Due at the end of Week 10:
The Last Assignment (combined assignment and synthesis for weeks 9 & 10)
Concerning : Geometric Regional Novel , Borges stories, "Cybernetics & Ghosts," The Five Obstructions , & The Age of Wire and String .
What, in light of these texts, has become of literature?
You have quite a lot in front of you, and a host of texts, themes, terms, and problems from the last 8 weeks of study behind you. To the extent that our study does not get to the essence of literature but traces a specific way of telling a story of literature, where do our current texts (produced by writers with somewhat similar curiosities and fascinations that we have tried to carry through this program) leave us? How do these works attend to some of the themes of our program in ways that carry on this same kind of inquiry within the framework of their own concerns, sensibilities, but having "taken stock" of the challenges proposed by our other authors. In short, how are they doing the work of literature's becoming?
Week Seven:
Jean Genet Assignment Options
- Consider the ontological implications of Genet's work/self in parallel with Calasso &/or Nietzsche's idea of the original vs the simulacrum or real vs appearance.
2. Do a close analysis of one key passage in Genet, studying his symbolism - by studying this passage, you should reveal something about the whole of the work.
Week Six: Sollers / Barthes Assignment
Option 1: Explain and substantiate, using Barthes (Pleasure of the Text), Sollers, and other texts, this line from Barthes's explanatory essay: "This new reading to which Event invites us would not attempt to establish an analogous rapport between the work and the reader, but rather a homologous one."
Option 2: Discuss the following line, "the story is the desire for the story" in relation to the "search for the book," and by comparison with Beckett's, Artaud's or an other's wowork.
Week 5: Artaud / Elektra Assignment
Option One: Write a piece that describes Language as a visceral experience, based on your own experience...in a manner like Artaud's, if you wish.
Option Two: Write a discussion of the paradox of Artaud's struggle with the capacity of language to express things and his extreme devotion to language/writing and the possibility of a "total" language.
week 4: Beckett Assignment
Write a short analytical essay that relates beckett with rilke or mallarmé.
Write a piece that explicates, through close reading, one of Beckett's Texts for Nothing --keeping in mind where it appears in the sequence of Texts .