Essay questions

Hey all,

As promised, here are the essay questions for the first essay, due next Tuesday, September 30. Choose one of them. The essays should be a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 5 pages long.

Good luck!

1. In his “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche famously announces truth to be “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.” As we have seen, with this move Nietzsche doesn’t so much dispense with the idea of truth as recontextualize it, giving “truth” not an absolute, timeless essence but instead linking it to power, language, history, figure and function. Freud too invokes the figural in his analysis of dreams and their relation to our inner-most selves, as for Freud the desires that most constitute us as individuals appear to us only in the guise of metaphorical, metonymical and intermediary dream content whose link to our desires is rarely if ever explicit.

First, describe simply and in your own words what you take to be the thrust of Nietzsche’s argument. This description may (but need not necessarily) take the form of a close reading of a shorter passage in Nietzsche that encapsulates some of his more general ideas. Second, assess the degree to which you see Freud as fitting into, complicating or rejecting the Nietzschean paradigm you have identified. This assessment can proceed along any number of lines - might Freud find Nietzsche’s celebration of self-creation a bit naïve, as to Freud any conscious control we might wish to have over our own psychical constitution is illusory at best? Conversely, might Freud’s theory be relying on a scientificism that Nietzsche would find problematic? Nietzsche clearly identifies the process of metaphor-creation as one of forgetting; what role does memory play in Freud’s description of dream-work and what are its implications?

This paper should not be a simple compare and contrast, but should rather attempt to inaugurate a dialogue of sorts between the two thinkers. Your goal is to take one small line of comparison and work it through completely. Be sure to provide specific textual evidence to bolster your readings.


2. In “The Plain Sense of Things,” Wallace Stevens describes what seems to be the inability of human experience to escape from the imagining mind: “the absence of the imagination had,” he writes, “/ itself to be imagined.” The result is a world in which stable things take on new meanings and new descriptions: human artifacts remake natural landscapes, linguistic description shapes future experiences of physical objects, and poetic language can evoke realities forgotten by those living a type of death in life.

Using two or three of Stevens’ poems and either the Nietzsche or the Freud, investigate the way notions of time, change and transformation play out in Stevens’ poetics. What claims, explicitly or (perhaps more potently) implicitly, is Stevens making about the role time, change and transformation play in human linguistic description? How does he make those claims (i.e. do his poems merely describe the way of thinking you’re identifying, or do they actually perform it)? How do these ideas either square with or complicate those of either Freud or Nietzsche? Some suggestions (though you’re certainly welcome, even encouraged, to not use these and move in your own directions): If using Nietzsche, you might want to focus on the performative dimensions of Nietzsche’s text – the fable at the beginning, for example, or his use of metaphor vs. logic to make his argument. If using Freud, you might want to explore his explanation of the way solitary experiences work to seed an almost infinitely possible number of dreams. Either way, one recommendation (again, not required) would be to start with Stevens’ quote from “The Poems of our Climate” that “the imperfect is our paradise,” figuring out what you take that phrase to mean and going from there.


3. Perform a close reading of one of the poems we read for class (whether we discussed it in class or not) with an eye towards the way the poem complements, complicates, contradicts or can otherwise be read in conjunction with either the Nietzsche or the Freud. As a good close reading, your analysis of the poem should attend to one or more of the poem’s formal elements - syntax (word order), diction (choice of words), rhythm, meter, enjambment (line breaks), structure, punctuation, among others - and should show how the elements you’ve selected help us understand both what the poem is trying to say and how your reading links up with either the Nietzsche or the Freud.