9.13.2008

Speaking of Seeing Seeing

For those who care or are perverts of some sort, I am recording and podcasting my Rhetoric 140 course at UC Berkeley this semester, entitled, "Seeing Seeing, or How Images Go."

You'll find them here: http://danielcoffeen.podomatic.com/

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess I'm a pervert... I ate up your lectures from spring 2008's Rhetoric 10 and am still pissed off that the last lecture wasn't published. Thanks for this!

Anonymous said...

Thanks, godfather. The podcast is a delightful pleasure.

Anonymous said...

thank you so much for doing this-- i really wanted to take your class but couldn't put it in my schedule. thought i would graduate without a chance to learn more through you.

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

Anonymous said...

Talk about generosity--many, many thanks.

Daniel Schealler said...

Damnnit Coffeen! What the hell just happened yesterday?

A lecturer (Mark) was performing a reading of a text, contrasting that text against his lecture. The lecture was about how texts of a given form should be written.

The text we read was a letter to the editor, taken from a magazine. Mark said that he felt bad to criticize letters to the editor because the text the author actually wrote may have been shortened by the editor - as such, the author's 'real' text may have been better, and Mark may have been maligning that author for no good reason.

There was this beautiful Zarathustrian moment: Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that THE AUTHOR IS DEAD? Who is this madman to say this insane thing? Who are these madmen surrounding me, to smile and nod in agreement with this insanity?

The text in front of us is the text in front of us! Where is this other text? If we had this other text, then we could perform a reading of it: But we don't have it! There is no second text floating beneath the surface of this text! The text we have is it's own thing, not some pale imitation of some other text.

Is liberation always this lonely?

Downloading 140 now. Looking forward to it.

Daniel Coffeen said...

Well, a text is complicated. What, after all, determines its limits? In some cases, the fact that an editor may have changed some text IS part of the text; other times, it's irrelevant—it depends what one is trying to do w/ the text. Sometimes, then, a text does have ghosts, traces, hauntings that lurk behind, below, above it.

Hope 140 hits the spot.

Daniel Schealler said...

Ha! Point taken.

Methinks I got a little overexcited, there. Sitting in that lecture room was the first time I really saw something in a different way, right down to my bones. It was yummy. ^_^

Interesting to think of a text being haunted by the ghost of the author... Time to read Barthes again, methinks.

Always a pleasure Coffeen - particularly since I've been reading your blog at work.

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