Category Archives: blogging

First off I would like to apologize because I was unable to get the link to Infection in the Sentence to work, so I was only able to read The Laugh of Medusa. So if anyone was able to make the link for Infection in the Sentence work please post about it.

That being said, The Laugh of Medusa brought up a few issues for me. It starts off by claiming thatg women have been driven out of writing. This led me to the question: how are women driven out of writing? If women are absent from writing, then is every representation of women in writing an inaccurate masculine portrayal?

The author also claims that there is no typical woman, so as a result they have “inexhaustible” imaginations. This made me wonder if there is a typical man? Is there a typical woman in writing?

She goes on to say that “woman must write woman. And man, man.” This is similar to a previous question that I posed, but is this statement true? Can men only accurately portray men in writing? Are women only capable of portraying women?

A prevelant theme of this essay is that through writing, women can become actualized as individuals. The author claims that women must write in order to reclaim power that has been denied from them. She goes as far as to say that women don’t own their body if they do not write without censorship. What do you make of this? Can writing help one understand themselves? Does writing give someone conrol over their identity?

Finally, I found it a bit odd the way that the author compared writing to sexuality. I was wondering what you all thought about that.

So, I’ve read most of the first two sections of the Golden Notebook, and am now going back and trying to comment intelligently. Usually I’m the type to jot down whatever I think as I go, but the idea that my comments would not be kept “confidential” exactly, really weirded me out and made me hesitant to comment at all. I feel like in this format my thoughts have to be much more “polished” and insightful, since they’re not just for me. Honestly, I don’t like that at all. I’m trying to ignore my inhibitions and comment more naturally, but it’s difficult. Is anyone else reacting to this new style of reading similarly? Or does anyone like it a lot more? I guess I’m just the type who likes to mark up an actual book without worrying about what I’m thinking, just jotting it down… Are you guys able to tap into that more easily than I am in this new online format??

Hey all, I meant to write this a few days ago and it must have slipped my mind. On Monday we talked about ideologies and threw out a number of theories and definitions for “ideology.” One that was brought up said that ideology is what causes humans to tell stories that give rational explanations to things (the stories themselves, however, aren’t as important as the desire to create these rational explanations). About a month ago, we briefly discussed the motivation to write versus the motivation to publish a text and make it public, especially in light of the theory that published texts no longer belong to the author. Does this definition of ideology help explain the desire to publish at all? What about fictional texts, which in some sense are less about “rationally explaining” certain elements of life and are more about the story itself?

Hey people,

I stumbled across an interesting little article today while searching around the web for Barthes and figured, in the spirit of collaboration and a personal love for media articles, to share it with you all. It’s titled “Blogs and the Crisis of Authorship” and examines, surprisingly enough, the concept of the author within the new media genre of blogs.

I realize that this article will most likely have little to no impact the paper of anyone writing about Barthes, but I thought it was interesting to see the literary concepts we have been studying examined within the field of a recently developed form of media.

For whoever is interested, here’s the link: http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=40

Barthes and Foucault debunk the notions that “the author” is a single point of origin for any text, and that (conversely) the identity of a writer can be deduced from or directly connected to the text the writer produces.

First, where does this leave our thinking about literary situations in which authorial identity is typically considered to have significant value in relation to the text–autobiography, for example, or plagiarism? In a post-authorial world, are these designations still relevant?

Second, how does the presence of multiple authors (or rather, since arguably no authors are “present,” per se, the attribution of a work to more than one named author) affect our understanding of a text? For example, our main text for this class is written by both Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle–to whom do we attribute a specific part of the text at any given point in our reading?