Write an essay of about 1500 words (four to six typed double-spaced pages) on one of the following topics. Please follow the current MLA style for format and documentation.
1. Present a brief close reading of an everyday object, such as a piece of clothing or furniture, a tool, a form of packaging, or an electronic device. What does it mean to read a thing that has little or no apparent language associated with it? How can you "textualize" that object? How do you decode its meanings, its use-value, its significations? What about that object might resist being "read"?
2. Examine the ways in which one of the following terms has been defined and deployed in a two of the theoretical texts on the course syllabus: reading, mind, literacy, audience, performance, space, subject, identity, myth, other, difference, sign, race, politics, queer, body, material, ideology, experience. On what texts and/or authorities do the meanings of that term depend? Why might defining that term be crucial to the critics and theoreticians? Can you suggest any blind spots or gaps in the theory you have read? (You may wish to use an entry from Raymond Williams's book Keywords as a model for this essay. Or you might reconsider how Michel Foucault approaches the term "author" by historicizig its usage.)
3. Choose a paragraph or two from one of the essays on the course syllabus, and do a version of a close reading of that passage. Does the writer you choose present an "answerable style"? Why does he or she employ specific rhetorical or stylistic devices? How are concept and form intertwined in his or her work? How is theory practised by writing?
4. Using the essays from Roland Barthes Mythologies as an example or model, perform a demythologizing reading of your own on a text, or object, or cultural practice. How does your version of applied semiology differ from, or expand upon, Barthes's 1957 French work?
5. Consider the performative aspects of much of this theoretical work: how does writing perform itself? What is the relationship between performance and performativity? Choose a well-defined example through which to articulate your analysis.
6. What are the cultural politics of literacy or of canonization? Choose a specific text or a figure, and examine how that work either resists or enables access, or reading. Who gets to read? How?
7. A topic of your own devising. Please consult with me before you begin to write.
Due in class on Monday, February 9.