Week 6: Ideology and the Unconscious

In class

• Discussion of Psychoanalytic Theories and Criticism:
  • Freud - model of the mind, mechanisms (repression, suppression, condensation, displacement), manifest and latent content - Adrienne Rich "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"
  • Lacan - the mirror stage, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real - Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science"
  • Kristeva - chora, semiotic, symbolic - EDM "Nyan Cat", Helen Chasin "The Word Plum"
• Discussion of Marxist Theory
  • Marx and Engels - material dialectic, estrangement, commodity, ideology, hegemony - Langston Hughes "Bad Man", Trainspotting opening scene
  • Jameson - "Always historicize!", metacommentary, semantic horizons (explication, ideologeme, ideology of form) - Brazil opening scene
  • Žižek - "opening scene" "Starbucks scene"
• Discussion of Annotated Bibliography and research methods

Assignments

• Complete your Annotated Bibliography
• Readings:
  • "Cultural Studies and New Historicism" (26-28)
  • Stuart Hall (1895-1910)
  • Roland Barthes (1457-1465)
  • Stephen Greenblatt (2250-2254)
  • Jean Baudrillard "from Simulacra and Simulation"
• Watch The Matrix (1999)
• Discuss The Matrix in the context of the assigned theoretical approaches. Due before class on Thursday, September 30.