Stockton Book Donation

This summer, I was down at Stockton to have lunch with Tom Kinsella. On my way in, I stopped at the library to donate some books I had read in classes while a student from 2001-2006. I thought it was a neat idea and Stockton's librarians were very interested. I would like to do the same at Monmouth someday too when I am back up in that area.

Here is a list of the books I donated:

• The first Electronic Literature Organization collection CD

• Kindred by Octavia Butler (African American Literature)

• The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (From Books To Movies)

• Sexing The Cherry by Jeanette Winterson (Senior Seminar: Postmodernism)

• Acid Free Bits by Nick Montfort

• The Aspern Papers by Henry James (Readers, Writers, and Books)

• The Life Of Pi by Yan Martel (Readers, Writers, and Books)

• City Of Glass by Paul Auster (Senior Seminar: Postmodernism)

• The Nietzsche Anthology (Moral Theories)

• The Iliad (Homer)

• New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (Senior Seminiar: Postmodernism)

• Beloved by Toni Morrison (African American Literature)

• The Odyssey (Homer)

• Another Country by James Baldwin (African American Literature)
  

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. 

We Believe In A Great Poet As The Author Of The Iliad and The Odyssey—But Not That Homer Was This Poet

Project Gutenberg has archived a Nietzsche lecture from 1869.  Nietzsche lectures on Homer and classical philology.  Among the things the lecture focuses on is just who, or whom, Homer was:

They conceived the Iliad and  the Odyssey as the  creations  of one  single Homer; they declared it to be psychologically possible for two such different works to have sprung from the brain of one genius, in contradiction to the Chorizontes, who represented the extreme limit of the scepticism  of  a  few  detached  individuals  of  antiquity  rather  than  antiquity  itself considered as a whole.

Nietzsche also wonders how much of Homer was actually left in The Odyssey by the time it was written down:

The name of Homer, from the very beginning, has no connection either with the conception of æsthetic perfection or yet with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not a historical tradition, but an æsthetic judgment.