Prompts (Provided Far From Promptly)

Prompt One:

How might one make a good case that despite what appears to be a rampant and relentless megalomania in his Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is actually rather modest in the claims he makes in his book? Substantiate this claim with quotations from the text. What insights might this "modesty" provide us as we try to determine what Nietzsche’s ambitions are for the interpretive method of “affirmation” he proposes in Ecce Homo.

Prompt Two:

Discuss how [1] Klein's discussion of the Logo, [2] Debord's discussion of the Spectacle, [3] Benjamin's discussion of Aura, [4] Horkheimer and Adorno's discussion of the Culture Industry, or [5] Barthes' discussion of Myth (choose just one of these) is, on the one hand, indebted to Marx's account of the fetishized commodity in your view but also, on the other hand, departs from it in some key way.

Prompt Three:

In his essay “Psychological Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” Freud offers up an interpretation of the autobiography of Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber. Near the conclusion of his reading of Schreber’s story, Freud makes the last of a series of curious claims on a similar theme: “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 the project of psychoanalytic interpretation as a scientific practice? 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 to Freud in the first place?

Prompt Four:

How does the treatment of the figure of the Spectator differ in Wilde's "Soul of Man Under Socialism" from its treatment in Debord's Society of the Spectacle? What political significance attaches to these different treatments in their respective texts in your view? Discuss the relation of spectatorship to political agency in either of these pieces and substantiate your view through a close reading of salient moments in the text.