Jan 18: on Roland Barthes
Dear Good People,
Yet again, this may turn into a fuller post before the end of the week. In the meantime, I offer a placeholder for a working space we may begin using during tomorrow's class, as well as a set of materials that will comprise the "text" of our first case study on "Rhodes Must Fall":
I'll begin by saying this is a complex case; we will -- as much as possible -- try to examine it and consider its aspects while questioning representational traps and resisting diabolical assumptions (i.e., black vs. white, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, etc.). Our cases are complex because they involve multiple constituents, and multiple narratives. Sometimes they involve spectacle. And most times they require a lot of us as readers, witnesses, interpreters, and participants.
I may ask us to take any 1 of Barthes’ 7 notions of “text-not-work” and try to apply it to our Case. What could it mean for “Rhodes Must Fall” to function as text-not-work? What do we think this campaign is really about?
Or, I may ask us whether Barthes’ or Fish’s theories help explain how certain subjects might get engendered, or oppressed, or hidden in the spaces between human rights rhetorics? What are some risks that come with the notion that all utterances are already functioning within systematic contexts?
Finally, I may ask us to consider whether or how the case study encourages us to define “textuality” after today? “Interpretability”?
-Prof. Graban
Yet again, this may turn into a fuller post before the end of the week. In the meantime, I offer a placeholder for a working space we may begin using during tomorrow's class, as well as a set of materials that will comprise the "text" of our first case study on "Rhodes Must Fall":
- the refereed Wikipedia article on the movement
- Amit Chaudhuri's editorial article on the movement for the UK Guardian (16 March 2016)
- Facebook page for the University of Cape Town movement
- Twitter account for the Oxford University movement
- The Global South Cultural Dialogues Project
- and finally, the "Preamble" from Universal Declaration of Human Rights
I'll begin by saying this is a complex case; we will -- as much as possible -- try to examine it and consider its aspects while questioning representational traps and resisting diabolical assumptions (i.e., black vs. white, good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, etc.). Our cases are complex because they involve multiple constituents, and multiple narratives. Sometimes they involve spectacle. And most times they require a lot of us as readers, witnesses, interpreters, and participants.
I may ask us to take any 1 of Barthes’ 7 notions of “text-not-work” and try to apply it to our Case. What could it mean for “Rhodes Must Fall” to function as text-not-work? What do we think this campaign is really about?
Or, I may ask us whether Barthes’ or Fish’s theories help explain how certain subjects might get engendered, or oppressed, or hidden in the spaces between human rights rhetorics? What are some risks that come with the notion that all utterances are already functioning within systematic contexts?
Finally, I may ask us to consider whether or how the case study encourages us to define “textuality” after today? “Interpretability”?
-Prof. Graban