Writing the Body

Paul Connerton “Bodily Practices” from How Societies Remember pp. 72 -104.

Connerton Notes

Luce Irigaray “He I Sought But Did Not Find” from I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History pp. 97 – 102.

Assertiveness for Women -- This program will give practical instruction on how women can learn to assert themselves in a positive and effective manner. Facilitated by Dr. Prentiss Price of Counseling Center
12:00 PM-1:30 PM on April 18, 2006 Russell Union Room 2041

Final Reading Response: Beginning with your journal observations about habitus and bodily hexis (linked to Connerton's explanation of habitual memory/ incorporated memory), analyze what you have observed. Bring, as Connerton asks us, Incorporating practices back into the realm of interpretation --- what can you say about techniques of the body, properties of the body, ceremonies of the body? What do your observations tell you about the relation between incorporated memory and social class/power/ hierarchy?

Journals:

Connerton is concerned with the ways in which the incorporated memory is presevered in the body but written out of the scene of interpretation (link Bourdieu's incorporated history of the body to Connerton's discussion of incorporated memory). Both Connerton and Bourdieu are especially concerned with how this relates to social class and the exercise of power. Sum up Connerton's explanation of incorporating practices and the difference between incorporating and insciribing practices
Holding together the difference between incorporated and inscribing practice, explain what Connerton means by:
- Techniques of Bodies
- Properties of Bodies
- Ceremonies of Bodies
Bracher describes the relationship between body and language in his analysis of master signifiers and identity -- connect this to social/cultural memory and habits/practices of the body

