Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Mimesis, Memetic Desire, and Memes



Mimesis

basic theoretical principle in the creation of art. The word is Greek and means “imitation” (though in the sense of “re-presentation” rather than of “copying”). Plato and Aristotle spoke of mimesis as the re-presentation of nature. According to Plato, all artistic creation is a form of imitation: that which really exists (in the “world of ideas”) is a type created by God; the concrete things man perceives in his existence are shadowy representations of this ideal type. Therefore, the painter, the tragedian, and the musician are imitators of an imitation, twice removed from the truth. Aristotle, speaking of tragedy, stressed the point that it was an “imitation of an action”—that of a man falling from a higher to a lower estate. Shakespeare, in Hamlet's speech to the actors, referred to the purpose of playing as being “ . . . to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.” Thus, an artist, by skillfully selecting and presenting his material, may purposefully seek to “imitate” the action of life.

"mimesis." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 28 Aug. 2007 .

Mimetic Desire

Rene Girard's work goes along the lines that "The dominant opinion as well in the human sciences as for the common sense, is that we fixe our desire on an object in a completely autonomous way." He's talking about Freud, who argues, as Nicolas Wey-Gomez points out, that "hardly anything is harder than for a man to give up a pleasure that he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another."

Memes

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi discusses memes in The Evolving Self:

The term "meme" was introduced about twenty years ago by the British biologist Richard Dawkins, who used it to describe a unit of cultural information comparable in its effects on society to those of the chemically coded instructions contained in the gene on the human organism. The name harks back to the greek word mimesis. (120)

Monday, August 27, 2007

Teoria Literaria - "Aura" de Carlos Fuentes



Estoy en el primer año del doctorado y nunca había leído ni estudiado "Aura" de Carlos Fuentes antes de este mismo momento.

Me recordó al Obsceno pájaro de la noche de Donoso y algunos cuentos de Cortázar. Usa también técnicas citadas por Borges para adentrarse a la irrealidad (i.e. sueños, tiempo circular, efecto caja china, desdoblamiento).

En mi opinión, lo que más se destaca es la voz narrativa y el efecto escalofriante que produce en el lector; “Lees y relees el aviso…parece dirigido a ti y nadie más.”

¿Cuáles teorías podrían ser útiles para analizar este texto? Esta pregunta la respondimos en clase de la siguiente manera:

Recepción

Semiótica: Soussiere

Desconstrucción

Autoreflexividad

Intertextualidad, metatextualidad

Arquetipos: La bruja, misa negra, mito fausto, mitología cristiana, azteca, griega (Narciso), el golem (como en “Las ruinas circulares” de Borges)

Psicoanálisis: Jung, Freud, Lacan

Posmodernismo: Si lo comparamos al Obsceno pájaro, podríamos formular paralelos con su actitud posmoderno destructiva frente a las oposiciones binarias de belleza/fealdad, amor/crueldad, vejez/juventud, lo vital/lo podrido, pasado/presente, lector/protagonista, historia/ficción, luz/oscuridad, presencia/ausencia (espacio), etc.

Formalismo

Teoría Feminista

Teoría Genérica

Bajtin: cronotipos, polifonía textual

Foucalt: autoridad, discurso, sexo, poder

Todorov: lo fantástico, terror psicológico

Hayen White: entramamiento, historia de Mexico, New historisism, metanarrativa histórica (Literature is as historical as history; history is as fictional as literature.)

Lo narratológico: Genette, focalización

Simbología tradicional (Cae bajo algún categoría? Es formalista?) el color verde/rojo, los gatos, la coneja, los cubiertos, la muñeca de trapo, los dientes, la sangre, el café frío, etc.

Me quedé con las siguientes dudas:

¿Qué significa?

Sinecdote

Metonimia

Shifters/embriagues, glissage (Lacan)


* * *

Creo q’ la función principal de los capítulos de Atkins (Contemporary Literary Theory) es simplemente lo siguiente: demostrarnos que la teoría literaria, tal como la literatura, es desarrollada dentro de una estructura de poder y por lo tanto es afectada por ella, tal como lo es la literatura. Algunas teorías vienen y van de moda dependiendo de su relevancia con su contexto…como las formas literarias. Nada puede ser divorciado de su contexto, incluyendo la literatura, la teoría (James A. Parr), el papel de la academia en si (Walter Mignolo) la metodología educativa (Jane Thompkins), la historia (Hayden White), etc.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Archetypal Criticism



Carl Jung

Richard F. Hardin, "Archetypal Criticism"

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

Thoughts on the Profession/Education


...and a message to my future self...

"In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing...Education thus becomes an act of depositing in which students are the depositories...Instead of communicating the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat."
- Paulo Freire, as cited by Jane Thompkins in Pedagogy of the Distressed

I AM NOT SIMPLY A DEPOSITORY AND I AM TIRED OF BEING TREATED LIKE ONE.

You could learn something from your students, if you bothered to ask and listen.

There, I said it.

I'm a student of Education in the closet. Among my favorite books and articles (besides the above mentioned) are:

Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundry

Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year

Walter Mignolo "The Role of the Humanities in the Corporate University"

And did I mention that I am a PowerPoint freak? Check out these resources on how to make yours better:

Research points the finger at PowerPoint

Help! My brain is overloaded!

I always start with lists.



Power

Edward Said
Immanuel Wallerstein World Systems Analysis

The Third Space, Hybrid Subjects and Stuff

Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture

Learning How to Write as Me

Adrienne Rich "When we Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision"
Alison Jaggar "Love -Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology", Inquiry: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 32, (June, 1989.)