Re: FMA 48 - Goodbye


"Liz Broadwell" <ebroadwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:slrne0ed4s.lt8.ebroadwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 02 Mar 2006 01:14:22 GMT, elsie <lcubbison@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
snip>
For damn sure. The manga also has presented one exceedingly brief and
ambiguous image of the father/son relationship from Hohenheim's POV; it's
by no means as clear as the anime flashback. I'm waiting for further
elucidation.

That's intriguing.

snip

[Personal peeve: I'm not fond of the way I was
taught theory, which was devoid of application-to-text. The courses
would
go on and on about linguistics and metaphysics and psychology, and I
never
quite had the courage to ask, "Okay, but how am I supposed to use this
stuff when I'm reading a book?" Faint heart never won a proper grasp of
postmodernism.]

Ain't that the truth! And seriously that's what's wrong with much of how
theory is taught. And why people come out of English majors hating theory.
And why I teach it through application to text. Just out of curiosity, did
you get the historical survey approach?

Sort of. The undergrad course started with snippets from Plato and
Aristotle, then jumped straight into the twentieth century: a little
Levi-Strauss, a little Foucault, a little Derrida, a little of several
other authors. (I do have fond memories of the final project I did for
this course. Rather than write a straightforward analytical paper, I
persuaded the professor to accept a sequel to Plato's _Ion_ in which Ion
calls Socrates out, demanding satisfaction for having been libelled.
Socrates then snags Plato out from behind the pillar where he's taking
notes and proceeds to demolish his arguments -- or at least, demolish them
to the extent that I could; not being as smart as Plato or Socrates, I was
a bit nervous about whether this bit would work -- and tells him to
apologize to Ion and withdraw the dialogue from circulation. Just then
the soldiers arrive to arrest Socrates, and Plato lets out an ambiguous
exclamation. The professor passed me. Phew.) The graduate course was a
historical survey: a little of the classical period, a fair swath of the
nineteenth century (particularly Kant and Nietzsche); then the twentieth.

I prefer to teach the course as units: literature and language featuring new
critics, rhetorical criticism, semiotics; literature and the mind featuring
reader response and psychoanalysis; and literature and culture, featuring
marxism, cultural studies, post-colonialism, new historicism, queer theory.
I tend to cover feminism as branches within the other theories. Are you
familiar with Kenneth Burke's cocktail party metaphor? I use it as the
guiding principle for the course.

I audited this one and was *very* glad of it, because by the time we
started in on Kant I was well lost. No one else seemed to be, but perhaps
they simply hid it better. The students who seemed to be doing best in
the course were the ones who had a theory background already or an intense
enthusiasm for philosophy. I'll admit that once we hit the
postmodernists, I kept tripping over my own philosophical preferences -- a
sort of "look, I know it's both perceptually and conceptually mediated,
but there is a there there and it's silly to claim there isn't!" reaction.
I have no trouble deconstructing texts, but I do have some trouble
deconstructing life after a certain point.

I'd comment on this but I'm not feeling well again and deconstruction takes
more brainpower than I have at the moment.

snip

Hey, is this the point where I should mention, for Ed's fans'
delectation,
that the latest chapter of the manga had an Ed-in-the-shower scene?
</grin>

Ooh! gif? (hey, if the guys can demand gifs....)

<wrestles with the issues> I'm not sure. I might be able to produce one,
but I don't have anywhere to put it for viewing. The places which do have
viewable images that I know of have also scanlated the dialogue. The sin
of copyright infringement weighs heavy on my soul when I contemplate
facing my own Author :-), but perhaps more important is the fact that the
dialogue is spoiler-heavy and I would not for the world spoil the
just-concluded arc. Too many "whaaat?" and "eek! wow!" moments.

Okay. I'll just wait for it to reach the US version.

<snippage>

snip
Hurray! As I stated elsethread, I don't believe the Philosopher's
Stone
to be a morally neutral object, so I'm glad to see Ed reject the use
of
it on ends/means grounds. Whether that position holds through the
next
three episodes, however ...

Or whether he'll even be allowed to reject it.

I wonder if Al will take the decision out of his hands.

I'm worried that Al won't take care of himself.

Now I'm worried Dave is going to say something cryptic. Again. Or maybe
just grin. Again. :-)

Along with a loud Bwahaha!

<snippage>

What? The other side of the gate is *us*? What?!

I think so, sort of.

I think you're right, but it's not quite what I was expecting. Again,
reading the manga gives you some occasionally disorienting double vision
on the basic issues. I wondered if something like this was coming when
Dave suggested Asimov's _The Gods Themselves_ as a parallel, back
several
months ago. I was kind of hoping for something a little more
transcendent, myself, but I'd like to see what the anime gets out of
this
idea. The whole thing with the baby had me channeling Wordsworth the
other week ("Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting"), but he's
talking
transcendence, too. Hmm.

Well, I'm reminded of a conference paper I did on Digimon Tamers (yes,
seriously). Chiaki Konaka did something really interesting in that series.
You had multiple worlds going on. The world of the Digimon series the kids
watched, the "real" world of the story, the digital world, and so on but
all
in relation to the world of the viewer (which is our world). Worlds within
worlds, not just moving from alternate world to alternate world but from
narrative world to narrative world. I applied Baudrillard as I remember. A
lot of fun.

Cool. Is it published anywhere?

It's on my website, I believe, at
http://www.radford.edu/~lcubbiso/personal/research/digimon.htm

laurie


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