Notes about animals

Virginia Wolff's Flush as hybrid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush:_A_Biography

Anthropocentrisim under phallocentricism

Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject

TS Eliot, and human superiority

human/animal, humanimal, animal/human

Derrida's heterogeneous multiplicity

animality
controlling animal bodies in the Victorian age, via zoos, dog fancy

coevolution of human-dog, to get away from domestication model of dominance

Ulysses--dogs without owners
Waste Land--dog on corpse

shifting of gender roles and hierarchies in Modernist times

Bildungsroman: The novel of education

Bildung as humanist project, a project of self-cultivation

Animal narrative traditions
Victorian animal autobiography
Anthropomorphism
"Feminine" sentimentality

Flush as allegory of the woman writer

Unwelt: organiism's perception of the world
Jakob Von Uexküll: Foray Into Worlds of Animals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_von_Uexk%C3%BCll

Another summer project

omission and art for art-o-vend

Topeka Projects

fragments of:

Topeka Zoo
birthers
Brownback
domestic violence suspects released

A student asks about diversity

Diversity is complex to me, as the root of the word comes from "divert," while the meaning means the opposite--to combine different elements of something.

Riffing off of Washburn University Diversity Initiative's definition: When it comes to diversity in people, I think of sensitivity first. We are each different, come from different cultures, background, beliefs, and we should each be sensitive to that fact. Along with the sensitivity, we should also agree that no one has the perfect definition of what diversity means. For example, gender identity would not be included in any definitions from fifty years ago, as the culture-at-large was not sensitive to such ideas. In general, if there is a definition I could add to diversity, it is the sensitivity to how people identify themselves, as well as not pushing definitions of identity onto others. However, the nice thing about diversity is that we are all Washburn students--diverse and complex.

Adorno quote

"History has left its residue in punctuation marks, and it is history, far more than meaning or grammatical function, that looks out at us, rigidified and trembling slightly, from every mark of punctuation." —Theodor Adorno

Flarf and Conceptual Poetry

I spent an hour and a half preparing my Flarf and Conceptual Writing presentation. Assembled books, handouts, etc. Also had a hands-on part. I've used Katie Degentesh's The Anger Scale and Kenneth Goldsmith's Traffic as examples. Students read these without any prior information about these forms. Lots of great debate over "Is this real writing?"

Punctuation as Patriarchy

My first ideas: Punctuation stops the reader, forces closures, measures, enforces rules. Think of Elements of Style. Think of what is enforced in elementary schools.

I'm looking through these books, for examining the idea of punctuation as Patriarchy:

Alice Notley's The Descent of Allete
Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry"
Gertrude Stein's "On Punctuation"
Kenneth Goldsmith's "Gertrude Stein's Punctuation"
M.B. Parkes' Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West
Jennifer DeVere's Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play
Theodor Adorno's "Punctuation Marks"
Dorothy Richardson's "About Punctuation": "But in the slow, attentive reading demanded by unpunctuated texts, the faculty of hearing has its chance, is enhanced until the text speaks itself."

[

"A question is a question, anybody can know that a question is a  question and so why add to it the question mark when it is already  there when the question is already there in the writing. Therefore I
never could bring myself to use a question mark, I always found it positively  revolting, and now very few do use it." --Gertrude Stein

"Is a question a feminized form of the statement?" --Rachel Zucker