seven

Ken Rufo's guest post was quite helpful, but the most interesting part was during his discussion on the Matrix movie and the concept of the simulacrum. Rufo explains the simulacrum of Epcot and how we believe that we're really in movies, which are just fakes. This makes me think of all the ideas from my childhood, including Disney, the future, and all of our childhood hopes and dreams are just simulacras, and none of it is real at all. The ideas we get from Disney are love, beauty, frienships with humans and animals, and happy endings. I grew up thinking that one day I will get a great, fun job, live in a nice house, fall in "love", have a perfect family and die happy. This dream life was based off of movies like Aladdin, the Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast. These movies projected these picture perfect life ideas that were embedded into my mind. These themes come from cartoons, nothing real, nothing that could ever be real. (Talking fish, magic carpets, beast to handsom man). But through it all, it was believed to be true.

six

In class, we discussed the idea of the author and Roland Barthes explains that text does not come from the author, but that the author is dead. The author is really the scriptor who transcribes culture. I agree with this notion that culture kind of just flows through the author and into a text. But does this text have a meaning? And if it does, is it truth? I find it difficult to follow the idea that humans are not essentially individuals. I think that authors impose their ideas and beliefs on the text that they are creating even these thoughts are skewed by culture.
Foucault then said "The function of an author is to characterize the existance, circulation and operation of certain discourses within a society." He is saying that certain things have writers, but not necessisarily an author. The "real" person does not shine through the texts, whether or not a this "real" person exists or not.

Authorship!?
In this blog, the "author" discusses the ideas of blogging and plagerism, not excactly authorship and pseudonimity, but another point that I think should be addressed when it comes to authorship. The idea of having ownership over ideas seems strange when the author is just the scriptor of culture. So does the author then own the language that is describing culture? Does the author own culture? It doesn't seem likely.

five

In the film, Derrida, he states that love is the most important thing in personal lives. But that raises the questions about what exactly love is. Is it the who or the what? Psychoanalytic criticism is "a form of therapy which aims to cure mental disorders 'by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind'", specifically how the mind, the instincts and sexuality work.

Derrida's ideas and the ideas of psychoanalytic criticism merge at the idea of sexuality. When Derrida says that this is the most important thing, to define a person, to really get to know a person is through their love and sexuality, it relates with psychoanalytic perspective in that sexuality is innate and it is what drives humans through the libido. Freud also agrees with this saying that this innate sexuality is repressed in humans and that it comes out through the Oedipus Complex, projection and dream work.

Through each of these, the repressed desires shine through to show the unconscious of the person and their true feelings.

four

This week, Saussure told us that "in language there are only differences without positive terms". This explain that whether we have the signifier or the signified, neither exist outside of one another. We need black and white, boy and girl, yes and no. One can only be defined with its negative, but how the meaning has come to be over time is altered by reality. For example, in class we discussed AIDS and how a few decades ago, the disease was perceived as only contracted between homosexual males, and today people think and know how anyone anyone can get it.

Post-structuralism is a bit different in that these opposites do not give the full meaning of the signified and signifier. The meaning of words keep being deferred, and the true meaning is unknown.

Take money for example. Is the idea of money, or having money actually having the bills and coins, or is it now represented based on appearance of material items? I think the idea of money comes in so many different forms today from not having any, to having it, to showing it off, to watching the stock market plummet.

Three

Dr. Craig's post really cleared things up on Marxist criticism. The part when Dr. Craig mentioned how the American ruling class brainwashes the working class into thinking that they are fighting the system by purchasing certain commodities, makes the working class seem so pathetic.

Here we are (and I say "we" because I would put my pennies down on the fact that no one reading this is part of the ruling class), going about our day to day lives, some of us struggling to buy books, or pay rent, or concerned about being in $160,000 in debt within the next one or two years, unable to change any of it. Most are aware of the ruling class that has so much money they don't know what to do with it, but there are often the rebellious folks who attempt to fight it. In high school, my boyfriend at the time was one of these rebels. He would criticize me for my Uggs, or Northface, or anything else with a brand, for "feeding the corporations". He was doing the same thing when he bought CDs, concert tickets and his Vans slip ons.

Even the CDs that my boyfriend bought were singing about the war, the economy, how people need to "stand up for what they believe in" all gave back to the ruling class. These bands were signed onto big record labels and most of the money gained from CD, concert and t-shirt sales was ulitmately given back to the owners of the label and became another social contradiction that still has not been resolved.

Two

Marxist criticism on literature seems kind of lame at first saying that all that "we" have created has been influence by the outside world and is basically economically determined by capitalism in the US. It says that nothing can come from spirituality or our inner self. With a majority of religious Americans, it almost seems unreasonable to think that nothing could be shaped or formed by the individuals' beliefs like in the ten tenets of liberal humanism, where it states that individuality is something securely possessed within each of us as our unique essence.

Marxist literary criticism then begins to fall into place making sense in that people learn from what is around them, with what they grew up with, forming their "own" beliefs that are inevitably the same of most of their peers/community/family/friends.

For example, people who grow up with Christianity may believe in Jesus and the Bible may continue to believe and act in life according to the religion, but throughout life, a lot of moral decisions will be based off of Christianity because it was drilled into them growing up. I think that some people tweak their beliefs a bit but only in a certain range to the extent of their knowledge and what is acceptable in the society.

So... that's it.

one

I don't like introductions and my initial thoughts are usually wrong and boring.

From my past experience with theory, thanks to Dr. DeGooyer, I can never look at ads the same way again and I am a walking advertisement 24/7.

Short and sweet.