The End of Homosexuality

HUM 290A - WORLD OF FILM:

In this course students will develop the expertise necessary to allow them to communicate intelligently about the artistic medium of film. The course is taught by a team of four professors coming from a range of disciplines. The course begins with an initial unit on the language of film; the course then turns to a series of units focusing on one element closely associated with film, such as photography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound and music, acting, narrative, or ideology; and examine films from a variety of historical epochs and countries. Fine Arts Approaches core.

DIFFICULTIES:

1. Teaching film as opposed to watching movies.

   1. Students are unprepared to deal with film in a sophisticated critical way.

   2. Students resist being asked to address film using the genre's own language.

2. Team teaching ¼

   1. Jumping in cold to deal with students at a random point in the term.

3. Gender, Sex, Sexual Orientation, and Sexuality 100%

   1. Resistance to address critically nearly all of the above categories.

   2. Concerns with religious, moral, political views.

4. Queer Factor

   1. This unit assumes that students are able to deal maturely with all sorts of questions dealing with queers, such as politics, sexuality, etc.

PROLOGUE TO A DISCUSSION:

How can we relate the following two clips to Judith Butler's performative theory of gender?

1. Chris Crocker - No one is “Straight”
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbo-b5w4vY

2. La Agrado's monologue in Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother (1999)
   

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

1. Clip #1 – Boy meets boy
   Chapter 7 (23 minutes 29 seconds)
   
   

2. Clip #2 – Boy wants to be a man
   Chapter 14 (41 minutes 58 seconds)

Shortbus (2006):

1. Clip #1 Girl meets girls

   Chapter 6 (26 minutes 25 seconds)
   
   

2. Clip # The boy and the mayor

   Chapter 7 (29 minutes 31 seconds

3. Clip#3 Boys singing

   Chapter 8 (36 minutes 26)

Beginning theory with Beginning Theory

FL 200
As I mentioned last Wednesday, we are starting with the theory component of this class on Monday. Chapter 1 of Peter Barry's _Beginning Theory_ is your reading assignment for that day. I look forward to a lively discussion.

Make sure to read critically and judiciously. From time to time I will pop short quizzes on the material covered in Barry's chapters.

This is a very accessible theory primer. I am confident that you can get a solid idea from it of each critical paradigm we go over.

For Monday pay special attention to the following:

• The tenets of liberal humanism p.16-21
• The two "tracks" in the development of English criticism p.25
• Close reading: Arnold and Leavis p.26-29
• I.A. Richards, the consolidation of liberal humanism and the seeds of the clash with 'theory' p.30-31
• The transition to 'theory' and some recurrent ideas in critical theory p.32-36

Here is a pretty good summary of the main points of this chapter: Humanism and Literary Theory. Also, the following text by John Lye, Some Characteristics of Contemporary Theory, should be very helpful in trying to understand the assumptions that the kind of critical theory we will be reading makes.

Contemporary Literary Theory is not a single thing but a collection of theoretical approaches which are marked by a number of premises, although not all of the theoretical approaches share or agree on all of the them.

1. Meaning is assumed to be created by difference, not by "presence," (that is, identity with the object of meaning). As the revisionist Freudian Jacques Lacan remarks, a sign signals the absence of that which it signifies. Signs do not directly represent the reality to which they refer, but (following the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure) mean by difference from other words in a concept set. All meaning is only meaning in reference to, and in distinction from, other meanings; there is no meaning in any stable or absolute sense. Meanings are multiple, changing, contextual.

2. There is no foundational 'truth' or reality in the universe (as far as we can know)--no absolutes, no eternalities, no solid ground of truth beneath the shifting sands of history. There are only local and contingent truths generated by human groups through their cultural systems in response to their needs for power, survival and esteem. Consequently, values and identity are cultural constructs, not stable entities. Even the unconscious is a cultural construct, as Kaja Silverman points out in The Subject of Semiotics, in that the unconscious is constructed through repression, the forces of repression are cultural, and what is taboo is culturally formulated.

3. Language is a much more complex, elusive phenomenon than we ordinarily suspect, and what we take normally to be our meanings are only the surface of a much more substantial theatre of linguistic, psychic and cultural operations, of which operations we are not be fully aware. Contemporary theory attempts to explore the implications (i.e., the inter-foldings, from 'plier', to fold) of levels of meaning in language.

