After my second all nighter I succeeded in turning in my Language and Culture midterm. At this point I’m am hoping for a “b” though I’m willing to settle for a “b-“. It sucked. Two essays, five pages each. And here’s a sample question:

2. Why should ritual text-in-context be hypermetasemioticized in every respect? We have considered the role of densely laminated metricalization as the prime reflexively calibrated metapragmatics that regiments the signs within ritual so that the whole as well as its parts are determinate indexical icons, even if that indexical iconicity is only a figurative sign of aspects of the “conventionally cosmic,” i.e., the universe of presupposable conventions. But, taking one of the elaborate examples of ritual from our reading list, show how in addition to straightforward metricalization, the form is saturated with meta-semiosis layered upon meta-semiosis. (Recall here the relationship of the “literal” or everyday to the “tropic” or figurative in Jakobson’s account of “poetic function” in denotational language involves a metasemiosis moving from a lower to higher plane of meaning.) For the example you choose, explain the role of any folk metapragmatics that attempts to understand the possible/likely/guaranteed “effectiveness” of ritual as performed. Is there a Rhematic understanding of some principle(s) that make effectiveness transparent to local understanding, for example?

It literally took us one week to decode these things. Then almost another week to formulate our answers. I’m not looking forward to the final. And in the meantime I’m planning to take a long nap.

However, folks, start expecting e-mails as my life is sorta my own again.

the Reg is our post Soviet Block architecture library. And I’m here working on Language in Culture… in threory at least. I can’t concentrate and I need to get through at least 200 pages of reading in the next few hours. I’m not currently loving life.

I got a B+ on my Perpectives in Social Science Analysis Course. As I had been hoping for a B, this was good news. My gut is that this is the average grade. Basically what it means is that I can still get an “A” in the course, I just have to write a kick butt final, which I don’t expect will be anywhere near as intimidating. Well at least not quite as intimidating.

However, that can’t me a concern right now. Right now, Langauge in Culture is all that occupies my waking and sleeping hours.

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.