Tell a story about a man riding the bus from New Jersey to New York, in the style of a KGB report The subject, identified as John Smith, boarded the bus in New Jersey at approximately 8:00am on the morning of January 12th, 2023. He was observed to be carrying a black backpack and wearing …
Tag Archives: Theory of Literature
The weed-out course
What’s your story? We drove from Pittsburgh to Mazatlan for Spring Break. Four college sophomores in a Jeepster. 7,800 miles in 10 days. Adventure, danger, romance, comedy, la tequila, las drogas, una pistola. No arrests, no fatalities. You want a story? Oh, we’ve got a story. But not yet. What’s your major? I started Carnegie …
It all works out, in theory
Originally published by Seattle Review of Books, February 7, 2018 How do you enter the conversation among generations of Continental philosophers? Learn the lingo — and bring a bodyguard. In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet depicts the big names in 1980s literary theory — Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Bernard-Henri Lévy — as …
Thoughts on AI Art
Based on “Anonymity of a Murmur” how do you view/what are your thoughts on all the AI art out there? Apostasy X Fnord “Anonymity of a Murmur” was posted on Wednesday, but I’ve already moved on from Foucault and it’s too late to turn back now. But you’re in luck, sister, because we are now …
Journals
Morning pages vs. writer’s journal Susan Sontag, in Against Interpretation, on the function of a writer’s journal: “in them he builds up, piece by piece, the identity of a writer to himself.” In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommends “morning pages,” three stream-of-consciousness handwritten pages. What’s the difference between morning pages, the release of thoughts …
Drone On
On my walk, I saw three guys on the field below Kerry Park working a roto-copter drone, or whatever you call these mechanical contraptions. Whatever happened to kites? Not thrilled to have a new source of visual pollution. Drone as the term for a flying machine, also the noise that a machine makes, also the …
Anonymity of a Murmur
“I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author-function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemic texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint—one which will no longer be the …
Introduction to Theory of Literature, Part 1
Lecture 2 Foucault, Barthes, and the death of the author. I am a writer (for hire) of commercial texts. An author of discourses subject to ownership. Am I alive? [Two weeks later.] Lecture 3 Complicated stuff, glad to have a guide. Envisioning a multimedia accompaniment to the ideas of hermeneutic circles and other hard-to-grasp philosophical …
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