4. Language itself always has excessive signification, that is, it always means more than it may be taken to mean in any one context; signification is always 'spilling over', especially in texts which are designed to release signifying power, as texts which we call 'literature' are. This excessive signification is created in part by the rhetorical, or tropic, characteristics of language (a trope is a way of saying something by saying something else, as in a metaphor, a metonym, or irony), and the case is made by Paul de Man that there is an inherent opposition (or undecidability, or aporia) between the grammatical and the rhetorical operations of language.

5. It is language itself, not some essential humanness or timeless truth, that is central to culture and meaning. Humans 'are' their symbol systems, they are constituted through them, and those systems and their meanings are contingent, relational, dynamic.

6. The meaning that appears as normal in our social life masks, through various means such as omission, displacement, difference, misspeaking and bad faith, the meaning that is: the world of meaning we think we occupy is not the world we do in fact occupy. The world we do occupy is a construction of ideology, an imagination of the way the world is that shapes our world, including our 'selves', for our use.

7. A text is, as the etymology of the word "text" proclaims, a tissue, a woven thing (L. texere, to weave); it is a tissue woven of former texts, echoes of which it continually evokes (filiations, these echoes are sometimes called), woven of historical references and practices, and woven of the play of language. A text is not, and cannot be, 'only itself', nor can it properly be reified, said to be 'a thing'; a text is a process of engagements. Literary Theory advocates pushing against the depth, complexity and indeterminancy of this tissue until not only the full implications of the multiplicities but the contradictions inevitably inherent in them become more apparent.

8. The borders of literature are challenged by the ideas

a) that all texts share common traits, for instance that they all are constructed of rhetorical, tropic, linguistic and narrative elements, and

b) that all experience can be viewed as a text: experience insofar as it is knowable is consequently symbolically configured, and human activity and even perception is both constructed and known through the conventions of social practice; hence as a constructed symbolic field experience is textual.

While on the one hand this blurring of differentiation between 'literature' and other texts may seem to make literature less privileged, on the other hand it opens those non-literary (but not non-imaginative, and only problematically non-fictional) texts, including 'social texts', the grammars and vocabularies of social action and cultural practice, up to the kind of complex analysis that literature has been opened to.

9. So the nature of language and meaning is seen as more intricate, potentially more subversive, more deeply embedded in psychic, linguistic and cultural processes, more areas of experience are seen as textual, and texts are seen as more deeply embedded in and constitutive of social processes.

---

None of these ideas shared by contemporary theories are new to the intellectual traditions of our culture. It appears to many, however, that Literary Theory attacks the fundamental values of literature and literary study: that it attacks the customary belief that literature draws on and creates meanings that reflect and affirm our central (essential, human, lasting) values; that it attacks the privileged meaningfulness of 'literature'; that it attacks the idea that a text is authored, that is, that the authority for its meaningfulness rests on the activity of an individual; that it attacks the trust that the text that is read can be identified in its intentions and meanings with the text that was written; and ultimately that it attacks the very existence of value and meaning itself, the ground of meaningfulness, rooted in the belief in those transcendent human values on which humane learning is based.

On the other hand, 'theory people' point out that theory does is not erase literature but expands the concept of the literary and renews the way texts in all areas of intellectual disciplines are or can be read; that it explores the full power of meaning and the full embeddedness of meanings in their historical placement; that it calls for a more critical, more flexible reading.

It is the case that Literary Theory challenges many fundamental assumptions, that it is often skeptical in its disposition, and that it can look in practice either destructive of any value or merely cleverly playful. The issue is whether theory has good reasons for the questioning of the assumptions, and whether it can lead to practice that is in fact productive.

El romancero y Mio Cid

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El romancero, como veremos, desciende directamente de los cantares épicos como El poema de Mio Cid, sin embargo difieren mucho de la sobriedad de los mismos. Mientras el Poema de Mio Cid es una celebración de una heroicidad mesurada, los romances buscan efectos dramáticos extremos en brevísimas escenas o viñetas. Suelen empezar de repente (in medias res) y culminar abruptamente. En el caso de la figura de El Cid, como venimos diciendo, su carácter heróico se magnifica, llegando a ser casi una caricatura de sí mismo. Notad, por ejemplo, cómo cambia de signo la masculinidad cidiana en este fragmento. ¿Se atreven a teorizar por qué pasa esto?

