Here are some questions for our reading this week. Since we won’t be submitting reading responses, I gave myself permission to toss on a few more questions than we generally do. I also tried to gesture to some additional material that might enrich or clarify the readings. See you all in class!
Kristeva
1) Explain the difference between the semiotic and the symbolic. How does chora fit into this arrangement?
2) Kristeva borrows her term chora from Plato, who, despite attempting to describe chora as non-material, used the metaphor of nurse, womb, or receptacle when explaining it. Kristeva takes the gendered associations of this term and runs with it. In what other ways are Kristeva’s descriptions of language gendered? What are the implied sexual politics of her linguistic and poetic assertions?
3) Kristeva’s writing is heavily inflected by a Lacanian narrative of linguistic development, and as such she describes many parts of language that are deeply intertwined with childhood psychological development (including the Freudian “family romance”). To what extent is Kristeva explaining elements of language that exist beyond our control, versus elements of language we can and should manipulate and mobilize as poets and writers?
4) How do sacrifice and art relate differently to jouissance (see “Poetry That Is Not a Form of Murder”)? How does this compare to your own views on art? On violence?
Loy
5) What inadequacies does Loy see in her contemporaneous feminist movement? Who is responsible for addressing those inadequacies, and how?
6) Though Loy is a poet, and wrote on poetic practice itself, “Feminist Manifesto” is one of the texts in our class that focuses less explicitly on literature and more on cultural norms. What do you see as the literary implications of some of Loy’s assertions?
7) Loy emphasizes the representational limitations of, and restrictions placed upon, female bodies. What is the line between metaphor and the material in Loy’s descriptions of these bodies? How does this compare to the way female bodies are valued today? What challenges (or opportunities) does this create for poets and writers who have female bodies and/or identify as women?
[Extra: What are the implications of Loy’s essay for other areas of identity politics, including race and class?]
[Even more extra: Loy was famously connected with Italian Futurist movement (before it tied itself to fascism, but long after its misogyny was apparent). Compare her social politics in “Feminist Manifesto” to the artistic concerns she raises in this passage from her text “Aphorisms on Futurism”: “TODAY is the crisis in consciousness. / CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that moulds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it. / CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.”]
Stein
8) After shifting from a general discussion of the properties of parts of speech and punctuation to an anecdote about The Making Of Americans, Stein writes the following:
Nouns are the name of anything and anything is named, that is what Adam and Eve did and if you like it is what anybody does, but do they go on just using the name until perhaps they do not know what the name is or if they do know what the name is they do not care about what the name is. This may happen of course it may. And what has poetry got to do with this and what has prose and if everything like a noun which is a name of anything is to be avoided what takes place.
What are the stakes of Stein’s argument about the act of naming and its effect on language? How does Stein approach the question (here and elsewhere) of what poetry can do about this, and what poetry itself is?
9) How does Stein position her essay historically? What effect, if any, does this have on her argument?
10) What is the role of the poet in Stein’s essay? How does it compare to other texts we’ve read so far?
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