Look what we did!

Our class websites--please bask in their collective and collaborative awesomeness. Congrats to everyone!

The Family

http://artl.shellc0der.com

Ideal Gender

https://sites.google.com/site/idealgenderrolesinthecoldwar/

Nonconformism

https://sites.google.com/site/coldwarconformity/

Cross-Cultural Encounters

https://sites.google.com/site/ coldwarencounters/

Publicity and Privacy

https://sites.google.com/site/publicandprivateinthecoldwar/

Maggots and Men!

Most respected comrade-students! 

Please post your questions, observations, and textual equivalents to tempestuous applause (in the spirit of the Soviet experience) on the blog thread below. The filmmakers and I hope to respond to some of them. But beyond that, I encourage you to channel your inner collectivist and engage with each other on this site, too! 

In solidarity, 

Professor K

Office Hours, in-person (4/30) and online (next week)

Dear students, 

The last office hour--not to mention, our last day of class all together--is crowning now! I will be available for speed-meetings of ten minutes max tomorrow from 4-5 pm after the movie in my office THH 261. Sign up as soon as you can on the thread below. And if you were advised by me last week (in person or over email), please cede your time to other students who haven't had the chance to meet with me yet. 

Also, please say "thank you" when you receive this additional individual attention. No one owes it to you in particular. You likely won't get tons of it in the future from other professors. And you'll get even less of it if you don't express gratitude for their ceding precious time in their schedules to attend to your concerns and desires. Take this advice to heart now and your life will be easier and more felicitous down the line, I swear it! 

During the non-instruction period next week, I will intermittently check the blog (not my email) for your questions about the website project, including your personal essays and collaborative main-page statements. Remember that you have excellent resources for writing and critical thinking in your classmates, and an incredibly targeted audience in your group! Also consider that a part of the assignment grade is based on your ability to work without supervision from on high, and to execute a complex task as self-managing members of a group. 

All that said, good luck!

Sign up for office hours tomorrow!

Grab a ten-minute slot during tomorrow extended office hours from 3:30 - 5:00 pm. Three or so of you had already requested a meeting on Thursday, so let's start at 4:00 to play it safe.

And remember that I'll be playing the HBO version of Angels in America on the big screen at the same time, in case you want to research your reader response on the play, or just see more of Meryl Streep in Rabbi "drag," Al Pacino at his most awful as Roy Cohn, and Mary-Louise Parker as Harper, the pill-popping ex-Mormon with the closeted husband and hyperactive fantasy life. I can't recommend it enough.

Angels in America, Act Three (the last of Millennium Approaches)

Tomorrow we're going to turn back to the big questions with a special emphasis on History and tolerance (diversity, difference). Post your own big (or not-so-big) questions below. And be sure to bring the handouts from today's class!

_Angels in America_ Take One/Act One and Two!

In _Millenium Approaches_, the first half of his two-part dramatic epic _Angels in America_, Tony Kushner poses what Russian thinkers have called "the accursed questions"--those big philosophical questions about the role of the nation, man's place in society, the social function of art, and so on. We will consider these accursed questions and the others you pose below in Tuesday's class. 

Website Group Themes

You're off the hook for discussion questions tonight...

Now's your chance to call dibs on one of the website topics we collected at the end of class today. Some groups of five have already formed; others are starting to form and still need a participant or two or three; others await formation altogether. Please read the "want-ads" for the partially-formed ones below, and confer with the following list for themes that don't yet belong to a team.

When you sign up for a theme in the thread that follows, make mention of your special angle: How might you approach the topic? With what texts? With what focus? (If you'd like to explore cross-cultural encounters in cold-war culture, you might add you'd like to write about Nekrasov and advertising, for instance. If you want to work on paranoia, you might claim Queer and Angels in America, and connect suspicions about communism and queerness together. And so on)

Proposing options while you select a theme will give other unaffiliated students the chance to pick your theme, pick you as a team member; and potentially develop a topic for the personal page that complements yours. For those students already in groups, such notations will help you prepare for Thursday's class, when we spend more time fleshing out the group theme for the project main page and collaborative essay.