Si les interesa leer otros romances pulsen el siguiente enlace: ROMANCERO VIEJO

Romance del Cid Ruy Díaz
Cabalga Diego Laínez
al buen rey besar la mano;
consigo se los llevaba
los trescientos hijosdalgo,
entre ellos iba Rodrigo,
el soberbio castellano.
Todos cabalgan a mula,
sólo Rodrigo a caballo;
todos visten oro y seda,
Rodrigo va bien armado;
todos espadas ceñidas,
Rodrigo estoque dorado;
todos con sendas varicas,
Rodrigo lanza en la mano;
todos guantes olorosos,
Rodrigo guante mallado;
todos sombreros muy ricos,
Rodrigo casco afilado,
y encima del casco lleva
un bonete colorado.
Andando por su camino,
unos con otros hablando,
allegados son a Burgos,
con el rey se han encontrado.
Los que vienen con el rey
entre sí van razonando;
unos lo dicen de quedo,
otros lo van preguntando:
-aquí viene, entre esta gente,
quien mató al conde Lozano.
Como lo oyera Rodrigo
en hito los ha mirado,
con alta y soberbia voz
de esta manera ha hablado:
-Si hay alguno entre vosotros
su pariente o adeudado
que se pese de su muerte,
salga luego a demandallo,
yo se lo defenderé,
quiera pie, quiera caballo.
Todos responden a una:
-Demándelo su pecado.
Todos se apearon juntos
para al rey besar la mano,
Rodrigo se quedó solo,
encima de su caballo;
entonces habló su padre,
bien oiréis lo que ha hablado:
-Apeaos vos, mi hijo,
besaréis al rey la mano
porque él es vuestro señor,
vos, hijo, sois su vasallo.
Desque Rodrigo esto oyó,
sintiose más agraviado;
las palabras que responde
son de hombre muy enojado:
-Si otro me lo dijera
ya me lo hubiera pagado,
mas por mandarlo vos, padre,
yo lo haré de buen grado.
Ya se apeaba Rodrigo
para al rey besar la mano;
al hincar de la rodilla
el estoque se ha arrancado;
espantose de esto el rey
y dijo como turbado:
-Quítate Rodrigo, allá,
quítateme allá, diablo,
que tienes el gesto de hombre
y los hechos de león bravo.
Como Rodrigo esto oyó
aprisa pide el caballo;
con una voz alterada
contra el rey así ha hablado:
-Por besar mano de rey
no me tengo por honrado,
porque la besó mi padre
me tengo por afrentado.
En diciendo estas palabras
salido se ha del palacio,
consigo se los tornaba
los trescientos hijosdalgo.
Si bien vinieron vestidos,
volvieron mejor armados,
y si vinieron en mulas,
todos vuelven en caballos.

Time for a Thesis

FL 200

What is a thesis statement?
A thesis statement:

• tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
• is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
• makes a claim that others might dispute.
• is usually a single sentence somewhere in your first paragraph that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.
• presuposses that you are going to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, thus you may need to convey that position or claim near the beginning of your draft.

How do I get a thesis?

• A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a "working thesis," a basic or main idea, an argument that you think you can support with evidence but that may need adjustment along the way.
• Start by focusing on what is NOT obvious. Look for instances where the text vacillates or equivocates. Focus on the cracks, fissures, interstices in the text through which you may glance hidden meanings. Tease meaning from the text. Make it yield data.
• Interrogate the text: Ask questions about the situations, events, or aspects that have excited your curiosity. Asking questions you stimulate yourself to provide answers and generate connections.
• Bounce off your ideas or plans aloud with a friend: It matters little if the person in question knows what you are writing on. Sometimes when you hear yourself telling what you are thinking it all becomes clear.
• Draw what you are thinking: Diagrams help you visualize your thoughts better and often lead to a tighter thesis.
• Once you think you have a arrived to a thesis, make sure that you follow the advice in the handout titled THESIS STATEMENT BASICS. Make sure that your thesis is an arguable idea or proposition the provides a smart answer to a "problem" you have previously identified. Make certain that your thesis is NOT a not a title or a fragment, a question, a command, a fact, an announcement, an obvious or evident statement, an unarguable personal opinion, a broad generalization, a simplistic proposition, an immature or tasteless proposal, or a wordy confusing mess. You want the opposite of that.
• Your thesis often evolves as you develop your argument. Make sure to revisit your thesis as you write. Tweak it as needed so that it continues to serve as a road map of the paper for your reader.

