One of the groovy things about our new “open” society is how venerated institutions of higher learning like Yale are being strong-armed into sharing their course content online with the unwashed masses (aka you and me). This means you don’t have to go to The Interwebs or TedX to get quasi scholarly ramblings about your favorite intellectuals or ideas: you can get qualified scholarly ramblings instead.
Paul Fry has a named chair at Yale in English and Literary Theory and has done work on psychoanalytic criticism. This hour long seminar on Lacan covers key Lacanian concepts from a psychoanalytic perspective but works as an explication of these ideas in a philosophical context as well. Additionally, this lecture serves as a good bridge between our struggle with Lacan as philosopher and the reading of Poe’s Purloined Letter we’re about to undertake.
Please to enjoy:
–seth
Thanks for this, I have quite a bit of trouble understanding Lacan and I need all the help I can get.
I love Yale’s podcasts on YouTube! My favorite is the American Revolution class taught by Joanne Freeman. I didn’t know Yale was doing it under duress? What does that mean exactly? I actually thought they were doing it because it’s a cool idea.
They aren’t doing it under duress, I was being flippant. What I meant is that there is a huge movement of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) and universities are basically getting shamed or compelled to participate as if it is the next phase of public education. When in fact it’s just another content / monetization problem that no one has figured out yet.
Seth:
Earlier this year there was an article in The American Interest titled “The End of the University as We Know It”, the argument being that in the face of the rising cost of university education, the on-line version of university education will make the physical university obsolete:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352
I have been using on-line courses for a number of years – in part to refresh material in university courses taken decades ago, and others for pure interest sake – and I expect universities are safe for some time to come.
Roy
Roy–
Thanks for the response. I think making content available from “leading” universities is great for those who can usefully consume it. It’s the recent bum rush to get on a platform and create ___x distributions that seems somehow problematic. edX, Udacity, Udemy, Coursera – all of the sudden your university or college is ‘lagging’ if they don’t find some way to participate in the ‘revolution’. But what revolution is this?
this is really an outstanding series of undergrad lectures and quite something that they are freely available to people with internet access, that purloined letter can be a slippery slope back into the haunted house of language that Jacques built…
Regarding Lacan, Astra Taylor’s documentary on Zizek might be interesting. There’s a five minute segment wherein Zizek talks about Lacan. He says part of the aim his (Zizek’s) philosophy is to show that Lacanian ideas can be put in plain language. Here’s the full documentary on Youtube:
This is a fine survey course the Prof. Fry conducts that covers so much material, much of it foregrounding the overlap between literary theory and philosphy. In addition to Lacan, Prof. Fry discusses Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Zizek, Claude Levi-Strauss, and many others. I’ve watched the entire set of lectures ( I think around 26 lectures for the class) a few times and have always found his class engaging and extemely helpful explicating some of the more difficult concepts that one encounters in the various “isms” related to close reading/literary theory.