broadsheet

Last week marked the end of our first unit (at least to the extent to which each assignment creates a unit).  We’ve already looked at how ideology, interpretation, and intertextuality work together by focusing on some very basic stories that many of already knew: Bambi, “Rapunzel,” and “Sleeping Beauty.”  We’ve seen ways that the same basic narrative can be approached from a number of different perspectives, and how each form of the story is dependent on rhetorical concerns such as audience, purpose, arrangement, etc.

Now, me move into thinking about texts on a more mechanistic level; that is, in this second unit we will be paying closer attention to how our source texts are created and strtuctured.  In part, this is because these texts share a common theme: they are all created through the appropriation, alteration, and mutation of other text(s).

As you do the reading this week, pay particular attention to how each text has been created, especially its relationship with the original source (if you can determine what it is).  It will be important to understand how such texts are created because assignment two (as we’ll see on Saturday) asks you to create such a text of your own and then (in essay form) to explain your own creation.

This week, I’ve asked you to read several versions of a story with which I’m sure many of you are already familiar: the fairy tale most commonly called “Sleeping Beauty.”

By now I’m sure you’ll have noticed that this unit on ideology/interpretation/intertextuality has focused to a great deal on children’s stories and fairy tales.  I know why this is, but I’d be interested to see what any of you looking for a blog subject might make of it.  Why do these stories prove so interesting to discuss in terms of the three I’s mentioned above?  Already, we’ve seen that many writers have a considerable interest in the content of these stories and the work they perform socially–why should that be the case?  Shouldn’t important, respected writers like Banks, Porter, and Martin (who makes the comparison btw Sleeping Beauty and the female egg cell in her essay) be writing about something more important and respected–Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Kafka–than fairy tales?

We turn our attention this week to multiple views of the same story.  For my interests, Coover’s Briar-Rose, from which we will read excerpts, is the most interesting of these.  In rewriting “Sleeping Beauty,” what might we conjecture are Coover’s aims?  Is he offering critiques of the story similar to those offered on Bambi by Banks or “Rapunzel” by Porter, or is Coover doing something else entirely?  Or is he critiquing the story and doing something else at the same time?  What might the “something else” be?  We haven’t intoduced it the second assignment yet, but it is dependent on your transforming source texts into your own text–how might we look at Coover’s work as being a “transformed” version of the tale many of already know?  What does Coover do to transform it?

As you begin the reading for this week, it is important to keep in mind the three I’s we spent time discussing last week: ideology, interpretation, and intertextuality.

This week, I’ve asked you to read two pieces.  As you read these essays, you should keep in mind the following questions that might help generate a point to start your blogs this week:

1. Both pieces (I would suggest) raise points about the ideological codes embedded in two popular children’s stories.  What identity categories are at work in these stories according to the authors?  How do they address the questions–are they explicit about their ideological interest or do they find other ways to imply the questions in which they are interested?
2. What do the authors do to develop their interpretations of the stories in question?  Do they look solely at the “big picture” presented by the stories or, rather, are they attuned to details and other small figures?  Of course, they might do both.  Why?  Which is more effective?
3. Obviously, since these authors are writing about other stories, the essays are intertextual.  How else are they intertextual?  What other relationships with what other texts can you discover in these essays?

Welcome to 1020, Spring/Summer 2007!

I’ve had plenty of questions along these lines, but most of them have been in person.  However, one of your peers just submitted the question via e-mail and since I think the answer is of general interest, I’m posting my reply to that student here as well–names and any revealing details moitted, of course.

So: How to Write a “Discourse”

1) The first step, obviously, is to choose a discourse role to write about; for Barthes, it was the Lover, for me, the Writer.  In order to choose your role, just spend some time thinking of the various roles you occupy every day as a matter of course: those of a woman,a daughter, a student, a writer, a lover, sister, etc.  If you’re curious, I’d encourage you to check out some of your peers’ preliminary research reports to see how they’ve started thinking about the discourse assignments.

2) The second step is to identify what your primary source text will be; for Barthes, it was Goethe’s novel  The Sorrows of Young Werther, for me, Danielewski’s House of Leaves.  Your text will sort of depend on what discourse role you’ve decided to write about, but generally speaking, the primary text should be one you’re already familiar with and have personal connection and association with–it is, as we read in TextBook, a text of pleasure and bliss.

3) Third, you have to find the moments of identification in your primary text–those details and motifs that can be associated with the general experience of your discourse role.  The moments will become the organizing theme of each figure in your discourse–as Barthes writes, “You know you have a figure when you say, “I recognize that scene of language, that is so true.’”  For Barthes, those details were things like waiting for the beloved, wearing special clothes, being jealous, etc.  For me, it was being transformed by writing, feeling disoriented (the labyrinth), feeling as though one was coming apart, etc.

4) Fourth, once you’ve found these moments in your source text, you need to discover how these moments are repeated through other texts.  This could come from research, or you can (like Barthes) build your text out of sources you already know and are familiar with.  (I’d like to see both approaches used, if possible.) 

5) Now you’re ready to assemble the “Discourse.”  The moments of recognition will be shared between texts, but not identical–so your task is to collect and collate these moments and to use the body of the “Discourse” to reflect on how each moment is constructed in different texts.  Looking at Barthes’ model, we can see that each structural element of the “Discourse” serves a unique purpose: the title, heading, argument, and body.  The title is just that: it announces the central motif of each figure.  The heading is the one or two word distillation of that motif, and the argument (the sentence or two that follows the heading) describes the fundamental importance of the given motif to the chosen discourse role.  The function of the body we’ve already alluded to.

Generally speaking, the “Discourse” does not ask you to write about your primary text but to see it as a place of recognition and identification, to draw attention (your own and your reader’s) to the ways texts have formed your role in a given discourse.  This is why it focuses on individual moments of identification rather than asking you to just “objectively analyze” a given text.