| Review the notes from Wednesday's class, esp.
on Post-Structuralism
Make sure you understand the following quotes from
"Death of the Author"
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"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing
a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a
multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
centres of culture."
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"In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to
be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’
(like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but
there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not
pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it,
carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature
(it would bebetter from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a
‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text),
liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity
that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end,
to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law."
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and the last paragraph of essay
Read also the excerpt from s/z (3 pages in
the reading packet) - try not to get hung up on the references to French
authors, etc, instead, try to pull out Barthes' approach to the act of
reading, of interpretation, of starring the text.
Umberto Eco - Read pages 23-35 (Starting
at The City of Robots"
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read the section on Disneyland carefully, as
well as the last 2 paragraphs.
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Q: How does he practice the sort of reading which
Barthes describes?
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Q: Whas is the "ideology" of post modern America?
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