Books Read 2011

  1. Beowulf & Other English Poems
  2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  3. Roland Barthes by Graham Allen
  4. With A Tangled Skein by Piers Anthony
  5. Collection of Aristophanes’ Plays
  6. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
  7. Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
  8. Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes
  9. Incidents by Roland Barthes
  10. Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes
  11. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
  12. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
  13. High Druid of Shannara: Jarka Ruus by Terry Brooks
  14. High Druid of Shannara: Tanaquil by Terry Brooks
  15. The Path To The Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino
  16. Six Memos For The Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
  17. Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino
  18. The Cambridge Companion To Chaucer
  19. Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag by Stevie Chick
  20. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  21. Matched by Ally Condie
  22. Context-Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century by Cory Doctorow
  23. Makers by Cory Doctorow
  24. With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow
  25. Ten Plays by Euripides
  26. Discipline & Punish-The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
  27. H.P Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq
  28. Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Invisible Presences by Molly Hoff
  29. The Odyssey by Homer (Butler translation)
  30. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
  31. Basrayatha: The Story Of A City by Muhammad Khudayyir
  32. New York Hardcore 1986-1991: A Time We’ll Remember by David Koenig
  33. Teaching Literature & Language Online (Edited by Ian Lancashire)
  34. Piers Plowman by William Langland
  35. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard
  36. Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism by Constance Markey
  37. Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos by McAlinden
  38. Utopia by Sir Thomas More
  39. Plato-Euthyphro
  40. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
  41. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott
  42. Civil Disobedience & Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau
  43. Look At The Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
  44. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
  45. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
  46. The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf

The Multiplicity Of Discursive Elements

My first semester of graduate school, one of the courses I took was on Critical Theory with Dr. Bluemel.  As we went from theorists as varied as Eve Sedgwick, Stanley Fish, and Roland Barthes I noticed a pattern forming during our discussions.  A number of my contributions to the discourse were referential to not only outside sources, but even some outside of what is normally considered “literature” by most students.  My professor told me to try to stay within the bounds of literature in order to not lose or confuse other students, which was fine by me.  Still, I was troubled that I received blank stares from my classmates when bringing up David Hume, John Dewey, or even a popular contemporary like Zadie Smith.  I had an extremely hard time trying to stay “in bounds” which it came to our classroom discourse. 

In History Of Sexuality, while discussing the unity of power and knowledge in discourse, Foucault offers this definition of discourse:

We must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform or stable.  To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies (100). 

As an undergraduate, I took a number of extra courses to attain a minor in Philosophy.  I did this in order to supplement my literary studies.  What I learned from Dewey, Hume, Nietzsche, Arthur Danto, and others went with me back to the English classroom to accentuate my work there.  Perhaps this is why theoretical concerns are more compelling to me than the standard close reading associated with English, but I see no reason for not extending into other fields for further enlightenment and thought.  Just talking about English in English classes bores the hell out of me.