Potential Topics

Cross-Cultural Encounters

Beauty

Consumption 

Paranoia/Uncertainty/Doubt

Aesthetics (Kitsch, Propaganda, Avant-Garde)

Technology

The Family 

Sexuality

Truth/Freedom

Ethics/Responsibility

*A new one?

Add a new topic in the comment thread!

Complete Group: Ideal gender 

Members: Kaylie, Claire, Ryan, Jordan and Ben.

Incomplete Group: Nonconformism 

Members: Connie, Colin, Shant, and Daniel

They need 1 teammate.

Incomplete Group: Public/Private

Members: Lindsay, Ian and Jon.

They need 2 teammates.

Disco and Atomic War

Drop one interesting detail-bomb about Disco and the Atomic War on the blog thread below, just so your prof. knows you were paying as much attention to the movie as an Estonian straining to hear Finnish broadcasts of rock 'n' roll... 

Last Day with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Books Six and Seven

The last two books of ULB get really heavy and then, of course, light again. Please feel emboldened like Stalin's son or Kundera's narrator to tackle the big metaphysical issues in your questions and observations below. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Day Five: Lightness and Weight (again), Public and Private (again)

When we tackle Book 5 this Tuesday, we'll put Tomas and his existential code back in the spotlight, but also complicate his code with the binaries we pursued in Books 1-4. To refresh the memories of those who attended class on Thursday (and implant a fresh memory in the mind of those who missed out), we focused on publicity/privacy and truth/lies on the intimate level of the individual and the broader plane of political or world-historical experience. We homed in on how each character contextualizes or "solipsizes" these questions: for Tereza, through her mother, photography, plumbing and a general obsession with surveillance and exposure; for Sabina, painting and love-making or romantic affairs; and for Franz, the hypocritical "glass house" he longs to live in, after Andre Breton.

Please ask your own question about the two worlds of public and private, and about "living in a lie," whether you take your inspiration from Milan Kundera's novel or Vaclav Havel's essay, "The Power of the Powerless." Here's a link to the essay you MUST read!

http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Day Four: Back to Soul and Body

Tereza's existential heading, "Body and Soul," returns with all its vertiginousness (a verifiable word) and weight. Please post your question on Book 4 here.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Day Three: Words Misunderstood

Please post a question about "Words Misunderstood," Book 3, which divides its sympathies between Franz, Sabina and the narrator. Make sure to keep up your motif log for group discussion. On Tuesday you'll meet with your group members to share your individual findings.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Day 2 / Part 2

In today's class, we explored the narrator's philosophical framing of the novel between Nietzsche, Parmenides, and Beethoven; chance, fate, and eternal recurrence; lightness and weight; emotional non-attachment and the ethical burden of the Other.

We also began to discuss eternal recurrence as a philosophical idea and as a structural principle of the novel...which brought us to the motif. Since Thursday you'll be meeting for the first time in your motif groups, try creatively appropriating this blog entry to send messages to the other members of your "secret brotherhood" of the book (to borrow a turn-of-phrase from Kundera). Otherwise just use your question as usual.

And remember to read the supplementary text by Kundera, "Dialogue in the Art of the Novel."

Now here is a picture of Tereza and Tomas at their neediest and therefore most beautiful. 

_The Unbearable Lightness of Being_ Day One!

Milan Kundera's novel is self-consciously constructed according to the presence of motifs, so feel free to start tracking some of them in Book 1, as we will do in groups for the rest of the session. Otherwise post discussion questions as usual. This book is rich not just in motifs but in metaphors and literary allusions, as well as ideas about art, history, and life. Enjoy!

In-Class Mini-Meetings!

If you want dibs on a certain time slot for a five-minute paper consultation during class next week, sign up here! Alternately, you can forgo a five-minute class meeting and schedule a ten-minute meeting during Tuesday and Thursday office hours, 3:30-4:30 in THH 261.