How do I know if my thesis is strong?
If there's time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following:

• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose?If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it's possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough?
• Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like "good" or "successful," see if you could be more specific: why is something "good"; what specifically makes something "successful"? Does my thesis pass the "So what?" test? If a reader's first response is, "So what?" then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
• Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It's o.k. to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.

The following handout: OVERVIEW OF THE ACADEMIC ESSAY from Harvard University's Writing Center provides one of the best explanations of critical argumentative writing that I have ever seen.

The History Channel presents: The Conquerors - El Cid

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The History Channel presents: The Conquerors - El Cid.
Known as El Cid (The Leader), the 11-century warrior Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar is often hailed for having "freed his fatherland from the Moors". Yet recent scholarship reveals many contradictions between reality and myth about Spain's first national hero. In one contemporary's words he was "the scourge of his time".

Was he arrogant and insubordinate, a stern overlord driven by an unquenchable thirst for money? Before his death, he was already celebrated in a poem written in tribute of the conquest of Almería; posthumously he was immortalized in the great epic Poema de Mio Cid and was the centerpiece for countless other works of literature.

Equally at home in the feudal kingdoms of northern Spain and the Moorish-held lands of the south, when he died in Valencia in 1099, he was ruler of an independent principality that he had carved out of eastern Spain. Was Rodrigo a zealous Christian leader or a mercenary that sold his martial skills to Christian and Muslim alike?

The episode was uploaded to You Tube and divided in five segments each lasting 10 minutes or less.

Enjoy!! It is really interesting.

Conquerors : El Cid part 1


Conquerors : El Cid part 2


Conquerors : El Cid part 3


Conquerors : El Cid part 4


Conquerors : El Cid part 5

Cat in the Rain - A couple takes

FL200

Yesterday we carried out a "close reading" of "Cat in the Rain". This type of approach to literature is second nature now to many readers, yet it has a clear theoretical origin. What we did was to follow the central tenet of a critical approach called "New Criticism":

New Criticism (1930s–1960s): Coined in John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941), this approach discourages the use of history and biography in interpreting a literary work. Instead, it encourages readers to discover the meaning of a work through a detailed analysis of the text itself. This approach was popular in the middle of the 20th century, especially in the United States, but has since fallen out of favor.

Note that New Criticism has "fallen out of favor" not because scholars do not perform "close readings" anymore, but rather because that kind of reading has become second nature. What has changed is that close readings are now seen by many as a first step in approaching a text. Close readings lead to enhanced critical readings that presume further theorizing and the use or deployment of additional theoretical aproaches.

Here is a one page analysis of the story. It comes to us from Germany: http://www.gs.cidsnet.de/englisch-online/Leistungskurs2/hemingway3.htm

• Note what elements are left out by this reader.
• Note what shifts in the chronology of the story the reader makes to solidify his/her views.
• Note the internal contradictions in this reader's take on the story.

The reader, however, highlights two important aspects:

• Children would want to "protect" a cat from the rain, whereas adults know cats can take care of themselves.

This is interesting given how everyone else is so concerned that George's American wife/girl does not get wet. Yesterday, as you recall, we wondered whether she is identifying with the cat: "The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on. (...) ‘No, I’ll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table’" (1, ln. 14-15; 21).

SPARKNOTES offers this summary of the story:

Only two Americans are in the hotel. Their room faces the sea, a public garden, and a war monument. Many Italians come from far away to see the monument. That day, it is raining, and the American wife is looking out the window. She sees a cat under a table that is trying to keep dry. She tells her husband that she is going to get it. He tells her not to get wet. Downstairs, she is greeted by the hotel operator, whose seriousness and willingness to please she adores. When she goes outside, he sends a maid after her with an umbrella. She does not find the cat. She goes back upstairs feeling sad. She asks her husband if she should grow her hair out. He says that he likes it the way that it is. She decides that she wants a bun at the back of her neck, and a cat to stroke, and a table with her own silver, and some new clothing. He tells her to shut up and to find a book to read. She says that she still wants a cat. Just then, someone knocks at the door. It is the maid. She has brought up a cat, at the request of the hotel operator.

