My Archive

This page will remain under construction.

Once again, I attempt to create a unifying mechanism which will contain my dissertation. Be contained, you!

This time, taking a page from Lauren Berlant, I call it "My Archive" :

One does not find the materials of the patriotic public sphere theorizing citizenship in either beautiful or coherent ways. These materials frequently use the silliest, most banal and erratic logic imaginable to describe important things, like what constitutes intimate relations, political personhood and national life. In this book I am conducting a counterpolitics of the silly object by focusing on some instances of it and by developing a mode of criticism and conceptualization that reads the waste materials of everyday communication in the national public sphere as pivotal documents in the construction, experience and rhetoric of quotidian citizenship in the United States. The very improvisatory ephemerality of the archive makes it worth reading. Its very popularity, its effects on the law and on everyday life, makes it important. Its very ordinariness requires an intensified critical engagement with what had been merely undramatically explicit. -- Berlant, The Queen of America, p. 12

My Archive: An Outline in Progress

• Snippet: Chapter 3
  field.jessel's note: This outline was made with Checkvist, a free tool for making and exporting outlines. Cool, huh?
  • Chapter 3: The Essays of Yang Jiang 楊絳散文
    • Core Texts: Yang Jiang's Essays
      field.jessel's note: Note: I'm not sure exactly how many essays to look at. Is it possible to make comments about them all?
      • My First Time 'Downunder' 第一次下鄉
    • Motivating Texts (AKA "Theoretical Framework")
      • Tang Xiaobing on Melancholic Subjects (link)
      • Laurent Berlant, "Theory of the Infantile Citizen" (link)
        field.jessel's note: Here we ask, is Yang Jiang an infantile citizen?
    • Reviews and Ephemera
      • A young douban reader reacts to the essays, 2009