Mental Twinges

Conflict and Survival In this lecture Adorno recaps the first five lectures and discusses the legitimacy of the bourgeois philosopher’s idea that conflict is reality and that society survives because of its conflicts rather than in spite of them. He asks how mankind survives under these circumstances and whether or not we can imagine a history that does not involve conflict. Recap of First Five Lectures The ‘universal’ asserts itself as an ‘historical process’ and has a ‘logical structure’ (49). It has negative aspects for individuals and positive aspects for the species; it “[joins] mankind together in societies...in a totality” (49). The totality both expresses and threatens the destruction of everything beneath it while at the same time it acts as a “cohesive force to which society owes its survival” (49). Marx’s Law of Value Marx agrees with this positive view and it forms an element of his “optimistic view of history” (49). In Marx, it is expressed in “the law of value...

**Mantel, Hilary.  Wolf Hall. Harper Perennial. 2009. Print. (Jan 14) Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. Penguin Books. 2004. ebook. (Jan 16) Waugh, Evelyn. Sword of Honour Trilogy. Penguin. 1965. Kindle. 2012. (Feb. 4) Chesterton, G.K.. The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare. 1908. Kindle. 2012. (Feb. 16) *Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Norton Anthology: English Literature: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century. 10th Ed. 2018. (Feb. 18) Wilson, Robert Charles. Vortex. Tom Doherty Associates. 2011. Print. (Feb. 19) Wister, Owen. The Virginian, a Horseman of the Plains. 1902. Kindle. (Mar. 1) Tigar, Michael E. Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power. Monthly Review Press, 2018. Kindle. (Mar. 21) Milner, Marion.  A Life of One's Own. 1934 .  Routledge. 2011. Print. (Mar.30) Howey, Hugh. Wool. Self-published. 2011. Kindle. (Apr. 4) Wilson, Margaret. The Able McLaughlins. 1923 .  Library of America E-Book Classics. Kind...

The Totality on the Road to Self-Realization In this lecture Adorno claims that there is a problem with Hegel's philosophical history. He argues that the idea of history as a "self-realizing totality" [a consolation of philosophy]  is irrational because no one benefits from it. It has only survived as long as it has because humanity has survived despite of all the suffering that has been inflicted in the concept's name. The Philosophy of History and Historiography  To "construct" an historical event, we need to know the context, the facts, and how they are connected to each other (39). The process of gathering "the relevant factors" related to "historical events" in order to understand them philosophically both "requires and presupposes historiography [the study of historical texts]" and the process of history-writing to explain them. i.e. in explaining an historical event we rely on historical texts and we create texts fo...

Playback  by Raymond Chandler. Hamish Hamilton. 1958. Kindle. 2013. Cranford  by Elizabeth Gaskell. 1853. Kindle. 2012.  How to Read Shakespeare  by Maurice Charney. McGraw-Hill. NY. 1971. Hardcover.a  How Shakespeare Changed Everything  by Stephen Marche. HarperCollins. Toronto. 2011. Hardcover. William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: Blooms Notes.  ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House. PA. 1996. Hardcover. The Cruellest Month  by Louise Penny. Headline Book Pub. London. 2007. Sphere. London. 2011. Paperback. *The Glass Menagerie  by Tennesse Williams. Random House.1945. New Directions. NY.1999. Softcover. *Frankenstein: 1818 Text  by Mary Shelley. Oxford World Classics. 1998. NY. Paperback. *The Tragedy of King Richard III.  The Oxford Shakespeare. 2000. NY. 2008. Print. *The Handmaid's Tale  by Margaret Atwood. 1985. Emblem. 2014. Print. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics  by Carl...

Testimony by Robbie Robertson. Alfred A Knopf Canada. Print. 2016.  Ways of Seeing by John Berger. BBC and Penguin Books. Print. 1972.  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Vintage International 1947. Kindle. 1995.  At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches by Susan Sontag. ed. Paolo Dilanardo and Anne Jump. 2007. Kindle. 2017.  Murder Underground by Mavis Doriel Hay. Skeffington & Son. 1934. Poison Pen Press. Print. 2016. Studies in Classic American Literature by D.H. Lawrence. 1923. Kindle. 2016.  The Witch and Other Stories by Anton Chekov. 1931. Kindle. 2012.  The Summer Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick. Sphere. London. Print. 2013.  Ion by Plato, trans. W.R.M. Lamb. Perseus Project. Online. 2017. Barkskins by Annie Proulx. Scribner. Print. 2016. The Purple Diaries: Mary Astor and the Most Sensational  Hollywood Scandal of the 1930's by Joseph Eagan. Division Books. NY. Kindle. 2016. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene. Vintage...

The Republic of Plato trans. by Francis MacDonald Cornford, Print. 1941 A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer, Kindle. 2008 Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer, Kindle. 2009 Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry. Print. 2015 The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, 1913. Kindle. Heretics and Heroes by Thomas Cahill. Print. 2014 The Door in the Wall and Other Stories by H. G. Wells, 1911. Kindle. On the Sublime by Longinus, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, 1 A.D. Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus, ed. Philip Tody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy, Print. 1970 Medea by Euripides, trans. Gilbert Murray, 431 B.C. Kindle. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, trans. Lewis Campbell, 429 B.C. Kindle. The Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde, 1889 (Essay) Race and Language by Edward Augustus Freeman, 1879 (Essay) Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, trans. Lewis Campbell, 400 B.C. Kindle. Antigone by Sophocles, trans. Lewis Campbell, 441 B.C. Kindle. Cometh the Hour: A Novel (Clifton Chron...

