SDSU ENGLISH 600
Presentation Videos:
"It's a state in which the text works on us, not we on it. In the state, scholarship, criticism, and theory are suspended, though, paradoxically, everything we know and areas unreflexively brought to bear; and the hesitations, pleasures, and perplexities we encounter and absorb in that state are the material, as we bring them to consciousness, for all subsequent intellectual reflection. It is this state of intense engagement and self-forgetfulness that we hope our students will come to know." Helen Vendler (Richter 32)
Film 01 - "A Peer into Pedagogy" by Chris Pappas
"The famous 'crisis of the university,' that detail of a more general crisis of modern capitalism, remains the object of a deaf-mute dialogue among various specialists. It simply expresses the difficulties of this particular sector of production in its belated adjustment to the general transformation of the productive apparatus. The remnants of the old liberal bourgeois university ideology are becoming banalized as its social basis is disappearing. During the era of free-trade capitalism, when the liberal state left the university a certain marginal freedom, the latter could imagine itself as an independent power. But even then it was intimately bound to the needs of that type of society, providing the privileged minority with an adequate general education before they took up their positions within the ruling class." Mustapha Khayati (http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/poverty.htm)
Film 02 - French Situationist Text: The Poverty of Student Life - Aaron Rosenberg
"To put it simply, we must begin where we are, at the end, and start asking how we got here. In terms of a curriculum to sustain the historical dimension of the discipline of English, this means that most introductory courses should not be literary surveys that start at the 'beginning' but rather courses in the culture of the modern period that accommodate the rise of the new media and situate traditional literary works among the texts of these upstart media" Robert Scholes (Richter 115)
Film 03 - The Scholars of SDSU - presentation by Gayana Parsegova
"Even before literary criticism became a discipline, the university system had itself begun to nurture strongly anti-academic, life-affirming theorists-- most notably Friedrich Nietzsche. In a series of essays written while he was a Professor of Greek philology at Basle in the 1870s, Nietzsche mounted a devastating and highly influential attack on the German university system, his primary target {was} the violence committed against culture by research-based disciplinarity. For him, the academic humanities were entombing vital culture" Simon During (Richter 98)