wk 1 1.9	Course overview and Introductions Professor Rouzie's Writing on the Body Resource Page (excellent resource - use this alot!) http://www-as.phy.ohiou.edu/~rouzie/569A/body/wrindex.htm Frame work of the semester -- in-class review of Adina Roiskies Narrative and Memory Conference Talk: Emotion, Memory, Language, Neuro-Chemistry, Body First Journal entry: What is your experience of reading Adina Roiskies piece? What did you understand from the reading? What was your emotional response to the reading? Where do you locate your emotional response in your body? What is your intellectual response to your emotioinal response? After class discussion, do you understand the reading differently? Do you feel differently about the reading? Do you perceive a mind/body, intellectual/emotional continuum here? Describe this. What is the most important thing that transpired in class tonight? Notes for Roiskies
wk 2 1.16	Monday, Jan. 16, 7:00 p.m.: Ghosts of the Mississippi, RU Theatre Tuesday, Jan. 17, Mrylie Evers-Williams: Tomorrow's Leaders: Their Voices, Our Journey -- PAC 1. The Creative Writing Club is holding its first meeting of the semester Wednesday, January 25th at 5:00 in Newton 1110. All are welcome. 2. The Roy F. Powell Award for Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction Writing Competition is requesting submissions. Deadline is February 28, 2006. $100 Prize in each category, publication in Miscellany, award certificate during Honors' Day. Open to all University students.
wk 3 1.23	Anne Fausto-Sterling “Dueling Dualisms” from Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality pp. 1 – 29. Anne Fausto-Sterling “The Sex Which Prevaileth” from Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality pp. 30 – 44. Sterling class notes In-class journal: 1) Name social institutions that require naming identity categories (male/female, race, etc.) 2) Explore several cultural narratives that work on our bodies and explain how these narratives shape the way we see the world 1st Response Paper Topic: How does language function as a bridge between our individual bodies and our social bodies and between our individual/social bodies and the environment? How does language literally write our bodies and shape what and how we see in the world? 1 1/2 - 2 pages, typed, double-spaced. Use three quotes from chapters 1 & 2 that help you to make your points
wk 4 1.30	Anne Fausto-Sterling “Of Gender and Genitals: The Use and Abuse of the Modern Intersexual” from Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality pp. 45 - 77. Renata Salecl “Cut in the Body: From clitoridectomy to Body Art” from Thinking Through the Skin Eds. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey pp. 20 - 35. New Form of Gender Equity http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/01/24/43d5e42763c09 Class Notes for Cuts in the Body In-class journal topics: Synthesize the opening remarks (re: Teresa Brennan's hypothesis of in-utero communication between mother's blood and implanted blastocyst, the conceptualization of DNA as an alphabet and a biologiocal language communicating between maternal environment and blastocyst to organize development of cells and formation of body) Group journal exercise (from groups formed in class mini-workshop): For Renata Salecl's "Cut in the Body: From Clitoridectomy to Body Art," review the quotes I've excerpted from this piece and give examples to explain/support those quotes (just like we did in class for the quote that framed our discussion) First Reading Response Due: How does language function as a bridge between our individual bodies and our social bodies and between our individual/social bodies and the environment? How does language literally write our bodies and shape what and how we see in the world?
wk 5 2.3	Donna J. Haraway “In the Beginning Was the Word: The Genesis of Biological Theory” from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature pp. 71 – 80. Judith Butler “Bodies That Matter” from Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex' pp. 27 – 55. Films: The Fairer Sex, Nell In The Fairer Sex, pay close attention to the ways in which the words "male" and "female" construct a narrative that shapes the social body. Give specific examples of of this. In Nell, watch carefully for the discussion of language, sex, gender. Use what we have so far discussed in class to analyze this film. Assign Reading Response 2: You may do a response to any of the works we have so far read or to one of the films that we have watched. If you do a text, I want you to summarize the piece. If you do a film, I want you to analyze the film based on what we have so far read/talked about re: individual and social bodies, language, writing. Journal due
wk 6 2.13	Elizabeth Grosz “The Body as Inscriptive Surface” from Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism pp. 138 – 159. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey “Introduction: Dermographies” from Thinking Through the Skin Eds. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey pp. 1 – 18. Notes for Weeks 5 & 6 Second Reading Response Due
wk 7 2.20	Group Observation Exercise: Reading social bodies -- This will count as your 3rd Reading Response -- turn in 1 paper that the group writes collaboratively
wk 8 2.27	Jane Kilby “Carved in Skin: Bearing Witness to Self-Harm” from Thinking Through the Skin Eds. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey pp. 124 - 142. Janice McLane “The Voice on the Skin: Self-Mutilation and Merleau-Ponty's Theory of Language” from Hypatia: Special Issue on Women and Violence pp. 107 – 118. cutting notes Journal Entries: After breathing exercise, free-write about: what were you conscious of in your body? Could you tell if your shoulders were aligned with your hips? Did your weight shift (from ball of foot to heel, for example?) Were you able to find your center of gravity? What was that like? What was your physiological experience? During the class exercise reading Merleau-Ponty's words about being as sonorous, voice as vibration, what did you hear/feel as you read? How was this different than listening to others read? What do you understand this passage to mean? Journal assignment for week: Think about Kilby's call to bear witness to the voice on this skin. Kilby argues that the voice speaking on the skin of the self-injury both defies and demands witnessing. What does this mean? What does it mean, not merely for the author of the wound, but for the witness, the reader? How do we read so as to not mis-read (either through what Kilby calls appropriation by the empathetic embrace or mis-reading as pathologizing)?