• Note how terse and minimalistic the summary is.
• Note how the story is told in the present tense. This should always be done in talking or writing about fiction. Stories, poems, plays, etc. always happen, as it were, in the present. That is, they are always "happening".
• Note what points the reader takes for granted in offering this summary.
  
• Note differences in the language chosen to summarize the story in comparison with the language of the text itself.

The take on the story offered by SPARKNOTES is strikingly different from what we considered yesterday:

The American wife expresses a desire for many things in this story. She tells her husband that if she cannot have any fun, then she might as well have things that she wants. In other words, this desire for material goods comes from an inability to acquire intangible goods such as fun and affection. This lack of intimacy is not entirely her husband's fault, of course. She also ignores his compliments.

This American way, desiring material objects and becoming bored, is contrasted with an Italian way of vacationing. The Italians arrive in the same location to see the war memorial and honor the war dead. They are more involved in the ideas of the place than in owning things from it. In addition, it is a more communal way of living, to honor the sacrifices of others, rather than to stay inside and read.

Their view appears more weighted towards Marxist and Psychoanalytical approaches.

You can find many other positions regarding this text online. As you know, there are sites that offer students the chance to read or use the ideas and or written work of other people. This is plagiarism and it is icky. However, just as a tool for the workshop it is interesting to look at a least one of them:

This is an excerpt from the paper...

From bulls to marlins, when Hemingway uses animals in his fiction they are purposefully used to create richer characterization for his human characters. For example, in The Old Man and the Sea, the Marlin is used as an almost worthy antagonist to Santiago and Santiago even admits there is not much difference between him and his fish.

In Cat In The Rain, the animal is a cat and it is significant enough to the story and characters that it rates a mention in the title of this short story. The cat has a twofold meaning to the story and the American female traveling with her husband. First, the cat symbolizes how human beings are often faced with larger, more hostile forces than they can contend with on their own. Second, the cat symbolizes the situation of the woman in her relationship. The woman seeks love, comfort, companionship and nurturing from her husband which she does not receive. She, therefore, like the cat "was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on" (Hemingway 167).

The cat also has a third relevance to the story and that is that it acts as a surrogate child for the women. She wants "to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her" (Hemingway 169). She wants this as much as she yearns for long hair, i.e., some unique aspect to her identity which a child might serve for her, "I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel" (Hemingway...

• Can you find problems with the selective explanation of the cat as a "symbol" in this paper?
• Is the cat facing "larger, more hostile forces" than it can cope with?
  
• Is the cat seeking "love, comfort, companionship and nurturing" from the American wife/girl?
• The sexual interpretation of the cat as "symbol" is absent from this paper. Should it be there? How? How would it affect the argument as presented above?
  
• Can you find problems with the way in which the writer expresses his/her ideas?

The questions I am posing here should help you understand the kind of treatment that I give your writing when I read your papers. They should help you be ready to cover all your bases as you prepare to come up with papers, titles, and the all important theses the vertebrate them.

Connell, Whitehead y Barrett

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Monadas, me quedé un pelín mustio hoy pues sentí que los 50 minutos apenas nos daban para todo lo que teníamos que hacer. Es una lástima, pero hay que apechugar, es decir, hay que echarle ganas al asunto.

Los textos teóricos o sociológiocos nos sirven de soporte para nuestra discusión de la representación de la masculinidad en los textos.

Por ejemplo, con el Poema del Mio Cid tenemos lo siguiente:

• masculinidad hegemónica - la de el Cid, sus lugartenientes, Alfonso VI, Abengalbón, etc.
• masculinidades subordinadas - la de los judíos (Raquel y Vidas), la de Yusuf, rey de Marruecos, las de los Infantes de Carrión, etc.
• discurso del vasallaje - regula la relación entre el Cid y Alfonso VI, etc.
• relaciones homosociales - hay una larga serie de relaciones entre hombres que o bien están en crisis o bien son celebradas como ejemplares
• la frontera y la masculinidad
• la violencia masculina y la mujer como su receptora
• el artefacto cultural -el poema- y su rol como parte del discurso hegemónico castellano
• etc.

Espero que el poema nos dé mucho que hablar el miércoles. ¡Si no, el film de seguro que sí!