. I asked him what he thought of Freud...
He smiled. "Isn't it all about wanting to shag your mother?' he said.
I wandered and blathered for three hours about the relationships between ourselves and our parents; about the emotional separation of us from our parents and about how our perception of our parents changed as an essential part of emotional maturity.
I talked about childhood trauma and how as adults we see those traumas reenacted within children that we know - yet fail to remember ourselves as traumatised children. Of how we've suppressed those major traumas and rages within ourselves; rages so catastrophic at the time yet now somehow diffused when remembered as adults.
I noticed a random, smiling student who looked to me as if the penny had dropped; that he'd perhaps reached some sort of theoretical epiphany. Yes - this would be it - he would explain his reading of the text back to class who will have already enthusiastically grasped it. He would continue with his explanation of Sigmund the Great; getting it all wrong but having been carried away by the joy and hubris of that first ever discovery - expanding enthusiastically but incorrectly. I asked him what he thought of Freud...
He smiled. "Isn't it all about wanting to shag your mother?' he said.
Monday 5 December 2011
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