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Monday, October 31, 2016

Teaching In The Homestretch...

William Burroughs, Elizabeth Grosz, Aldo Leopold in my graduate fetishism seminar in the City today, Terence and Roman satire at Berkeley tomorrow... Election frazzled, and waiting to be post-election dazzled... Let's just get this goddamn thing over with! Do we get a Senate with a working majority and a shell-shocked House ready to punish its nihilist caucus when they can't even keep the lights on? Teaching Cicero's invectives through late Roman Republican elections in the midst of Trumpmania was an utterly terrible demoralizing idea, I must say.

2 comments:

Chad Lott said...

I don't think I ever asked, what Burroughs do you teach?

Dale Carrico said...

In my graduate fetishism seminar I'm teaching "On Coincidence" (because I think he means by the magical universe pretty much what Nietzsche means by the eternal return, which forms the basis for his ressentiment thesis which I take to be a critique of fetishism; I also find an affinity between his writing assignments to students -- which are designed to induce paranoia/magical receptivity -- and Freud's stunning concluding moment of collapse/identitification between his own psychoanalysis and Schreber's, er, theology). In my undergraduate critical theory survey I always teach "Immortality" -- and I always pair it with Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto. Now ain't that a kick in the head?