Book Log - Spring Semester, 2008

Special academic round-up, the very last time, I swear...spare me grad school, oh gracious Lord.

Shakespeare Survey II
Oddly appropriate that I should end my academic English career, effectively, where it began: 8 more plays under the direction of Richard Horwich, even if he did advise his students against kowtowing entirely to one man's interpretations. I don't have the hubris necessary to offering detailed "reactions" to the plays. Covered: King Lear (third time through; presumably something to grow on me and increasingly increasingly away at my fragile psyche as I age), Macbeth (no comment), Twelfth Night (never again; I think this was the third time), Antony And Cleopatra (freakishly dull, honestly; Cleopatra is perhaps the single least appealing, tolerable character in Shakespeare, and her constant whims — defended, even praised by many of the women in the class — struck me as exactly the kind of unnecessary, stupid relationship drama I've spent my entire life running away from. NYU also paid for tickets to a production at the Public Theater; the first half was paced like "The West Wing," the second was extremely lugubrious, an all-too-common tactic in any medium for conveying sudden seriousness. It was also updated to the African colonies in 1884, but the connect-the-colonial-dots approach didn't really get any place particularly interesting.), Measure For Measure (too nasty to be truly "enjoyed," which of course makes it endlessly intriguing), The Tempest (too elegiac, maybe? Still quite moving, and the question of what, exactly, Caliban attempted with Miranda — rape or consensual sex? — is really interesting, as is Prospero's obsession with her virginity. I didn't finish it in the end-of-semester rush), The Winter's Tale (I have the reaction to this I should have to The Tempest, I suppose), Othello (I love this: the briskness of the tempo, the intricacy of the plotting, the high level of oration...brilliant; I also wrote a Foucauldian interpretation of this analyzing it as an image-system of oceanic imagery, mostly to prove I could get away with it).

The recitation was, again, an exercise in watching stony-faced undergrads refuse to talk about anything with any enthusiasm, until eventually 5 or 6 kids — mostly over-earnest and wonky, but at least they cared — dominated every conversation. (Top prize for least cooperative, most inexplicable class enrollee: the girl whose sole comment all semester was about the eyeliner in the Antony and Cleopatra production.)

Seminar: Introduction To Foucault
Hedging my bets here, although this turned out way better than expected. Grad school is my fallback should all else fail, I suppose, and it would be sheer madness to storm its towers without even a cursory acquaintance with the man who's, for all intents and purposes, effectively monopolized it for the last 30 years. (More on this above and below.) This was taught by visiting Prof. Juliet Fleming, a British woman who wasn't afraid to laugh in people's faces and tell them they were wrong; she's awesome. And, for once, I have almost nothing but good things to say about my classmates: nearly everyone was engaged and said insightful things. (Now would be a good time to salute the guy who showed up one week 45 minutes late with no explanation and the biggest black eye I've ever seen. Well done sir.) We read three books, at least ostensibly.

First up: Madness And Civilization, which (ironically enough) almost drove me crazy. We never pinned down in class whether it's simply sloppier and/or more poorly translated than Foucault's subsequent work (both are possible, said the prof), but I was utterly perplexed by the recurring adjectival use of "secret": everything is a "secret conspiracy," a "secret affinity," etc. We were assigned three 5-page papers, one per book, so I took the demon head-on and discovered that you can make this seemingly oblique adjective work in nearly every context: in many cases, however, it requires extreme interpretive leaps, and I'm hardly convinced it's all intentional. What it clued me in to, oddly enough, was how neatly Foucault's paranoia (and there's really no other way to describe it at a certain point) lines up with Pynchon, Eco et al.: once you're convinced that all the books are talking to all the paintings (and no one creating them realizes it), it's hardly a leap to treating history as one giant conspiracy.

