Thursday, Sept. 5th: Foundations 3: de Saussure / Kristeva / Barthes

Roland Barthes cultivating an air of disaffected intellectual coolness.

I've put all of our readings for Thursday in one PDF, which you can find here.  The first four excerpts are taken from the first edition of A Critical and Cultural Study Reader, ed. Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan, while the fifth is from Barthes' Image, Music, Text.

As has been the case with our other two foundations classes, these readings are significantly more complex and theoretical than the majority of the work we'll be doing this term, but if you're able to keep with them, particularly through our class discussions, you'll have a strong body of critical tools with which to begin the rest of that work.  Do your best to navigate them, using the pointers below, and don't worry if you're not feeling 100% sure of what you've read (or 70% for that matter).  What's most important is that you've made an effort and have digested some of the ideas at play here — we'll work quickly to figure out the rest in our class discussion.

We'll be leapfrogging quickly from reading to reading, and I might even set a timer to keep us on schedule so we can get through everything.  

things to look out for:

• de Saussure: definitions of the sign/signifier/signified; general defining characteristics of language; 
• Barthes (from Mythologies): first and second order signification

(note: these readings are being provided as groundwork to set up the other readings by Kristeva and Barthes)

• Kristeva: definitions of phenotext vs. genotext; "poetic language"
• Barthes ("The Grain of the Voice"): characteristics of the grain of the voice
• Barthes (from The Pleasure of the Text): definitions of pleasure vs. bliss

Take notes as you read(!) and try to jot down some rudimentary answers to these questions, and you'll be well-positioned for us to start unpacking these ideas.  Also, try to look for connections to some of the texts we've already read this semester.  Finally, take heart!  We begin looking at poetry as soon as we're done with this!