Additional Assignment Sequences

ADDITIONAL SEQUENCE TWO

On Difficulty

Michel Foucault

Judith Butler

Kwame Anthony Appiah

David Foster Wallace

ALTERNATIVES:

Alison Bechdel

Jonathan Lethem

John Edgar Wideman

The assignments in this sequence invite you to consider the nature of difficult texts and how the problems they pose might be said to belong simultaneously to language, to readers, and to writers. The sequence presents four difficult essays (and three alternatives, should you wish to alter the sequence). The assumption the sequence makes is that they are difficult for all readers, not just for students, and that the difficulty is necessary, strategic, not a mistake or evidence of a writer’s failure.

ASSIGNMENT 1

Foucault’s Fabrication

MICHEL FOUCAULT

About three-quarters of the way into “Panopticism,” Foucault says,

Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. (p. 200 of the print book)

This prose is eloquent and insists on its importance to our moment and our society; it is also very hard to read or to paraphrase. Who is doing what to whom? How do we think about the individual being carefully fabricated in the social order?

Take this selection as a problem to solve. What is it about? What are its key arguments, its examples and conclusions? Write an essay that summarizes “Panopticism.” Imagine that you are writing for readers who have read the chapter (although they won’t have the pages in front of them) and who are at sea as to its argument. You will need to take time to present and discuss examples from the text. Your job is to help your readers figure out what it says. You get the chance to take the lead and be the teacher. In addition, you should feel free to acknowledge that you don’t understand certain sections even as you write about them.

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ASSIGNMENT 2

Concept and Example

JUDITH BUTLER

Judith Butler’s “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy” is a philosophical essay, and one of the difficulties it presents to a reader is its emphasis on conceptual language. The sentences most often refer to concepts or ideas rather than to people, places, or events in the concrete, tangible, observable world. It refers to the human or to the body, but without telling the stories of particular humans or particular bodies. In fact, as a reader, you can feel her pull back at the very moments when she begins to speak in the first person, to personalize the essay. Without something concrete, without some situation or context in which the conceptual can take shape, these conceptual terms can lose their force or meaning. (If there is a story in this essay, it is not the story of the loss of a particular friend or love; it is the “story” of a struggle to understand and to articulate a response to the essay’s opening question: what makes for a livable world?)

Reread this essay, noting particular moments (sentences, passages, and paragraphs) that make things hard for you, that are difficult for you as a reader. Choose four that seem to you to be the most representative. How are they hard? How would you characterize the difficulties they present? Where and how do you see Butler trying to help her readers? Where and how does she leave you on your own?

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ASSIGNMENT 3

A Reader-Friendly Text

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

Compared to Butler’s “Beside Onself,” Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Racial Identities” is a reader-friendly text. But it is also a learned text. It contains casual references to writers and scholars whom you may not recognize: W. E. B. Du Bois, Ian Hacking, Matthew Arnold, Charles Taylor, Thomas Sowell — to list just a few. The essay works with complicated ideas and poses an argument that not only runs against common assumptions, but also raises difficult political questions about race and identity.

As you reread, take note of the places in the text where the writer addresses you or, if not through direct address, where the writer seems to have you in mind. And take note of those places where you find yourself to be most challenged, where the text becomes difficult to read.

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ASSIGNMENT 4

The Figure of the Writer as an Intellectual

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

A character emerges in David Foster Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage,” a figure representing one version of a well-schooled, learned, and articulate adult, an intellectual, someone who reads widely, who thinks closely and freshly and methodically about big questions, someone with ideas and with style, someone who is defined in relation to sources — to books and to other writers, someone whose writing requires footnotes and long digressions.

As you reread, think about the speaker as a character, as an invention of David Foster Wallace, the writer (who could, at least hypothetically, have written about dictionaries in a different voice and in a different form). And mark moments when this character seems most distinctively present or alive. This character (whom we might also call Wallace) is a figure who reads in the field, who thinks about these issues, and who speaks with authority. He has a distinctive personality, way of thinking, view of the world. (Students are often invited, for example, to think of the “Thoreau” in Walden in just these terms, to think of him as a great American character.) Why would Wallace, the writer, present himself (or enter the conversation) in just these ways? What was at stake for him?

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ASSIGNMENT 5

A Theory of Difficulty

MICHEL FOUCAULT, JUDITH BUTLER, KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH, DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Now that you have worked with these four texts, you are in a good position to review what you have written about each of them in order to say something more general about difficulty — difficulty in writing, difficulty in reading.

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ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENT

The Graphic Challenge

ALISON BECHDEL

Some readers might find Bechdel’s work difficult to read. Many of us (except for those who might be avid comic book readers) might not be accustomed to reading graphic essays or graphic novels. Because Bechdel’s work requires us to perhaps enact a new way of reading a text or thinking about a text, some difficulty or discomfort might arise as we are reading it. As you read Bechdel, think carefully about what the form of her graphic work asks of you.What challenges present themselves as you read Bechdel’s work? What difficulties does the graphic excerpt present? And how, as readers, might we adapt, adjust, and learn to be better readers of graphic work? Write an essay that describes the difficulties you faced while reading Bechdel. You’ll want to consider the following questions: what about your reading strategies makes Bechdel’s text difficult for you to read? How might Bechdel’s work teach you how to read it? What new strategies might you invent to rise to the graphic challenge?

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ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENT

Creating Hyperlinks

JONATHAN LETHEM

One of the pleasures of Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” is its broad range of reference. This is also one of the essay’s strategies — to range quickly and widely among examples of influence in literature, music, the visual arts, and popular culture. Lethem refers, for example, to the Disney Studios, the Oulipo group, Bob Dylan, Vladimir Nabokov, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, South Park, Muddy Waters, Andy Warhol, and Led Zeppelin — to name just a few. As you read through Lethem’s essay the first time, keep a list of his range of materials. Mark those materials you don’t know much about. Then, once you’ve read Lethem’s essay, go in search of the history and meanings of each of the items on your list. Read widely online or in the library itself as much as you can about these references — taking notes on what you might tell readers if you were asked to write a hyperlink for each of these references. This may take you some time; you might even gather with a small group in your class to help one another find the information you need.

Once you’ve gathered your list and recorded your notes, reread Lethem’s essay again, noting how your reading of the essay has changed or is enriched by the new understandings you gleaned from your research.

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ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENT

A Story of Reading

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

At several points in “Our Time,” Wideman interrupts the narrative to discuss his position as a writer telling Robby’s story. He describes the problems he faces in writing this piece (or in reading the text of his brother’s life). You could read this selection, in other words, as an essay about reading and writing. It is Wideman’s account of his work.

As a narrative, “Our Time” is made up of sections, fragments, different voices. It is left to the reader, in a sense, to put the pieces together and complete the story. There is work for a reader to do, in other words, and one way to account for that work is to call it “practice” or “training.” Wideman wants to force a reader’s attention by offering a text that makes unusual demands, a text that teaches a reader to read differently. If you think of your experience with the text, of how you negotiated its terrain, what is the story of reading you might tell? In what way do your difficulties parallel Wideman’s — at least those he tells us about when he stops to talk about the problems he faces as a writer?

Write an essay in which you tell the story of what it was like to read “Our Time” and compare your experience working with this text with Wideman’s account of his own.

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