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(2)
Stuart
Hall's account of the competing intellectual trends in "Cultural
Studies: Two Paradigms" mentions a number of thinkers whom
most of you probably won't have read. Nonetheless, I'd like to
encourage you to try to follow his narrative, because it's a useful
brief summary of the tensions out of which British Cultural Studies
took shape. Discuss the two alternative
"paradigms"-- "Culturalism" and "Structuralism"
-- for Cultural Studies, with
questions that occur to you and examples from your own reading
and reflection.
3) Stuart Hall's webcast series, "Race: the Floating Signifier," and Ted Allen's book, The Invention of the White Race (for which a detailed synopsis is presented here) present perspectives on racism in modernity that overlap in many respects but also diverge significantly, I think. Discuss/compare these two analyses of racism as a cultural discourse in modernity.
(4) Consider how the brief examples of different meanings of "representation" mentioned by Stuart Hall in the video "Representation and the Media" correspond to the Adorno/Horkheimer essay and/or to the discussion of film representations by bell hooks in the first week's video links.
(5) From your
reading of the Smith chapter, from Stuart Hall's discussion in
"Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," and/or from your
own previous reading and past experience in Cultural Studies,
discuss the some of the issues that have arisen in the relationship
between Cultural Studies and the "New Left" and/or "Identity
Politics" movements since the 1960s.
(6) Toward
the end of Chapter 1, de Beauvoir discusses the experience of
women, between the onset of puberty and the onset of menopause,
as a sort of physical enslavement to the reproductive function,
in which women's bodies are, in effect, at war with their personal
individual development. For example, she writes:
Women experience
a more profound alienation when fertilization has occurred and
the dividing egg passes down into the uterus and proceeds to
develop there. Ture enough, pregnancy is a normal process, which,
if it takes place under normal conditions of health and nutrition,
is not harmful to the mother; certain interactions between her
and the foetus become established which are even beneficial
to her. In spite of an optimistic view having all too obvious
social utility, however, gestation is a fatiguing task of no
individual benefit to the woman but on the contrary demanding
heavy sacrifices.
What are some
of the other examples by which de Beauvoir argues that reproduction
is inimical to the individual freedom of the woman? Do you agree?
(7) Discuss
the effect of de Beauvoir's dry, "scientific" rhetoric
in this chapter or in the other chapters we have read. For example,
do you find her comparisons of women's sexuality to that of men,
of insects, frogs, monkeys, etc., shocking, funny, thought-provoking?
Something else?
(8) Toward
the end of her second chapter, on Psychoanalysis, Simone de Beauvoir
writes: "We therefore decline to accept the method of psychoanalysis,
without rejecting en bloc the contributions of the science or
denying the fertility of some of its insights." What are
some of the problems with psychoanalysis, according to de Beauvoir,
and what are some of the insights that she finds useful?
(9) Raise
and discuss any questions and/or reactions you have in response
to these readings after you have read the texts.
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