Sunday, September 6, 2009

Gwatter06 9/4

We’ve gotten the course off and running and it’s already looking like we will be unraveling some compelling stuff. I was glad to see that my post was selected to share in class, which gives me confidence that I’m on track and haven’t gotten lost too early on. I like to concentrate on the new things that we learn and that I am unfamiliar with to help cope with the understanding and use of the concepts. Going over concepts like tmesis and tropes was completely new to me but I feel like a have a pretty good grasp on what Barthes was trying to incorporate as far as literature is concerned. We went over that tmesis is inserting something violently and changing the course of history of something else. This relates to Macherey’s concept of a “rupture” within the text. Both of these terms refers to the “absent” in text, relating to the concept that text is created from what is not there but what has already existed; a concept in which we learned is intertexuality. Intertextuality is the concept that text rely on other text to entail its meaning. The most interesting part of learning about all of these different ideas is how they all correlate with each other and how one plays off the other. I have picked up on that early and understand its importance, noticing and acknowledging links between different concepts is very exigent.
This week we also engaged in an interesting conversation in which helped exemplify the concept that intent cannot be imbedded within text. To not believe this as valid is committing intentional fallacy in which explains that the author cannot determine intent because they cannot control you or determine when you experience tmesis. We did this as a class by taking only 6 phrases and creating our own meaning behind what we thought the phrases together meant. It was not surprising, but very interesting, to see how many answers came back completely different and so far from relation. I thought this was a very good example to use and clarified any questions I had on the topic. I can only hope to stay on mark as far as readings go as they continue to get more challenging.

1 comment:

CMC300 said...

Again, you do a good job in explaining not only what they theorists mean but you also do a good job in connecting them together to gain a further understanding of the readings and this past week of classes. Definitely hold onto connecting everything in class to one another as it will make exams a lot easier!

Smiley Face :)