Mid-Term for Critical Theory A

Part One:

First, choose one of these three questions to discuss. Your answer should be 4-5pp. long. It is very important that you remain focused on the topic of the question you have chosen, and that you substantiate your claims with quotations from the text your are discussing.

Question One:

In "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," Oscar Wilde forcefully distinguishes our possessions (property) from our creations (art). What impact do you think this distinction has on Wilde's individualist politics, since it would seem that his version of individualism demands both self-possession and self-creation?

Question Two:

Despite what appears to be a relentless megalomania in Ecce Homo, it is also true that many of the topics on which Nietzsche focuses in the book are actually rather modest. What insights might Nietzsche's modesty or immodesty provide as we try to determine what his ambitions are for the interpretive method of “affirmation” he offers up in Ecce Homo?

Question Three:

In his essay “Psychological Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud provides an interpretation of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. Near the conclusion of his reading of Schreber’s story, Freud makes a striking claim: “It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe.” How and why does the figure of Schreber seem to pose such a challenge to Freud’s larger effort to portray psychoanalysis as a scientific project? Are there other places in the text in which Freud seems to play out this ambivalence to Schreber’s own interpretation of the world and of his own place in it? Why might this matter so much Freud in the first place?

Part Two:

Now, choose another question to discuss, from these two options. Your answer should be 4-5pp. long.

Question One:

Provide a brief account of Marx's critique of the fetishized commodity, and then discuss how either Klein's critique of the Logo or Barthes' critique of myth (choose only one of these two) is both indebted to Marx's account but also departs from it in some key way.

Question Two:

Pick two of the objects Barthes interprets in his shorter essays. First, show how these essays both illustrate the more general thesis that myth is naturalization, and then point to some significant differences in the way “the natural” seems to function more specifically in each of your chosen examples.