Sexual Chocolate

I want to post a quote from a work that a student in my class did this semester.



I don't think I betray any ethics issues in quoting her in/citation.



What I might say is that when the student came across this quote that she was surprised as anyone else. I did not "assign" this reading, but students found interesting fragments here and there throughout the semester.


In some ways, the texts they dis/engaged may seem more suitable for a "graduate class," but I find that we're all un/just "gradual" students in our own ways.


Anyway, I am interested in the example ... the story ... the surprise that happens ... happenings ...


All this talk ABOUT Sirc, for me, is less an effort at intellectual confrontation, and more of an opportunity for reading-writing instructors to share examples and tell stories ... to quote students and to quote the quotes students are making and un-making for themselves ...


Sirc is good at this, of course. Bartholomae, it might be said, is also exemplary in this regard. The former is more local and suggests a sense, we might say, of "Inventing the Classroom," whereas Bartholomae --following in the steps perhaps of E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, and R. Proctor-- has a, perhaps, broader conception in terms of "Inventing the University."

But, this local-broad binary is much too simplistic. Where Sirc takes us that Bartholomae does not is to a sense of writing, following Duchamp, that is "stripped bare" (ECH 66). Sirc's writing is shot-through in this sense with a sense of being itself. If Bartholomae is concerned with the pragmatics of the institution, Sirc --via the example-- is interested in the libidinal ... or as he says something that "kicks in all genres" and is revealed as "sexual chocolate" (ECH 67).

Yes! Here's a sense of KICKING! But notice that what he is after is something SENSUAL ... if there are NUTS it is to be found in the "sexual chocolate" ...

Punk music isn't reducible to violence ... Punk might be said to play Love Songs ...

***

Well, anyway ... what I want to share is something of a sampling from a student this semester. It's a first year student quoting Roland Barthes in George Landow's -Hypertext: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology-:

"Ronald [sic] Barthes describes ... text composed of BLOCKS [caps student's] of words (or images) linked electronically my [sic] mulitiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path. 'In this ideal text,' says Barthes, 'the networks are many and interact, without one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has not beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable."

***

I love the little SPELLING inflections in this student typing in this quote. There was an urgency to do so because there was much to say once this was moved from one text to the next.

I'd be interested in hearing about the quotes from students this semester ... Not their "individual" quotes, necessarily --need to follow IRB protocol for that, probably-- but their in/citations that lent themselves to excitations.

You know, the sexual chocolate ...