Mental Twinges

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.