Tuesday

2:40-2:45
2:45-2:50
2:50-2:55
2:55-3:00
3:00-3:05
3:05-3:10
3:10-3:15
3:15-3:20

Thursday

2:10-2:15
2:15-2:20
2:20-2:25
2:25-2:30
2:30-2:35
2:35-2:40
2:40-2:45
2:45-2:50
2:50-2:55
2:55-3:00
3:00-3:05
3:05-3:10
3:10-3:15
3:15-3:20

"gladly beyond": Our Last Day with Esther Greenwood and The Bell Jar

For the last day of The Bell Jar, we will be taking up the themes of birth, rebirth and death, especially in light of "the baby" that appears on p. 3 only to disappear for the rest of the novel. We will ask about Joan, writing, and, finally, we will consider the question at the center of the novel: Is Esther "crazy"? And what is the eponymous bell jar all about?

Post your discussion questions below.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Esther Greenwood makes the goggle-eyed headlines! (The Bell Jar, Day Three)

We'll be focusing on the theme of doubles on Tuesday, both in terms of the Esther's internal doubling and the external doubles available to her as a cold war woman. Apropos of our most recent discussion, consider how the gendered double standards of American middle-class society at this time of bipolar world politics might be as responsible for Esther's psychic split as her own psychological make-up.

The Bell Jar Tolls for You, Part Two.

Let's keep today's guiding questions on cold war womanhood in mind for Thursday's class discussion. Consider the life paths open to a young (white) woman in early-1950s capitalist consumerist American culture--that is, Don-and-Betty-Draper country. What good and bad adult examples are available to Esther as she envisions (or is forced to envision) a future for herself? How do gendered expectations shape not just her personal plans but also her relationships with men (like Lenny, Buddy, Constantin, her father, et al.)? 

Please post a question of your own on this or related topics. Feel free to return to the allegory of the fig tree from chapter 5 as you contemplate how Esther's future is gendered in chapters 7-11, as well as the birth-and-death scene at the hospital with her betrothed, Buddy Willard, from chapter 6. We will be looking at these episodes as keys to coming sections, much like we close-read the first few pages of the book. 

Beginning the Bell Jar

Please post your questions below for your pair of chapters from the first six of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Try to extract themes by close-reading a particular passage.

Remember that you are responsible for reading all of the chapters through the end of 6, not just your own. 

Extra Credit: Through Eastern Eyes Live! Remarks on the Reading of Socialist Memoirists

For those of you cold warriors who braved the LA cold to hear about how ladies once lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain, I salute you! For the sake of your less adventurous colleagues, please share a little of what you learned tonight from former comrades Angela Thompson and Ana Tajder in this public forum. 

Through Eastern Eyes: Ruth Zernova's "Elizabeth Arden" and Drakulic's "Make-Up and Other Crucial Questions"

As if a rejoinder to today's questions about the present-absence of women in the works of cold war culture East and West, we get Ruth Zernova and Slavenka Drakulic to speak back with a distinctly Soviet flavor. Please focus your questions on "Elizabeth Arden," and consider connecting them to Nekrasov's travelogue, "On Both Sides of the Ocean," or the woman's perspective provided in Mad Men, incidentally expressed at the beauty salon in both pieces. 

the cold war heats up "on both sides of the ocean" (and in Cuba)

Over the weekend you'll be watching the Mad Men episode from the end of season 2, "Meditations in an Emergency," named after the collection of poetry and eponymous poem by Frank O'Hara (which you'll also be reading). Don Draper himself is shown dipping into this book at the start of the season, and reciting "Mayakovsky" as a voice over to end the season premier. Click on the link to listen to the one poem, or go nuts and watch the whole episode.

In order to offset the Americanness of this representation of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis-- as it is experienced by the public on the national level, on the level of (capitalist) corporation, and the more personal plane of familial experience--we will also read Victor Nekrasov's Russo-Soviet travel impressions, "On Both Sides of the Ocean," written roughly concurrently with the events depicted on Mad Men.

Post your questions below about any and all of these texts. Also, consider how they paint a fuller picture of cold war gender roles and normative American society more broadly, as a stark contrast to the marginal American expatriate communities Burroughs provides in Queer. Keep in mind how the cold war was not just about politics at the highest level, but about the most intimate aspects of everyday life. The two threads are inextricable, these texts suggest. How?