After that, Discipline And Punish is a model of clarity, even if its passages of straight-up reconstructed history and citations play far more absorbingly than the moments when, having laid the groundwork, Foucault leaps into the purely theoretical. It's not that he's not a brilliant synthesist: what I find insulting, at least to a degree, is the insistence that past ages operated on unconscious codes ("discourse"!), decoded just this moment. Of course, every sentence issued with seeming finality should have a qualifier, but we simply don't have the time. The most interesting tension in Discipline has to do with the gap between the seemingly arcane and the very real and sudden anger popping up; it helps to know that Foucault, in his spare time, was an ardent advocate of prison reform and prisoners' rights. In a startling break, Foucault compares and contrasts the "general tents of prison reform" which, he argues, have changed in almost no way since the 19th century and, in his view, have proven completely inefficacious at all times: gone, momentarily, are the paradoxes and irresolutions his work is supposed to propound. (I wrote my paper on that moment.) In any event, the long, gruesome reconstructions of arcane punishments make for terrific reading. Best anecdote: the general who, inspecting French troops at arms, said "Perfect, but they breathe."

I didn't finish The Order Of Things, the first book in ages I couldn't drag myself all the way through. The professor tried to make it easy on us: selected chapters were all that was required. But I'm an insane completist, and tried to read the whole thing in a week; I petered out somewhere around 200 and didn't have the heart to move on. With graduation around the corner — i.e., a moment when I would never have to read anything ever again against my will, unless I'm getting paid — I was confronted with passages that vacillated between the unreadably vague (Foucault's coinage of neologisms and resurrection of archaisms reaches a tipping point here) and the fascinating. The opening reading of Goya is arguably brilliant, and the sections on economics are startling; equally, certain moments where Foucault takes a whole page to diagram the alleged intellectual overlaps and weavings of his chosen subjects grew uninterpretable. Apparently I'm not alone; my last (and weakest) paper was a line-by-line explication of pg. 173, which needs all the help it can get.

18th Century British Novel
I'm going to save most of my venom for Prof. C.S. for a reflection essay about the NYU experience [noted, some 3 months later: this has been tabled, mostly because The Chronicle Of Higher Education won't pay me to do it, and there's no way to stop all those cranky essays about how the youth today just don't study like they used to], so I'll just generically note that this class was extremely weak. I only read about half the material: I didn't finish Sarah Scott's Milennium Hall, although I was very amused by the part where, in an act of kindness, a high wall of shrubbery is erected to create a private cottage/village area for both dwarfs and giants, this being the height of 18th-century tolerance. 2 canonical things we read (both of which I enjoyed) were Jane Austen's smart-assed Northanger Abbey, which alternates typically immaculate social observation with sly Gothic parody and is all the more enjoyable for the unabashedly sarcastic formal score-settling and Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, which is compulsively readable and surely one of the angriest books I've ever read. The big surprise was William Godwin's Caleb Williams, which should be a dry tract about social injustice and the need for prison/justice reforms but works as downward spiral melodrama in a Dickensian sort of way; it's actually recommended by me. I would not recommend reading The New Atlantis, the 18th-century equivalent of a contemporary tell-all, dressed up in pseudonymous drag; at a certain point, you simply have to stop blathering about the "alien" qualities and "otherness" of the past and quit pretending to your students that your obsession with poorly written gossip isn't a sign of vast mental powers and is just as much a freakish fetish, like otaku tendencies or people who deep-fry everything. The theory round-up was so unmemorable that I have nothing to say; suffice it to say that the great man devoted an entire class to a selection of three of his essays.

There'll be more to say about this in the aforementioned summary essay, but it's worth nothing that one of the 14k databases [this is hyperbole] NYU pays for (at tremendous cost to their endowment, apparently) is the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), which is simply tremendous. It's got apparently 95% of the extant books published in the 18th century in England scanned in and, if anyone's curious, I'll totally share with you my insights about what I learned about the old posted rules of Bath and how they affect Northanger. But I'll just let it be for the time being, if it's all the same.

Intro to Modern Philosophy
...which turns out to mean half a semester of Descartes, then brief excursions into Malebranche, Leibniz, Locke and the rest of the boys. A fairly disastrous course for me, one in which every argument could apparently be summed up as:
1) P.
2) If P, then Q.
3) P.
4) Therefore Q.

I have no idea how this resolves anything. I'm sticking to the intellectually lightweight, thanks.