At the end of the prologue to Ling Ma’s Severance, our narrator, Candace Chen, refugee from a deadly fungal outbreak that has devastated New York City and much of the rest of the planet, gives us a hint that she’s less than stable — as a narrator, at least. The Prologue, that is, has consisted […]
Read More →Archive for September, 2020
Misreading Freud’s misreading
In some recent iterations of this class, we encounter Oedipus not just through Sophocles’ play but even earlier, via Tony Sampson’s strong endorsement of some prominent critiques of Freud’s definition of the unconscious. (At stake in his book Virality is how we understand crowd behavior — how imitative behavior from fashion to fascism operates.) Sampson illustrates how […]
Read More →A complex complex
I’d like to throw out two general areas for our consideration as we begin our discussion of Oedipus: First, the question of plague as material fact and as metaphor. To what degree can we think about the representation of plague in these separate ways — i.e., literal and figurative? To what degree are they conflated […]
Read More →The big questions
Welcome to Contagion 2020, the eighth iteration of this course but the first actually to be taught in a pandemic. After class today, one of you asked how our current situation — with courses being taught remotely and our lives affected in any number of ways we may not yet be collectively aware of — […]
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