French Theory in America

TOPICS IN LITERATURE, CRITICISM & THEORY:
FRENCH THEORY IN AMERICA

Aim:
From the late sixties to the end of the twentieth century, a disparate group of French intellectuals greatly influenced Anglo-American arts and culture. Once imported to and disseminated in US universities, philosophical ideas and writing by figures such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari came to exert tremendous force both inside and out of the American academy. Rather quickly, a diverse and radical body of thinking was codified, first as intellectual movements (e.g., structuralism, deconstruction, poststructuralism) and eventually as simply “French theory.”

This course studies the reception of French theory in the US. Our aim will be to understand why and how it became such an integral part of American culture, shaping academic disciplines (especially literary theory, cultural studies, and media studies), sociocultural trends (e.g., identity politics, new historicism), and artistic practices (minimalism, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, surfiction).

In assessing French theory’s American influence, we will consider how it has been interpreted differently in the US and France, trace iterations of significant concepts (différance, discipline, abjection, simulation, minor literature, etc.), and evaluate the inflection of these concepts by US-based literary scholars (e.g., Edward Said, Judith Butler, Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Walter Benn Michaels, J Hillis Miller, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson) and writers (Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Shelley Jackson, Lynne Tillman, Gerald Vizenor, David Foster Wallace, Curtis White). Not least, we will speculate about theory’s relevance to twenty-first-century praxes.

Teaching Method: Short lecture followed by moderated seminar discussions and weekly presentations by seminar participants.

Requirements: One class presentation (5 pages), annotated bibliography (10–12 secondary sources), research paper (12–16 pages).

Reading List:
Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.

Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988.

Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Harari, Josué, ed. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.

Leitch, Vincent, eds. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001.

An Old School Professor Asks Students to Think

The Thinker is an inspiring profile of a philosopher at Auburn University who has resisted the imperative to instrumentalize higher education, which is undermining humanities departments and cheapening the value of college degrees. A true practitioner of the liberal arts, Professor Jolley challenges his students, first-year undergraduates included, to think through difficult philosophical problems with him. In the process, his best students learn to do philosophy, which they come to appreciate and understand as a way of living, curiously, in the world, rather than just another subject to be mastered on the way to a degree.

1500 characters max. how many hours revising?

Reading & writing are migrating to digitally networked environments; literature & literary studies must not be left behind. How are scholars & writers creating a sustainable literary presence within noisy, image-dominated media ecologies? My 3-part project analyzes & participates in the literary field’s evolution within an emerging, collaborative, network culture.

Editorial: ebr (www.ElectronicBookReview.com), a literary journal & networked database, hosts critical exchanges between distributed scholarly & artistic communities interested in digital writing & publishing, interface design, & cultural critique. I coordinate clusters, assign essays, & edit peer-to-peer-reviewed articles. Goals: keep conversations current, moderate debates, & solicit innovative scholarship.

Archival: Contribute to Archive-It, a curatorial experiment designed to preserve & disseminate the 1st generation of e-lit. On the Electronic Literature Organization’s international research team, I select works, write evaluations, & develop an e-lit lexicon. Over time, these efforts will provide a profile of the emergent e-lit field & scholarly tools for studying it.

Critical: Applying my editorial & archival expertise, I examine how changing communication systems affect world-literary formations (literary networks & innovative fictions) in the network society. Connect affective & ideological redistributions of the sensible to sense-making techniques in digital and printed networked narratives.

Seeking Satiric Sublimation

Is Jon Stewart the most trusted man in America? Personally, I'd have to vote for Bill Moyers or Studs Terkel, because they're better listeners during interviews. But then, of course, there's Stephen Colbert, who liberates the truth so it may soar like an American eagle!

As an avid reader addicted to dozens of online journals and newspapers, despite being disgusted by the onslaught of lies, propaganda and stupidity reported (and too often uncritically repeated) there, I think I'd fit in perfectly at the "Daily Show."

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”

Could I get away with running a media studies course based on this model? Finding a humanities department that could afford 15 TiVos would be hard, but still...

Original Intent