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Be warned: it’s a fairly large file (22 MB).

An earlier BBC version of the Tempest. This clip begins with the dialog between Propsero and Ariel and then leads up to the former’s exchange with Caliban.

A series of trailers for films based on the Tempest.

The animated Tempest.

Derek Jarman’s “gay Tempest“– all 90-odd minutes!

The quote above represents a key passage of the first section of the Manifesto, one that emphasizes the fluidity of capitalist modernity (i.e. “bourgeois society”). This is what “all that is solid melts into air” means: with the destruction of the static hierarchy characterizing the feudal order, a dynamic and unstable world was created. While under feudalism those who were born peasants died peasants, with the rise of capitalism (and new political institutions) social relations undergo a profound change. To be sure, the nature of this change is contradictory. On one hand it makes room for what Napoleon once called “careers open to all talent”– i.e. an increase in social mobility. On the other hand, all of the stability of the vanquished feudal society vanish. ”Precarity” is the order of the day.

Modernity will be the reign of the New. Because capitalism demands them novelty, innovation, and change will come to characterize social life to a degree never before experienced. The social experience of time itself will transform. The rhythms of life and work will accelerate.

Yet there are two darker aspects of this economic system. Even as capitalism expands productive capacity enormously and remakes the world with powerful new technologies it is prone to crisis. Perhaps even more disturbing in its earliest phases the capitalist mode of production requires bonded labor and colonies, setting millions upon millions of people into motion, often unwillingly, and drawing resources from half-way around the world.

Constantly burgeoning, its powers dwarfing those of all prior civilizations, the new order buckles sporadically. Recessions and depressions follow periods of unprecedented economic growth. Fortunes are made and lost. Whole sectors of the economy become redundant. Industries are plagued by over-production. In order to escape these crises the bourgeoisie must remake the economy, locate new markets, intensify the exploitation of old ones, adjust wages, and develop even newer technologies.

The certainties of the past no longer hold. Tradition itself is under attack. The institutions which governed social life become outmoded. All that is solid melts into air.

It’s important to remember the biographical documentary Can’t Be Satisfied as well, not only because it celebrates one of the world’s most gifted Blues musicians but because of what it tells us about the techniques of Life Narrative. Thursday we talked about the various methods in play in that film, including the use of testimonials, historical context, and performance. The story of Muddy Waters’ rise to fame and fortune (a favorite narrative deep in the American grain) is also an account of the nation at a particular moment in its development. Muddy’s life can tell us something about the multi-generational diaspora of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans left the South to pursue happiness (and, not always successfully, flee Jim Crow) in the North.

On Tuesday we’ll talk about Smith and Watson’s chapter on the historical evolution of life narrative, Nelson’s somewhat dry but fascinating hypotheses on the nature of autobiographical memory, and two of Fearing‘s poems. The first line of one of them– “You will remember the kisses, real or imagined”– tells us something crucial about memory. Can you guess what it is?

Asking questions starts that dialog and improves teaching. Yesterday someone inquired about the assignments for this coming week. In responding to her I tipped my hand about the purpose of these readings and how they relate to the course as a whole. Here’s what I wrote:

It’s always good to take notes on what you read, I think. It’s up to you to decide how extensive those notes might be. See if you can identify the authors’ basic arguments. You could underline passages which are particularly difficult. Look up words you don’t already know. The Barthes reading in particular (“The Reality Effect”) is challenging. Try to locate the core claims he is making.

At present, we’re looking at two things:
1) Capitalism as the economic system which structures American social life. Rather than simply taking it for granted, as a “fact of nature,” we’re trying to understand that capitalism is a system with a history. What cultural and personal values are generated by the way we work and live and subsist– by our material and economic lives?
2) “Cultural technologies” such as the novel as a means of exploring (or celebrating or refuting, etc.) cultural values. To begin that inquiry we need to figure out what a novel actually is.

From there we’ll begin to read the primary sources, beginning with Thousand Pieces of Gold.

Of the two readings assigned for Tuesday’s class, “What is a Novel?” and “The Reality Effect,” the latter is probably the most difficult. It represents a certain kind of intellectual project, semiotics, whose purpose is to analyze the structural aspects of signification, or making meaning. In that essay Barthes examines an aspect of narrative which is seldom given much attention: the seemingly insignificant detail. As we’ll see, such details in fact have a powerful function because they form part of a highly ideological claim on the part of Realism that what is represented in realist texts is “the real” itself. If that seems inscrutable, by the end of class on Tuesday you should have a better sense of it.

Remember that so far we’ve touched upon three major forms of value– the cultural (aesthetic), moral, and economic. Values can be difficult to assess given that some of them are intrinsic.  Intrinsic value does not depend on any external justification for its worth. Such values are significant because, in effect, they just are. Such a statement is known as a tautology. When Moses met with Yahweh in Midian he asked God what he was. Yahweh’s response was tautological: “I am that I am.” This assertion was echoed millennia later by Popeye:

Any idea that seems to possess validity simply because it is common sense or because “it just is” has to be interrogated. To fail to do so would be to surrender our obligation, as creatures of reason, to understand both ourselves and the world around us. As Catherine Belsey has written:

“In practice, common sense betrays its own inadequacy by its incoherences, its contradictions and its silences. Presenting itself as non-theoretical, as ‘obvious’, common sense is not called on to demonstrate that it is internally consistent. But an account of the world which finally proves to be incoherent or non-explanatory constitutes an unsatisfactory foundation for the practice of either reading or criticism” (Critical Practice 3).

Or consider Terry Eagleton’s remarks:

“Common sense holds that things generally only have one meaning and that this meaning is usually obvious, inscribed on the faces of the objects we encounter. The world is pretty much as we perceive it, and our way of perceiving it is the natural, self-evident one. We know the sun goes round the earth because we can see that it does. At different times common sense has dictated burning witches, hanging sheep-stealers and avoiding Jews for fear of fatal infection, but this statement is not itself commonsensical since common sense believes itself to be historically invariable” (Literary Theory: An Introduction 94).

In the weeks to come we are going to 1) think about the nature of value generally, both as a verb and and a noun 2) examine those values which might be in some sense peculiarly American (a risky proposition, fraught with the pitfalls of American Exceptionalism). In order to do that we will study a series of novels written by Americans about America.

Also, I’d like you to submit a youtube clip of a track that you think constitutes an example of life narrative to the comments section of this post. Paula and Monica have already done so. Paula’s choice reminds me of my grandfather, who had an old 8-track cassette with this song on it:

“A Boy Named Sue” was written by Shel Silverstein, the author of The Giving Tree, and recorded by Johnny Cash at a concert at San Quentin Prison.

Monica sent Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone”:

The name of the band, of course, comes from a PE teacher– a notorious hard-ass named Leonard Skinner– at their high school. It seems difficult to separate LS’s songs from the fate of the band who wrote and performed them. The “real,” objective world they lived in– and the plane crash that killed Ronnie VanZandt and Steve Gains– tend to intrude into the recorded music, influencing its significance.

The Temptations’ Papa Was a Rolling Stone:

Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing:

Your assignment for Tuesday (in addition to the required readings on they syllabus): send me a song (and lyrics) from youtube that you feel qualifies as a life narrative. It has to be “American.” Submit as a comment to this post by Monday evening @8 pm.

A map of the slave trade:

The vice-royalties of New Spain: