Sean Desilets - Tulane University
English 101-22 WRITING
Misinterred: Death and Ritual in the West
(MW 5:00-6:50, Gibson 414)
Sean Desilets Office: 214 Norman Meyer
sdesilet@tulane.edu Office Hours: TTh 3-4:30 and by
appointment
Required Texts (available at bookstore)
• Anson, Schwegler, and Muth, The Longman Pocket Writer’s Companion
• Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
The goal of this course is to help make you a more comfortable and effective writer. Writing is like most skills in that the only way to get better at it is to do it a lot. This sucks, I know. Who wants to spend lots of time and energy doing something (s)he doesn’t think (s)he’s any good at? There are, however, upsides. Getting better at writing can be extremely useful. Writing can get you lots of things you want. It will get you a good grade for this course, which is fine, but even more importantly it will improve your academic performance in any course (and there are many) in which writing is part of what you have to do. Moreover, writing has been an effective tool for seduction since it was invented. So you really can’t go wrong.
To be a little more specific, this course aims to improve your performance as an academic writer. All around us on campus, people are engaged in the conversations that determine what counts as knowledge in this culture. This class will familiarize you with the conventions or rules that govern those conversations so that you can start participating in them. We will attend especially to argument in academic discourse. You will learn how to develop strong positions on important issues and to deploy evidence systematically, and sometimes aggressively, to support them.
Producing those strong and well-supported arguments involves a set of interrelated intellectual activities. In this class, you will encounter a series of challenging texts (many of them written by your colleagues), talk about those texts in class, and, centrally, write your own essays responding to what you’ve read and discussed. When I wrote “write” in that last sentence, I referred not simply to the act of inscribing words in some permanent medium but rather to a whole set of related activities. It’s kind of like saying you “played” a baseball game, which really means that you caught, hit and threw a ball, ran the bases, and also came up with strategies to integrate those skills effectively. “Writing” an essay involves such practices as reading and thinking about a topic, generating ideas, roughing out a draft, reading that draft several times with a critical eye, banging your head in frustration against the wall, receiving and integrating feedback from readers, and then writing a final draft. You may not use every one of these techniques. That depends on how you feel you work best. I will, however, ask you to produce an early draft of each essay and to revise that draft as necessary to produce a final essay.
The books and films we will analyze in this class concern four approaches to the relationship between death and repetition. That may seem like a somewhat strange combination of ideas, since death is one of the few experiences that one can never repeat—or so most people believe. Despite (or because of) its apparent finality, though, death tends to force itself on our attention. As individuals and as a culture, we make innumerable attempts to understand death, to integrate it somehow into the texture of our lives. We worry about dying endlessly. We consume all kinds of texts in which people die in all kinds of ways. When loved ones die, we enact complex rituals to mark the ends of their lives and to help us continue with our own, and many of us perform annual rituals to mark the deaths of friends or family members. For such an incredibly final thing, death returns to us with remarkable persistence. Sigmund Freud actually thought he might know why death keeps demanding our attention, and his attempt to conceptualize the connection between death and repetition will lay the groundwork for the class. Freud’s analytical understanding of death will give way to three other kinds of approaches: artistic, ethical, and satirical. Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus, which retells an old story about an artist who travels to the land of the dead, will provide an artistic perspective on death and repetition. We’ll consider a number of other versions of the Orpheus story alongside Cocteau’s film in an effort to understand how Cocteau sticks to the old story and how he revises it. Our next text, Sophocles’s classical tragedy Antigone, is one of the most famous and unforgiving reflections on the ethics of funeral rites. It’s about a woman whose relentless commitment to giving her brother a proper burial puts her own life at risk. Finally, we will consider George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, a satirical movie about people whose relentless commitment to shopping leads them to arise from the grave to go to the mall.
You will do three kinds of formal, graded writing in this course:
1. Four major essays, five pages in length, each worth 20% of your final grade (for a total of 80%)
2. Six short (1-2 page) response essays, each worth 2% (12%)
3. Four peer feedback documents (1-2 pages), each worth 2% (8%)
Please keep all of your writing for this class in a sturdy binder or folder, which will be your portfolio. You should bring your portfolio to every class (along with whatever texts we’re discussing that day) and keep it stocked with a supply of 8½ x 11 inch paper for in-class writing.
I’ll expect you to submit all work in its entirety on the day it is due. Late work will suffer significant penalties. If some unlikely event renders you unable to submit an assignment on time, please speak to me ahead of time about an alternate due date. Very rare are the excuses I will accept if you fail to submit an assignment without having informed me in advance that you’ll need more time. Having said that, I would much rather you hand in a good essay a week late than a terrible one on time. I do have to read these things, after all. So don’t hesitate to ask for more time if for some legitimate reason you need it. But don’t do so on the day the work is due. You won’t like my response.
Students are allowed two unexcused absences over the course of the semester. Every subsequent unexcused absence will hurt the student’s final grade.
Students also have the right to a limited number of excused absences due to a religious holiday, illness, a death in the family, or other equally serious and unavoidable life circumstances. These absences will be excused if a student can provide a doctor's note or prescription or other similar written evidence. A missed class, excused or not, does not exempt a student from the assigned work for that day.
Because writing classes are conducted workshop-style and focus on revision, the student who misses too many class meetings or falls too far behind in making up work, even with a legitimate excuse, is simply not earning credit for the same course as the rest of the class. In that case, I may ask you to withdraw rather than fail the course. Moreover, if a student regularly comes late to class meetings, I may begin to count each late arrival as an unexcused absence.
Academic Honesty
Please see the honor code for Newcomb-Tulane College Code of Academic Conduct ().
|Date |WRITING: Death and Ritual in the West |
|August 29 |Introduction to the course and its participants |
| |Syllabus review |
| |In-class reading: Sharon Olds, “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” |
| |Write (in-class): Olds Response. Post to BB by Friday |
|September 3 |Labor Day, no class |
|September 5 |Read: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle |
| |Write: Beyond Response (prompt on BB) |
| |Print: Beyond Assignment |
| |Come with questions about Beyond and the course |
|September 10 |Read: Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse” (BB) |
| |Manifestations of the “death drive” |
|September 12 |Draft of essay 1 due (at least 4 pp) |
| |One-on-one workshop |
|September 17 |Whole group workshop |
|September 19 |Whole group workshop |
|September 24 |Whole group workshop |
| |Ethos, logos, and pathos |
|September 26 |Essay 1 due (5 pp) |
|October 1 |View: Cocteau, Orpheus |
| |Read: Ovid, excerpts from Metamorphoses (BB) |
| |Hear: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “The Lyre of Orpheus” (BB) |
| |In-class Viewing: Excerpts from Camus, Black Orpheus |
| |Write: Orpheus response |
|October 3 |Draft of essay 2 due (4 pp +) |
| |One-on-one workshop |
|October 8 |Whole group workshop |
|October 10 |Whole group workshop |
|October 15 |Whole group workshop |
| |Techniques for integrating quotations; what is discourse? |
|October 17 |Essay 2 due (5 pp) |
|October 22 |Read: Sophocles, Antigone; excerpts from Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus |
| |Read: excerpts from David Hopkins, Antigone and Jean Cocteau, Antigone (BB) |
| |Write: Antigone response |
|October 24 |Draft of essay 3 due (4 pp +) |
| |One-on-one workshop |
|October 29 |Whole group workshop |
|October 31 |Whole group workshop |
|November 5 |Whole group workshop |
| |Revising for style and coherence |
|November 7 |Essay 3 due (5 pp) |
|November 12 |View: Romero, Dawn of the Dead |
| |View: Simon, The American Nightmare |
| |Write: Dawn of the Dead response |
|November 14 |Draft of essay 4 due (4 pp +) |
|November 19 |Whole group workshop |
|November 21 |Thanksgiving break, no class |
|November 26 |Whole group workshop |
|November 28 |Whole group workshop |
| |Style and coherence |
|November 30 |Essay 4 due (5 pp) |
|December 3 |TBA |
|December 5 |Write: Final response |
| |Conclusions |
Writing: Death and Ritual in the West
Essay 1: Death as the Limit of Understanding
Length: 5 pages (draft must be 4 complete pages)
Draft due: September 12
Final due: September 26
The syllabus notes that Freud will provide the theoretical groundwork for our semester-long consideration of the relationship between death and repetition. We’ll use Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a model in another sense, too—a model of rigorous and responsible writing. Most of us are accustomed, when writing an essay, to appearing as smart, sure, and rational as we possibly can. We try to drive along so powerfully that our conclusions seem unquestionable. Freud is not like that. His essay is full of qualifications, moments of uncertainty, and intimations of failure. At the beginning of his final chapter, for example, Freud says that “we have still to solve the problem of the relation of the instinctual processes of repetition to the dominance of the pleasure principle” (75). Given that the whole purpose of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is to solve that problem, this is a startling confession. But Freud’s goal here is not simply to “prove” that repetition compulsion demonstrates the existence of a death instinct. He honestly doesn’t know. His intention, as he puts it, is “to throw [himself] into a line of thought and to follow it wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity” (71). All academic writing should be speculative in this way. If you’re sure about what you’re saying, you probably shouldn’t bother saying it, unless, as in Freud’s case, saying it is a waypoint on the road to a more ambitious and difficult idea. In admitting to doubts or acknowledging that readers may find some of his assertions unpersuasive, Freud shows no lack of confidence or intellectual sophistication. On the contrary, his confrontation with the unknown marks the ambition and strength of his thought. He uses his writing as a mode of thinking, not simply as a way of asserting something. Furthermore, his belief that some elements of human experience are indeterminable serves a rhetorical purpose in his writing. The whole point of psychoanalysis, as you may have noticed, is that people have far less control over, and even knowledge of, their mental and emotional lives than they think they do. When Freud says that human identity is too obscure to say anything decisive, he is enacting the truth of his own ideas.
Write an essay exploring the role of uncertainty in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Choose two or three important instances of doubt or qualification, explain how and why they emerge, make some connections between or among them, and talk about how they work in the context of Freud’s argument overall. What strands of thought have led to this difficult moment? How does Freud resolve or move beyond the uncertainty? What specific language does he use to articulate his hesitation and how does that language influence your understanding of the passage? What happens after this moment? Does Freud pursue the same line of thought in a different direction? Does he return to this issue later in the book? Does he talk, as he does in the example I give above, about the role of uncertainty in intellectual inquiry? What, in short, does Freud do with these knotty moments? Along the way, you should explain your own understanding of what Freud says, but obviously you should not shy away from admitting that you don’t understand when you don’t. When you encounter something perplexing, do what Freud does—offer a speculative idea or two.
Writing: Death and Ritual in the West
Essay 2: Orpheus in Love with Death
Length: 5 pages (draft must be 4 complete pages)
Draft due: October 3
Final due: October 17
Now we move from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which proposed a struggle between death and love, to Cocteau’s Orpheus (1949), which imagines someone falling in love with death. It’s not just any “someone,” though; it’s Orpheus, a mythical founder of western art and culture. Cocteau made his film at a time of considerable anxiety about the value of that culture. World War II had just crippled Europe, and the genocidal horrors of the Nazi regime were still fresh in people’s minds. Orpheus could be read as Cocteau’s attempt to put a positive spin on the fact that the whole world suddenly seemed dangerously in love with death and destruction. Whether you accept that reading or not, though, Orpheus definitely addresses the intersection of three big ideas: death, art, and love. Its approach to that intersection raises many more questions than it answers. For example, what can we make of the fact that Orpheus transcribes his poetry from The Princess’s car radio? It might suggest that art itself comes from the land of the dead, that creativity has some intimate link to death. The spectacular and strange beauty of the scenes in which characters travel to the underworld might support that idea. On the other hand, the destination of those strange journeys, the land of the dead itself, is depressingly familiar, dominated as it is by a heartless bureaucracy that condemns and punishes love. The fact that Orpheus essentially plagiarizes his poetry complicates things as well, though here the film may be making the point that creativity is actually the capacity to pay attention to the strange or unfamiliar elements of reality (like a car radio that chants weird lines of poetry between enigmatic bleeps and random numbers). Creation may be the capacity to find interesting things rather than to make them. But then there’s the question of Cocteau’s own art, which rejects realistic representation of the outside world in favor of images that seem to spring right out of the artist’s head (or right out of the camera, which raises other complicated questions).
Since Orpheus itself is so experimental, I thought we might try a somewhat unusual approach to this assignment, one that matches up with Cocteau’s open-ended methods. So your task for this second major essay is to formulate two insightful questions about art, love, and death in Orpheus and, instead of answering them, to explain how they emerge from your attempts to understand the film. The questions will appear in your essay as boldface section headers, and in the sections that follow you will explain how you generated these questions as you thought about the film. You are expressly forbidden to give decisive answers to any of your questions, and it will be a bad sign indeed if your questions can be answered clearly and easily. You are welcome to speculate on possible answers, as I did in the paragraph above. The real task, though, is to explain how your questions arise from your consideration of Orpheus. I ask you to pose your insights as questions so that you can feel free to work through complex ideas without reaching definite conclusions. We’re following Freud in more ways than one with this assignment, and I encourage you to live your confusion as he does. If you so choose, one or both of your questions may involve the other versions of the Orpheus story that we’ve considered. Of course, the questions will have to be related in some way, and you will need strong connecting language to explain how.
Writing: Death and Ritual in the West
Essay 3: Burying Antigone
Length: 5 pages (draft must be 4 complete pages)
Draft due: October 24
Final due: November 7
Here’s something amazing: a simple question from me. Why does Antigone bury Polyneices? That’s it. That’s what this paper is about. I want you to explain why Antigone buries Polyneices.
Simple question. But the answer is not so simple. It’s tempting to make quick assumptions from what characters say or seem to be saying, when a more careful reading will contradict and complicate what appears obvious at first glance. For example, in her first conversation with Ismene, Antigone seems to appeal to the “laws of the gods” to support her decision (192). But what law is she referring to? We might assume it has something to do with taking care of and loving one’s family, since she also says “He is my brother” when Ismene reminds her of Creon’s ruling (191). But in this same conversation, she also predicts that she will soon hate her own sister Ismene (193), which seems to be violation of the law that one should love one’s family. Maybe she plans to hate Ismene because she thinks Ismene herself is violating the law of the gods by not participating in Polyneices’ burial, but hasn’t Polyneices himself violated that law by killing his own brother? And yet Antigone describes Polyneices as “dear” to her (192). So with careful attention, Antigone’s own words actually contradict her claims. The real task of the assignment, then, is to acknowledge and explore the complexity of this question, and the difficulty of the language surrounding it.
Here are some of the subsidiary questions that I think will help you come to interesting conclusions about Antigone’s motivations. You should not feel obliged to answer all or any of these questions.
1. What does the act of burying Polyneices mean to Antigone (and/or other characters). What about the act of leaving him outside to rot? What are the consequences of these acts?
2. What do the other characters say about Antigone and what she does? How do they describe and/or interpret her actions?
3. A related question: how does Creon argue against Antigone? What principles does he invoke? Is he trustworthy?
4. Do Antigone’s explanations, or those of other people, change over the course of the play?
5. What about that passage that Fitts and Fitzgerald remove but Knox defends. How would its inclusion change your sense of Antigone’s motives?
Writing: Death and Ritual in the West
Essay 4: Living/Dead
Length: 5 pages (draft must be 4 complete pages)
Draft due: November 14
Final due: December 3
In many ways, Dawn of the Dead is a more complex version of those Hogarth images we looked at. It proceeds by way of juxtaposition, asking the viewer to make comparisons between one situation and the other. Instead of being about alcohol, though, Romero’s film is about power and access to resources. The primary juxtaposition is between the four survivors in the mall and the zombies they fight against. Again and again, the film switches between showing the lives of the survivors and showing the “lives” of the zombies, playing constantly on the similarities and differences between them. There are other parallels, too. The early scene in the housing project, for example, deals with racial differences. We will look at a scene in which a character makes a direct connection between police power and the emerging power of the zombies.
Death. Power struggle. Bodies desecrated in every possible way. When similar things happened in Antigone, they were addressed with the utmost seriousness. Sometimes Dawn of the Dead’s comparative technique is serious, too, as in the scene that cuts between the scientist on television talking about “logic” and Peter waiting for Roger to reanimate. Just as often, though, these same issues are addressed hilariously. In their bumbling desperation, the zombies are funny, and there is something over-the-top comic about the gratuitous graphic violence of the film. It’s disgusting when the zombies rip that biker’s intestines out, for example, but it also evokes uncomfortable laughter (even, to some extent, from the biker, whose screams have a gleeful edge to them).
Why, given the weightiness of the subject matter, is this film funny? What are the implications of its humor, and how does Romero’s comparative method contribute both to the serious ideas and the humor here?
To me, the central question here is how this film works. The key to that, as you might expect, is the film itself. Therefore, I am requiring you to look in detail at no more than two scenes in the film (though you can refer to others if necessary). You should consider all of the elements of the scene(s), including dialog, visual cues, and sound. You will obviously have to establish a relationship between what you learn in these scenes (if you work with two), and that relationship will have to contribute to a coherent argument about why and how Romero uses juxtaposition to address serious issues in comic terms.
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