Tomorrow, in addition to looking closely at a couple of the passage from the last blogpost, we will watch this 22 minute film that explains a short text by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, called "Postscript on the Societies of Control" . The text is actually quite short, but very dense. I am hoping that the video will communicate to you some of the aspects of Deleuze's theoretical work that may function as an interpretive device to bring to Super Sad True Love Story.
I show this video because it will serve as a contrast to our first part of class, which will be devoted to looking toward specific passages in the text in order to then "read" the rest of the text. Small passages frequently serve as microcosms of the macrocosmic work. However, as some of you may have noted, my own attempt to to this in the last blogpost transformed into larger Biblical themes.
"Theory" is another way (and the academy's most frequent way) to read literary texts. What we call 'theory' is shorthand for 'literary theory'. Literary theory has a long and fruitful history, but today, literary theory is frequently not only "literary" but "cultural" and even "philosophical" theory. That is, 'theory' does not only bear on literary issues of genre, historical precedent, or autobiography, but culture at large. While one can take something like Super Sad True Love Story and show how it imaginatively recreates, reimagines, or alludes to historical events, it is also interesting to think about the novel through a more general theoretical apparatus.
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