To counteract the cold--an oppressive "Oven"!

To quote Tony Kushner's Ethel Rosenberg, history is about to crack wide open--and with it (say the stage directions), goes the ceiling, too!


We'll spend the first half of tomorrow's class thinking about what these cracking angels of history in America have to tell us about the world at the end of the cold war. The second half we'll hand over to Evgenii Kharitonov and his gray "gay fantasia" set a little earlier in the socialist East.





I encourage the class to approach his manifesto, "The Leaflet," as a conversation with the West about "queer time" and the place of the homosexual in world history (which always pitches itself as straight, no matter which ideology--communism or capitalism--is catching). Whereas "The Leaflet" is self-consciously political and aesthetic-philosophical in its subject, "The Oven" is inversely and intensely lyric.  Consider it immanently, on its own terms, while also in sync with the asynchronous protagonists of "Pkhentz" and Queer, and similarly suffocated/liberated like Hedwig and the Angry Inch--whose namesake re-heats our cold war class in an East German oven before the Berlin Wall comes down and the semester ends... 

Getting Vertiginous (again) with Angels in America

In Millenium Approaches, the first half of his two-part dramatic epic Angels in America (which can and does stand alone as a work), Tony Kushner poses what Russian thinkers have called "the accursed questions"--those big philosophical topics that include the role of the nation, man's place in society, the social function of art,  and so on. We'll be wrestling with these issues (like Jacob/Yakov and the Angel), as well as the ones you post below for next Tuesday's class. You may find it fruitful to consider the play in conversation with Unbearable Lightness, since both works struggle to make sense of the movement of history, and the possibility of acting ethically in moments of personal and epistemic crisis. Enjoy--this is a goodie! 

Shitty metaphysics, at last!

Finally we've traveled far enough into the bowels of this unbearably beautiful book (AKA the birthplace of Tereza's soul) to talk shit in tomorrow's class! Taking a cue from Tomas's anal fixation and the stomach-turning latrine regime of Stalin's son, please contemplate the kitschy connections between the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the text in your comments below.

Of course, all roads lead back to the bathroom in ULB anyway, so you should feel truly free to post on any topic that interests you--just be prepared for the nauseating, vertigo-inducing acts of interpretation we'll be undertaking as a class. Those with delicate sensibilities may want to pack a dramamine tab and an airplane paper bag along with your notebook and the novel before heading to Thursday's class!

Inevitably--but hopefully bearably--we're mutating our motifs!

What a vertiginous discussion we had today! To repurpose a Stalinist metaphor to radically un-Stalinist ends, I'm dizzy with its success at destabilizing all meaning, as frustrating and unbearably light as that situation may be.
In sync with this swiftly tilting planet the novel has us inhabit, we'll shake up the function of motif groups in our next class. (The groups, however, will remain the same.) Please channel Sabina by betraying the original assignment, and reverting to old forms of marginalia or improvising new ones for the next ULB-based meetings.
For this purpose, I'd like you to use the blog to post questions for your group to consider on Tuesday, tethered however you like to your side of a given existential code. At the same time, try to channel your observations or questions into the issues of publicity and privacy, politics and personal life, intimacy and history. We'll start with Havel, and take Tae's presentation as a springboard for small group and collective class discussion about these topics.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Done with Midterms

Congratulations on completing the first major piece of writing for this class! And welcome to the wonderful world of Milan Kundera's book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This work intricately interweaves the lives of one protagonist with one another, their lives with that of the nation and its history, and these personal and collective histories with different ideas of history or historiographies. Thus we should read it as a philosophical novel, since it is also a self-conscious piece of literature, constructed with leitmotifs and other literary principles (of which the fictional characters themselves are aware). I urge you to take up the question of history posed by the first chapters of the book, or start tracking the major motifs, whose significance continues to accrue as the story progresses in not so linear ways. 

Strange Collocations: Daniel and Bambara

Since we reshuffled the schedule, we'll be splitting Thursday's class time somewhat strangely between a discussion of Yuli Daniel's "Man from MINAP," intended to be paired with Dr. Strangelove; and Toni Cade Bambara's "Witchbird," intended to be read alongside Ruth Zernova's "Mute Phone Calls." Please read the first two pages of Zernova's piece for something of a comparative context, and do consider checking it out in its entirety. You'll find many interesting similarities between the way women-narrators--in this case both artists by profession--narrate their felt or phenomenological experiences of the everyday. Post your comments on any of these works below--all the better if they contain some connections to the texts by other woman authors or writing about women we've encountered on our syllabus so far.

Strange Loves: Or, How Mac Students Stopped Worrying about their Midterms and Learned to Love this Bomb Movie

Sex, love and politics get even stranger over the short break. Drop your questions here on Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, George Kennan's "Long Telegram," and Yuly Daniel's "The Man from MINAP."