wk 9 3.6	Steven Conner “Mortification” from Thinking Through the Skin Eds. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey pp. 36 - 51 Third Reading Response Due (Group Reflection Paper)
wk 10 3.20	Journal Due Experimental Writing Project Proposal
wk 11 3.27	Page duBois “Torture and Writing” from Torture and Truth pp. 69 – 74. Primo Levi “Communicating” from The Drowned and the Saved pp. 88 – 104. Primo Levi “Useless Violence” from The Drowned and the Saved pp. 105 - 126. Journal exercises: Transition from "Torture and Writing" to The Drowned and the Saved chapters: what are the important points from "Torture and Writing," and how do you see relationships between this and Levi's work? What are the issues to discuss from "Communicating" and "Useless Violence"? Sum up and categorize the major points from the Levi chapters we read. These will from the basis for your 4th response paper Response Paper #4: Engage with Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved
wk 12 4.3	Elspeth Probyn “Eating Skin” from Thinking Through the Skin Eds. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey pp. 86 - 103. Shirley Tate “'That is my Star of David: Skin, Abjection, Hybridity” from Thinking Through the Skin Eds. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey pp. 209 - 221. Fourth Reading Response Due by Friday 5:00 p.m. From Primo Levi -- you may focus in detail on one specific aspect of the Levi chapters, or you may do a more broad synthesis of important themes/issues. What I am interested in is your ability to hear Levi, to think about what "Communicating" and "Useless Violence" have to say about our course's issues of writing and body) Journals from class: Sum up Shirley Tate's points in "That is my Star of David" about Double Consciousness Talk as 1) repositioning agency & 2) exposing the discourses and practices of white supremacy From Elspyth Probin's "Eating Skin," explain: the passage beginning on the last line of p. 88: "In thinking about the uses of skin, I want to work skin on a number of levels . . . colonialism as the process of laying a foreign skin upon the land, making its indigenous inhabitants wear their own skins uneasily, become ashamed of them, making them wear them in imitation fo the white man" (88 -89) in the middle of that first par. on p. 89, the passage: ". . . can thinking through the skin be used to figure other forms of relationships, of being within the historical present of countries . . . Eating skin as a way of living well with the present: . . . .to find a way of using skin as a way of engaging in the present history of my adopted country . . . reflecting on the history of my own skin, and how I live here with the ghostly skin of my forebears . . . viscereally in the processes of reconciliation, in the hopes of coexistence" (89) from p. 92, "It is not until I have looked at difference with an intent to eat well that I can truly taste the abyss between good intentions and something else" (92)
wk 13 4.10	John B. Thompson on Pierre Bourdieu “Editor's Introduction” from Language and Symbolic Power Ed. & Introduced by John B. Thompson pp. 1 – 31. Mark Bracher “Desire in Discourse” from Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism pp. 19 – 52. Notes for Bourdieu and Bracher Journal Assignment: Pay close attention, these next few weeks, to the habitus and the bodily hexis and the relations of power being played out in linguistic exchanges and social space. Pay special attention to your bodily dispositions (as Bourdieu defines these, they are unconscious and predispose us to act and react in certain ways). Try to become conscious of who has what kinds of access to what kinds of language and which fields. Describe your own linguistic competencies, how you see language situations as struggles for the recognition of competency/power. Where/how are you positioned in different fields? How do you read the body's incorporated history (which is also always linked to the symbolic violences through which dominant languages are established) in the exchanges you are analyzing? Put into words how your body/state of being predisposes you to respond to other bodies/states of being. What do your predispositions tell you about your incorporated history? About what the bodies you respond to represent?
wk14 4.17	Paul Connerton “Bodily Practices” from How Societies Remember pp. 72 -104. Connerton Notes Luce Irigaray “He I Sought But Did Not Find” from I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History pp. 97 – 102. Assertiveness for Women -- This program will give practical instruction on how women can learn to assert themselves in a positive and effective manner. Facilitated by Dr. Prentiss Price of Counseling Center 12:00 PM-1:30 PM on April 18, 2006 Russell Union Room 2041 Final Reading Response: Beginning with your journal observations about habitus and bodily hexis (linked to Connerton's explanation of habitual memory/ incorporated memory), analyze what you have observed. Bring, as Connerton asks us, Incorporating practices back into the realm of interpretation --- what can you say about techniques of the body, properties of the body, ceremonies of the body? What do your observations tell you about the relation between incorporated memory and social class/power/ hierarchy? Journals: Connerton is concerned with the ways in which the incorporated memory is presevered in the body but written out of the scene of interpretation (link Bourdieu's incorporated history of the body to Connerton's discussion of incorporated memory). Both Connerton and Bourdieu are especially concerned with how this relates to social class and the exercise of power. Sum up Connerton's explanation of incorporating practices and the difference between incorporating and insciribing practices Holding together the difference between incorporated and inscribing practice, explain what Connerton means by: Techniques of Bodies Properties of Bodies Ceremonies of Bodies Bracher describes the relationship between body and language in his analysis of master signifiers and identity -- connect this to social/cultural memory and habits/practices of the body
wk 15 4.24	Claudie Castaneda “Robotic Skin: The Future of Touch?” from Thinking Through the Skin Eds. Sara Ahmed & Jackie Stacey pp. 223 - 236. Journal Due Fifth Reading Response Due
Final Exam	May 1, 6:30 - 9:15 -- Melissa Chapman's house 206 Marvin Ave. / 770-843-0762 / melissalynn494@gmail.com Directions: Marvin Avenue is directly off of Fair Road. Coming from Hanner, it will be the turn just before Arby's/ Pittmore Drive. Call Melissa for further directions. All remaining work due tonight!