but the best has been saved for last. Language in Culture. The beast that has claimed numerous U of C students. In fact we just recently learned that William Hanks, head of the Linguistic Anthropology department at Berkeley, still has an incomplete in this course because he never turned in his final.

Here’s a sample midterm question:

3. Select a short passage of narrative or dramatic text [ca. 400-500 words; please supply a transcript or photocopy of the text-artifact along with your essay], and give an interpretative segmentation or chunking of it as interactional text, that is, as a be-degrees coherent development of social positions constituted and reconstituted by the participants. In support of your account of the interactional text, point out some of the mechanics by which the interaction gets accomplished: are there explicit primary performative utterances? Primary performative utterances? Clear denotational implicatures? Adjacency-pair structures? Invocations of other/prior event-structures and their role allocations (“interdiscursivity”)? Use of heteroglossic aspects of variation? A clear ‘voice’ [Bakhtin] structure emergent, perhaps with double- or n-tuple “polyphony” at points? How does the use of both referential and predicational deixis constitute the skeletal structure of movement of the whole informational structure of denotational text so as to constitute a kind of “interaction ritual” (Goffman) form in the passage? (Note: for drama, there is an interaction of inhabited characters that takes place within their fictive universe; the authorial message to the “audience” to this interaction is at another level. For narrative prose, there is a narrator role and the role of the narrated-to, distinct from the narrated world in which characters interact one with another. In both these cases, as Bakhtin noted, there can be powerful interactions across these ontic divides.)

Oy… I need to answer all of that in five pages. And also a similiar question as well. By Friday. And read about 250 pages of Freud.

On the plus side the people in my department took advantage of the beautiful weather and got together to play dodgeball and ultimate frisbee today. Originally we were supposed to be challenging the MAPH students (basically the sister program of ours located in the Humanities school). But those touchy feely types never showed up. So it was all MAPSS, all the time.

Now I’m at the Reg, our library, reading Freud.

so I nipped out for about an hour to attend an election party. Which is slightly better than a Tonys (ies?) Party which I also attended (though no where near as good as one of Tony’s Parties… Especially if a trampoline is involved).

On the walk back to the library, I had my break through for my midterm. So the in depth writing and revising is about to commence. I thank God… or perhaps the alcohol for the inspiration.

currently I’m sitting in the library trying to concentrate on my Perspective’s mid term. The problem is a wireless internet account. I’m switching back and forth between the project and election results at CNN.

I know I should ignore it, but I can’t help looking. Perhaps it’s a function of being at such a politically charged school. Either that or buying into the media hype.

reading

I thought I had it all under control. I really did. Then my syllabus finally arrived for “Language and Culture.” All 27 pages of it. Oh man. This is supposed to be a killer course in both content and its effect on the students. But I wasn’t prepared for:

Giglioli, LaSC: *Hymes (21-44); !Goffman (61-66).

Blount, LcaS: Hymes (248-82, esp. 255-69)

Silverstein & Urban, NHD: 1-17.

Duranti & Goodwin, RC: Goodwin & Duranti (1-42).

Goffman, Erving. The interaction order. American Sociological Review 48.1-17 (1983).

*Lyons, LS: ch. 1; ch.2, sec. 2.0-2.1; ch.9, sec. 9.0-9.3.

Lee, TH: Intro; !ch. 1 (1-39).

!Bauman, Richard & Briggs, Charles. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19.59-88 (1990).

That’s for this week. Part of that is due for class today. Which starts in about an hour and a half. Less actually. I’m off to read.

For those counting I did a quick tally and it’s easily over 200 pages of dense material. Welcome to the Social Sciences boot camp Matt.

one day down… lots to go

Yesterday came and went and with it, the first day of class. It went well. The obtuse readings came back into focus very quickly once I understood the concept and goals of the course.

I’m currently waiting for my second class to begin.

As to the questions raised about how to get wireless going, my understanding is to follow these steps:

• Get a wireless card and install it in your computer.
• Leave your computer on and wander into a wireless zone.
• Let your computer do the rest.

  That’s about it. Until something goes wrong I typically don’t get into the nitty gritty. So right now the entire thing is magic.

Speaking of computers, mine is sick. The tablet features aren’t working correctly. So I’m packing it up and sending it to tech support today for about 5 days. While I’m pretty bummed about this, it seemed like a better idea to do this now and get it resolved rather than waiting until I get later in the quarter.