sometimes a slimy underground cavern is just a womb metaphor
The curriculum chaos continues only slightly abated, and with a change in direction to encompass all those students who are blissfully oblivious to deadlines and consequently injured and angry when I tell them they're too late to change courses. My attitude to the whole thing is probably best expressed by the Freudian typing slip which yesterday led me to refer to the curriculum advisors' "wailing list" instead of "mailing list". Not only wailing, but gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair.
The whole bang shoot has not been materially assisted by the fact that my lectures on Pan's Labyrinth were not next week but this week, giving me a weekend less than I thought I had to actually write the damned things. This is significant because I inherited the lectures with the reading list intact, and guess what? it's all psychoanalytic criticism. Psychoanalytic criticism gives me the pip, which is a disease associated with birds and actually reasonably free of Freudian significance.
The problem with psychoanalytic criticism is that it's extremely powerful. You put yourself into the mindset where everything's about sexuality and dodgy childhood experiences, and suddenly everything you look at is about sexuality and dodgy childhood experiences. Psychoanalytic readings colonise the landscape. Or possibly penetrate it, or engulf it wholesale into their worryingly toothy gaping maws. This becomes even worse when you're looking at fantasy film, since fantasy deals with symbol and symbol speaks to the unconscious, and as far as the psychoanalysts are concerned, pretty much everything unconscious is about sex. It takes a huge effort of will to resist sexualised readings when you're in this mode.
Fortunately, in my lexicon bloody-mindedness is a virtue, and I tend to teach psychoanalytic reading with a hefty handful of salt, instructing the Dear Little Students to do likewise. My lectures are thus permeated with cheerful asides - "this critic says X, but frankly I think it's bollocks" - and with a determined campaign to introduce a healthy dose of structuralist readings of genre into the overly symbolic mix. Unfortunately, in this project I am utterly undermined by Pan's Labyrinth, which has an exceedingly self-conscious tendency towards deliberate Freudian imagery, and which has twisty womb-passages, monstrous rebirths and oral fixations up the wazoo. The lectures are thus a slightly invigorating tussle in which the students seem to be leaping on board with commendable enthusiasm. I do like a class that argues back at me. It means they're thinking.
Even further on the upside, it transpires that I'm not actually indexing Da Book this month, I'm simply proofreading. Indexing happens in another couple of months, when the nice layout person has done his/her design thang. I can thus bugger off to Montague for game-viewing next weekend with a reasonably clear conscience. Yay!
The whole bang shoot has not been materially assisted by the fact that my lectures on Pan's Labyrinth were not next week but this week, giving me a weekend less than I thought I had to actually write the damned things. This is significant because I inherited the lectures with the reading list intact, and guess what? it's all psychoanalytic criticism. Psychoanalytic criticism gives me the pip, which is a disease associated with birds and actually reasonably free of Freudian significance.
The problem with psychoanalytic criticism is that it's extremely powerful. You put yourself into the mindset where everything's about sexuality and dodgy childhood experiences, and suddenly everything you look at is about sexuality and dodgy childhood experiences. Psychoanalytic readings colonise the landscape. Or possibly penetrate it, or engulf it wholesale into their worryingly toothy gaping maws. This becomes even worse when you're looking at fantasy film, since fantasy deals with symbol and symbol speaks to the unconscious, and as far as the psychoanalysts are concerned, pretty much everything unconscious is about sex. It takes a huge effort of will to resist sexualised readings when you're in this mode.
Fortunately, in my lexicon bloody-mindedness is a virtue, and I tend to teach psychoanalytic reading with a hefty handful of salt, instructing the Dear Little Students to do likewise. My lectures are thus permeated with cheerful asides - "this critic says X, but frankly I think it's bollocks" - and with a determined campaign to introduce a healthy dose of structuralist readings of genre into the overly symbolic mix. Unfortunately, in this project I am utterly undermined by Pan's Labyrinth, which has an exceedingly self-conscious tendency towards deliberate Freudian imagery, and which has twisty womb-passages, monstrous rebirths and oral fixations up the wazoo. The lectures are thus a slightly invigorating tussle in which the students seem to be leaping on board with commendable enthusiasm. I do like a class that argues back at me. It means they're thinking.
Even further on the upside, it transpires that I'm not actually indexing Da Book this month, I'm simply proofreading. Indexing happens in another couple of months, when the nice layout person has done his/her design thang. I can thus bugger off to Montague for game-viewing next weekend with a reasonably clear conscience. Yay!