Theory and the English Symposium
April 1, 2007 by marina628
The faculty reading at the English Symposium really got me thinking about Foucault and his celebration, if you will, of deviance. I was surprised at the faculty readings and their vast relation to Foucault’s stress of bringing sex into discourse. Foucault states,
“…the nearly infinite task of telling–telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex. This scheme for transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ascetic and monastic setting” (1650).
And this is just what those professors did, they told, told everyone something that brought sex into discourse. Not ever having Hollis Seamon or Barbara Ungar as professors made their readings a surprise to me, while from professors that I have had before, Doug, Professor Laity and Dan Nester, and heard them discuss these various topics. Knowing them as professors and experiencing classes with them made their readings a little different for me than the others. Foucault would screech at my last sentence and shun me I’m sure because I’m viewing their readings or “discursive” practices and acting surprised at their reference to sex or questioning it at all.
I must say Foucault would have been astonished at each of the faculty members and their use of sex in discourse, “…its aspects, its correlations, and its effects…down to their slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between the body’s mechanics and the mind’s complacency: everything had to be told” (1649). Foucault really loves the idea of getting it all out their and letting the mind make of it what it will. I found that Dan Nester’s reading really did that. He read an essay from a book he’s writing and it was about an ex of his who allowed a man to lick her feet for ten dollars. He went in depth making just imagining such an act explicitly sexual and how she could now be seen as a foot prostitute. Clearly Nester used this deviant act of foot licking and wrote this essay free of any judgment based on its relation to sex, specifically using the act of foot licking, possibly prostitution, as a sexually detailed narration.
It was interesting for me how for once I could attend a reading and take Foucault and his essay on “The History of Sexuality” and relate the two. If the faculty readings all had in common their reference to sex one, who has not read Foucault, may think…what does that say about society or the professor at St. Rose? But most importantly for those of us who have read Foucault and have the opportunity of using his ideas to address such readings can stress his focus on the importance of writers telling all their is with out worrying whether or not it is sexually explicit or not. If what they write makes any type of connection to sex then so be it because contesting the use of sex in discourse just places too many restraints on society.
i Marina,
I too commented on a Foucault interpretation of the faculty readings. Did you notice the connection with Barbara Ungar’s rape poems as well? Foucault talks about the multiple discourses produced by regulation, one of which includes silence. I found this particularly interesting. Ungar introduced her poems saying that they were written for radio and thus could not refer to the actual violence associated with rape. She then wrote and read her way around the act. Still, anyone hearing the poems on the radio would understand what had happened … as stated between the lines. Here, what is not said becomes the message. (This also reminds me of the way Coetzee told Lucy’s story in Disgrace.)
-Kim