Additional Assignment Sequences

ADDITIONAL SEQUENCE FOUR

The Uses of Reading (II)

Judith Butler

Michel Foucault

Joshua Foer

Kwame Anthony Appiah

David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky

ALTERNATIVE:

Richard E. Miller

This sequence provides an alternative set of readings and assignments to the previous sequence. It again focuses attention on authors as readers, on the uses of sources, and on the art of reading as a writer.

ASSIGNMENT 1

Sources

JUDITH BUTLER, MICHEL FOUCAULT

At a key point in her essay “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” Judith Butler refers to the work of Michel Foucault:

The question of who and what is considered real and true is apparently a question of knowledge. But it is also, as Michel Foucault makes plain, a question of power. Having or bearing “truth” and “reality” is an enormously powerful prerogative within the social world, one way that power dissimulates as ontology. According to Foucault, one of the first tasks of a radical critique is to discern the relation “between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge.” (p. 121 of the print book)

And she goes on for some length to work with passages from Foucault, although not from his book Discipline and Punish.

Take some time to reread Butler’s essay, paying particular attention to her use of Foucault. Where and why is Foucault helpful to her? In what ways is she providing a new argument or a counterargument? And take time to reread “Panopticism.” What passages might be useful in extending or challenging Butler’s argument in “Beside Oneself”? Using these two sources, write an essay in which you talk about Butler and Foucault and their engagement with what might be called “radical critique,” an effort (in the terms offered above) to “discern the relation ‘between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge.’”

Question

ASSIGNMENT 2

Reading and Memory

JOSHUA FOER

Joshua Foer not only posits some claims about memory; he also raises some questions about reading as he connects reading itself with the concept of remembering. For example, Foer writes, “If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated.” (p. 166 of the print book) Here, and many other places in this excerpt, Foer explores how we read, and even asks questions about why we read.

Choose, and prepare to write about, a few passages where reading seems to be a way of questioning the role and future of memory. Then, return to the introduction to Ways of Reading (p. 1 of the print book) and gather some of the most significant claims we seem to make about reading.

Question

ASSIGNMENT 3

Ways of Reading

DAVID BARTHOLOMAE AND ANTHONY PETROSKY

Reread the introduction to Ways of Reading. Given the work that you have done in this sequence, you are prepared to read it not as a simple statement of “how things are” but as a position taken in a tradition of concern over the role of reading in the education of Americans. Write an essay in which you consider the introduction in relation to Butler, Foucault, and Appiah, and the ways they articulate the proper uses of reading.

Question

ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENT

A Story of Reading

RICHARD E. MILLER

Consider the following passage from Richard E. Miller’s “The Dark Night of the Soul”:

What makes Into the Wild remarkable is Krakauer’s ability to get some purchase on McCandless’s actual reading practice, which, in turn, enables him to get inside McCandless’s head and speculate with considerable authority about what ultimately led the young man to abandon the comforts of home and purposefully seek out mortal danger. Krakauer is able to do this, in part, because he has access to the books that McCandless read, with all their underlinings and marginalia, as well as to his journals and the postcards and letters McCandless sent to friends along his journey. Working with these materials and his interviews with McCandless’s family and friends, Krakauer develops a sense of McCandless’s inner life and eventually comes to some understanding of why the young man was so susceptible to being seduced by the writings of London, Thoreau, Muir, and Tolstoy. Who McCandless is and what becomes of him are, it turns out, intimately connected to the young man’s approach to reading — both what he chose to read and how he chose to read it. (p. 429 of the print book)

When Miller is writing about Krakauer’s Into the Wild, he seems to suggest that what we read, and how we read, can say something about who we are and about what we might become. This is a very bold claim.

Question