Week 6: Ideology and the Unconscious

Screen capture from The Pervert's Guide to Ideology featuring Zizek and a cup of Starbucks Coffee sitting in front of a poster that says "No Thought"

In class

  • Discussion of Psychoanalytic Theories and Criticism:
  • Discussion of Marxist Theory
    • Marx and Engels – material dialectic, estrangement, commodity, ideology, hegemony – Langston Hughes “Bad Man“, Trainspotting opening scene
    • Jameson – “Always historicize!”, metacommentary, semantic horizons (explication, ideologeme, ideology of form) – Brazil opening scene
    • Žižek – “opening scene” “Starbucks scene”
  • Discussion of Annotated Bibliography and research methods

Assignments

  • Complete your Annotated Bibliography
  • Readings:
    • “Cultural Studies and New Historicism” (26-28)
    • Stuart Hall (1895-1910)
    • Roland Barthes (1457-1465)
    • Stephen Greenblatt (2250-2254)
    • Jean Baudrillard “from Simulacra and Simulation
  • Watch The Matrix (1999)
  • Discuss The Matrix in the context of the assigned theoretical approaches. Due before class on Thursday, September 30.
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By Leonardo Flores

Professor Leonardo Flores is Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He taught at the English Department at University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus from 1994 to 2019. He is President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature and its preservation via criticism, documentation, and digital archives. He is the creator of a scholarly blogging project titled I ♥ E-Poetry, co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and has a Spanish language e-lit column in 80 Grados. He is currently co-editing the first Anthology of Latin American Electronic Literature. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.