Yesterday someone asked me 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 as 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:

1. legal name

2. preferred name

3. place/date of birth

4. are you a first generation college student?

5. are you a military veteran?

if so, what was your job/ period of enlistment?

6. are you fluent in more than one language/ did you grow up speaking more than one language? which ones?

7. have you taken, or are you currently taking, ENG 114 (or equivalent) or a CMS course?

8. what is your primary area of study?

9. what was the best non-required book you read in the last year?

10. what was the last film you saw in a theater?

11. name three musicians, groups and/or genres you enjoy.

12. pick one. what about his/her/their music do you like?

http://analepsis.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/maps-vial-contcult-americas/

http://analepsis.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/continents-hum455/

Johnny 99  (1982)

Well they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late that month
Ralph went out lookin’ for a job but he couldn’t find none
He came home too drunk from mixin’
Tanqueray and wine
He got a gun shot a night clerk now they call ‘m Johnny 99

Down in the part of town where when you hit a red light you don’t stop
Johnny’s wavin’ his gun around and threatenin’ to blow his top
When an off duty cop snuck up on him from behind
Out in front of the Club Tip Top they slapped the cuffs on Johnny 99

Well the city supplied a public defender but the judge was Mean John Brown
He came into the courtroom and stared poor Johnny down
Well the evidence is clear gonna let the sentence son fit the crime
Prison for 98 and a year we’ll call it even Johnny 99

A fistfight broke out in the courtroom they had to drag Johnny’s girl away
His mama stood up and shouted “judge don’t take my boy this way”
Well son you got any statement you’d like to make
Before the bailiff comes to forever take you away

Now judge judge I got debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holdin’ my mortgage and they takin’ my house away
Now I ain’t sayin’ that make me an innocent man
But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand

Well your honor I do believe I’d be better off dead
And if you can take a man’s life for the thoughts that’s in his head
Then won’t you sit back in that chair and think it over judge one more time
And let ‘em shave off my hair and put me on that execution line

see Census Shows 1 in 2 People are Poor or Low-Income from Associated Press

Novels

Gain by Richard Powers

Outstanding. 2 narratives that counterpoint one another. In the first, a small soap-making company adapts to the rise of US capitalism and becomes a multinational corporation. In the second, Laura, a 40 year old mother of 2, discovers she has ovarian cancer.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

A sharply observed political novel about Thomas Cromwell, counselor to Henry VIII and a leading figure in the English Reformation.

Waverly by Walter Scott

Scott’s first novel. A young man joins the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland.

American Rust by Philipp Meyer

Set in de-industrialized Pennsylvania. A novel about crime and the social effects of a faltering economy.

Non-Fiction

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies by Jodi Dean

The ideas are as bad-ass as the title. Way beyond the increasingly irrelevant lib/con divide.

Ideology (2nd ed.) by John Hawkes

A really outstanding and encompassing introduction to the concept. I cribbed bits of this for lecture.

The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel by Marina Mackay

A real pleasure to read. Highly accessible. The novel is a technology for making us think about the world.

Peoples and Empires by Anthony Padgen

Empire is one of my intellectual obsessions. Padgen takes a global view. A bit stodgy for my taste, but some valuable knowledge.

There is No Bread Without Freedom by Constantine Pleshkanov

Flipping the script on the triumph of capitalist democracy and the End of History.

A Revolution of the Mind by Jonathan Israel

The radical roots of Enlightenment.

Joseph Conrad: Nostromo by Ian Watt

Ian Watt was one of the most erudite and significant writers of literary criticism in English. This volume isn’t as seminal as his classic, The Rise of the Novel, but it offers perspicuous insights into Conrad’s most demanding work, Nostromo.

Film

The Housemaid (Korea 2010)

The Robber (Austria 2010)

The Violin (US/Mexico 2005)

Beau Brummell: This Charming Man (UK 2008)

Sin Nombre (US/Mexico 2009)

Behind the Rainbow (South Africa 2008)

A Handful of Dust (UK 1988)

A Film With Me in It (Ireland 2008)

The Escapist (UK 2008)

The Princess of Montpensier (France 2010)

Blind Shaft (China 2003)

Bad Day to Go Fishing (Spain/Uruguay 2009)

Mary, Queen of Scots (UK 1971)

Quilombo (Brazil 1984)

The Trip (UK 2010)

Comedy of Power (France 2006)

Tycoon: A New Russian (Russia 2002)

Gomorrah (Italy 2008)

The Red Violin (US 1998)

How I Ended This Summer (Russia 2010)

Towards Zero (France 2007)

Cutter’s Way (US 1981)