Routine Questions/Lee on the Road: Day 2 of Queer

Now that you've read all of Queer, you're prepared to post questions below that speak to the text's specific features as well as its general arcs. Feel free to connect your comments on Burroughs' novella back to the other pieces we've read, e.g. what do Lee, Anthony Burns, Andrei Kazimirovich, and Jesse have to say to one another as cold war characters? What does Queer have to say about the cold war? And what in the world do Lee's routines have to say about any of this? 

Cold War Exoticism: William Burroughs's Queer, Part One of Two.

Leave your questions here for Queer. Feel free to draw connections between Lee and our other flawed heroes from the past few weeks. 

Academic Applications: The Americans Premieres Tonight.

For the TV-watchers among us, tonight the Fox network will debut its cold-war drama, The Americans. Please feel free to share your expert opinions about the show as the semester and season progress in tandem. (I certainly won't compel you but I'm curious what you think!)

Aliens, Alienation, and Alterity between Shklovsky and Sinyavsky

I offer a few basic questions to get you thinking about our last two readings: the self explanatorily titled "Art as Device," and the gloriously unpronounceable "Pkhents." My objective in having you read these pieces as a pair is to sharpen your critical gaze so that you might apprehend not only the relationship of the theory to the text and the text to the theory, but also that of text and theory to social 'reality' and lived experience. Post your own questions about either or both of these works (or any other we've encountered as a class) below mine.

What does Shklovsky define as the purpose of art and the task of the artist? Against what extant definitions is he working?
- How is art a device? What does it do and how?
- Is “Pkhentz” an allegory? Of what?
- What is the role of reading, writing and words in “Pkhentz”? Mark all the places texts appear in the story.
- How might we compare the description and function of the sexual grotesque in Sinyavsky’s and Baldwin’s stories?
- What do we make of the figure of the alien? In what ways (pl.) do we understand it?

The Sado-Masochistic Erotics of American Racism: Baldwin + Williams, Part 2.

Please post a question below that explores the continuities and contrasts of these complementary short stories, possibly stirring Circus into the pot as well. If you desperately want to post about only one of them, feel free. Otherwise I welcome you to respond to one of the questions posted about these texts--whether in this or the previous thread, by you or your classmates. 

Be sure to indicate the origin of your question in this case, and do use this thread as a way to try out the thesis of your first reader response paper. 

American Authors Confront Race: James Baldwin and Tennessee Williams

- What connections do James Baldwin and Tennessee Williams explore between race, gender and sexuality?

 - Pay attention to the narrative texture of Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man." How does the story introduce its characters? Who is narrating? - What is the “thrilling silence” Big Jim C. talks about?  And what is the function of black song in the story?

Discussion Questions for Circus

--How are Americans and America depicted? How are Soviets and the Soviet Union depicted? How are Germans depicted?

--What kinds of oppositions—moral and ideological—separate the US and the USSR in the film? How does the film shore up these oppositions with black-and-white/light-and-dark imagery?

--How does the film demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism?

--According to the film, what are the US’s and USSR’s attitudes about race?

--What are the USSR’s attitudes about gender? For instance, who are the new Soviet man and woman? What are their psychological and physical attributes?

--How does the film handle the issues of marriage and romantic love? (Think not only of Marion and Martynov but also Raika and Skameikin.)

--Is this film propaganda, art, entertainment or some combination of the three?

--Why does this ideological struggle take place in the circus? What is the significance of Marion’s “Flight to the Moon” and Martynov’s “Flight to the Stratosphere” acts?

--The dominant metaphor of the film is that the USSR is one big, happy family. Do you agree or disagree? Support your answer.

--What can this film accomplish—artistically and politically—because it is a musical?

--The concept of genre is crucial to the analysis of an artistic text. Circus is not just a musical comedy but also a melodrama. What kinds of emotions does it attempt to invoke in its viewer, how, and to what end?

--What kind of viewer does this film assume? How does it embed these assumptions into its structure?

--How does the film use language—proper and improper Russian as well as non-Russian languages—to convey its ideological message?

Welcome to the Cold War Gets Hot official course website! Please check back for updates as soon as the spring 2013 semester is in full swing.