I'm sure even the most educated/adept/intellectual/mature of us leave the class after the 2.5 hours slightly foggy headed with the thousands of words seen, heard and thought about. I believe that most people could read the texts and listen to the lectures over and over again and come to different conclusions, or at least be a little less sure about their first conclusion as to what it all means. As we learned today, rhetoric's a bitch.
So, in the spirit of Dale (and I do believe it is in his spirit with all the quotes he spits out from various personalities of the last few millennia), I will provide this blog with various quotes from the last week.
On a personal note: I have to say, I find numerous things that Dale says to be equally hilarious and thought provoking. That being said, most of my notes are just quotes by him that I think it's nice to share with everyone so we can all reminisce and try and swim through his word vomit. Some might make you giggle, some might seem irrelevant, and some might just remind you of that one thing you asked him to repeat and he said that he couldn't tell you what it was. Either way, it's nice to revisit some of these moments.
“This is an impossible class, literally”
“Go to Amazon and be evil”
"Oh you Berkeley students..."
The first definition will tell you, in even the most generic dictionary, 'the art of persuasive speech,' the second; ‘something like bullshit’
"the business of language is to find the salient similarities and the salient differences with sense and clarity, so that it makes sense to one another”
“Write something substantial but don’t bore me”
“the work of critical theory is the work of finding ourselves in the habitation of the text”
"Oscar Wilde’s favorite obsession and most conspicuous symptom = an endless recourse to the figure of paradox"
“Oscar Wile was the first gay man because he invented it”
I prefer to think of the more free associational moments in my lectures as "word salad" rather than "word vomit," as it happens...
ReplyDelete