Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on At long last, here is the final:
All instructions are at the top. Please follow them carefully. Feel free to email me with logistical questions or problems.
Good luck! Due Tuesday at midnight.
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on I wanted to give you a heads up on two very unrelated items:
1. It’s Course Evals time. Here’s the 411:
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on As you probably know, there’s no reading for tomorrow, and we’ll review the prior unit. This is a golden opportunity for you to set yourself up for success on the exam.
I’m happy to walk through some of the high points of the readings as I see them, but I think the review will go best if you come prepared with questions. Take a look at the blog study questions and come prepared to throw out any that seem tricky for you.
Finally, I’ve put together a brief survey to take your temperature on how you feel about the course and its various components. It’s anonymous and ungraded (obviously), but I hope you will consider taking a moment to jot down your thoughts. I’ll give some time at the end of class to work on it, if we can wrap up the review in time.
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on Here’s a splendid 20 min lecture on Mulvey’s argument. The lecturer has an extensive array of podcasts on hundreds of theoretical pieces, including some stuff that we’ve read together, here.
Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
In this episode, I present Laura Mulvey’s short essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” If you want to support me, you can do that with these links: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theoryandphilosophy paypal.me/theoryphilosophy Twitter: @DavidGuignion IG: @theory_and_philosophy Podbean: https://theoretician.podbean.com/
And here are some examples (with very little contextualization) from the kinds of classic Hollywood cinema that Mulvey analyzes:
Laura Mulvey-Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema examples
Comm Studies 483
And here’s a moving short piece on the model and actress Brooke Shields’ reflections on her being rendered as an object for others’ scopophilia in today’s New York Times. It’s not super theoretical but does convey a vivid sense of the human cost of the patriarchal cinematic apparatus that Mulvey analyzes [remember that you can get free digital access via the Library’s site]:
Opinion | Brooke Shields, Social Media and the Public’s Withering Gaze
A moment in the documentary “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” that epitomizes the actress’s experience of fame calls back to her time as a Princeton undergrad in the ’80s. Shields – whose image was in the public sphere from the time she was a baby, when Francesco Scavullo photographed her for an Ivory soap ad – poured her soul into a self-help book about starting college.
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on I was thinking about how to demonstrate the way the “semiotic” processes are at work in some kind of poetry in ways that are more accessible to Anglo/American lit students than the Mallarme example Kristeva gives us. So here goes:
The end of Joyce’s Ulysses, narrated by Molly Bloom. The intense erotic energy of the “yesses” speak to the untrammeled pre-Oedipal polymorphous flows of desire that JK describes:
Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy …the last lines..
June 16th 2012 Bloomsday : the last lines of Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy to the backdrop of a Tribute Painting I painted this week…
And here’s Gertrude Stein, the great poet of the “semiotic” in JKs sense, giving an undulating “portrait” of Pablo Picasso:
Gertrude Stein reads If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso
Gertrude Stein reads her poem If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso.
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on While riding to work this morning, I thought about how Lacan’s reading of the “mirror stage” is hilariously conjured up by a joke the narrator relates in Alexandr Hemon’s marvelous novel, The Lazarus Project:
This is a classic instance of what Lacan calls “meconnaissance” (misrecognition), whereby the subject identifies with the idealized figure in the mirror (here, the “brawny, suntanned” man with the hot wife and scads of money) to substitute for the unbearable fact of his own frustrated, discontinuous, dislocated self (Mujo, like the narrator himself, is an immigrant who, Lazarus-like, is permanently alive and dead, between two worlds, already over and beginning again).
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on To help us contextualize the “mirror stage” essay, which narrates the formation of the ego and the advent of the “imaginary” in psychological life, check out this diagram:
This “knot” helps us see a few important things at once:
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on In case anyone’s not clear on the “rebus” analogy in Freud’s stuff on dreams, here’s an example: 
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on In another bit of kismet, as we get ready to discuss Freud in the context of a new unit on the psyche and affect in literary study, the New York Times has a piece on renewed interest in Freudian models for psychotherapy and in the culture more broadly:
Not Your Daddy’s Freud
The Great Read A new generation of analysts and patients are embracing the father of psychoanalysis – in magazines and memes and many hours on the couch. Credit… Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month.
Also, I’m officially reminding you that a) reading the NYT regularly is basic “equipment for living” for an educated citizenry and b) you all have free digital access from the Library (works for computers, iOS, and Android devices).
Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on It’s that time. Here are the instructions for your midterm and a link to the template you’ll use to write the exam and upload to Dropbox:
Here’s the template. Good luck, everyone!