Lecture 4 - The Concept of Mediation In this lecture, Adorno discusses the universal as existing systems working through (mediating) particular events. He uses academics and the French Revolution to explain how the particular , a specific event, is often erroneously taken as a cause rather than a side effect of the workings of universal processes. He claims that once we acknowledge the workings of the universal in the particular we can see the "spirit," the real underlying cause of the event. Facts as Cloaks of Illusion A fact (a particular) acts as a cloak when we mistake it for a cause rather than a secondary effect, creating the illusion that we know what really happened. The better we become at recognizing the universal's effect on the particular and the particular's inability to have a like effect on the universal, the better we will become at recognizing that a particular is not a cause of an event but a byproduct of the universal process or "conte...

Lecture 3 Constitution Problems In this lecture, Adorno makes the point that individual discontinuous [random] events are not  destiny but occur logically within the context in which they manifest and he identifies the "problem of the philosophy of history" as one of determining how to blend the "unity" [context] and "discontinuity" [random events] into a working theory of history. (28) The Truth of Facts Adorno begins by defining a fact as the individual experience of a random event which is "immediate knowledge" only for the person undergoing the experience (20) The truth of the event, the way in which it is experienced, depends largely on the person's  knowledge of the times in which it occurs. A fact..has a greater immediacy for the knowing subject than...the so-called larger historic context to which only...theory can give us access....This immediate knowledge...is no more than immediate knowledge for us ....[I]ndividual fact...

Lecture 12 focuses on "Freud and Fiction." One of the assigned readings is "Dream-work" extracted in The Critical Condition (500-509) from Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams .

[Notes on History and Freedom by Theodor W. Adorno] The Dominant Theme in Historiography and the Humanities What was presented earlier as "the crisis in the idea of historical meaning" [i.e. our habit of assigning meaning where none exists] is the result of the foundations [postulates] of the study of historical writings [historiography] and the humanities.  The dominant theme, first formulated by [Leopold von] Ranke , is 'tell how it really happened' but this precludes any attempt at understanding "historical tendencies" or "large concepts such as...universal history itself". It also undermines history as the recording of events, which tends to regard particular events as more important than other events. (10-11)

In Prof. Fry's second lecture on Deconstruction he references Paul de Man's Semiology and Rhetoric (1975) in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. 3rd ed . Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. 2007. 882-893. Print. and compares de Man's and Derrida 's views on deconstruction.

In this lecture , two essays in  The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition , David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007   by Jacques Derrida are discussed:  "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (915-926) and "Différance"  (932-949).

The lecture begins with a review of  synchrony  and  diachrony and their importance to semiotics and structuralism as well as their relation to the Russian formalists. The idea of functions  and their relationships first appeared in Formalism which became the synchrony  and diachrony  of Structuralism and then, from semiotics, added  "the idea of negative knowledge". Levi-Strauss' analysis of the Oedipus  myth utilizes the idea of negative knowledge   by stating there is   no one positive version of a myth from which all other versions have been copied.

In this lecture we're introduced to Semiotics and Structuralism, not because they are part of literary theory, but because they strongly influenced the development of literary theory. Semiology is "the study of existing, conventional, communicative systems"  and semiotics  is any language (means of communication?) composed of a system of signs .  The concept was first developed by Ferdinand de Saussere , a Swiss linguist, although his work has had a stronger influence in the humanities and social sciences (if Wikipedia is to be believed) than linguistics.

Levi-Strauss, in "The Structural Study of Myth" The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition , David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007 p 860-8) says that "...myth is language..." (861) whose "mythical value" (the story told in the myth) cannot be destroyed by even the "worst translation" .

Roland Barthes 1972 essay on "The Structural Activity" The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition , David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007 p 871-74) claims there is "...no technical difference between structuralism as an intellectual activity on the one hand and literature ... on the other hand: both derive from a mimesis [imitation] based not on the analogy of substances...but the analogy of functions..." (872).

This lecture was a bit of a slog to get through, especially as I don't have the course text book and could not locate complete copies of the reading material. The key point, as far as I can tell, is to highlight the differences, and similarities, between Russian Formalism, New Critic Formalism and the established approach to literary history.

Cleanth Brooks, in "Irony as a Principle of Structure" ( The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition , David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007 p 799-806) asserts that context (structure) determines meaning: The memorable verses in poetry ... derive their poetic quality from their relation to a particular context....Even the meaning  of any particular item is modified by the context. (800) The simplest proof of this can be seen by making a study of  irony: ...the obvious  warping of a statement by the context we characterized as ironical . (800) And sarcasm is the simplest form of irony;  occuring when the context creates "a reversal of meaning" .

Formalism was the reaction to old-fashioned philology and the  "appreciative teaching" that was in vogue at the beginning of the 20th century. The first insisted on the strict  meaning  of words according to their time and place while the latter indulged in raptures; readings which said little or nothing about the work itself. The two main proponents of appreciative teaching were Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q") , at Cambridge, and William Lyon Phelps at Yale.

I.A. Richards and Monroe Beardsley, in Principles of Literary Criticism The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition , David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007 p 764-74), identify two distinct uses of language ( scientific and emotive ) which we confuse; and, they assert there are two causes that produce mental processes associated with both usages: "...the effect of past stimuli associated with them" (764) "...the organism, its needs, its readiness to respond to this or that stimulus." (764) There are  external and internal  stimuli that can trigger a mental event and the character  and course  of the mental impulse is the result of the interaction of these two sources of stimuli. They use the analogy of a hungry man to explain the difference between (1) and (2). A hungry man's reaction to food is determined by his inner state; his hunger (cause #2). A well-fed man may or may not eat what is given him de...