Re: yeah...
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Mon, 25 Oct 1999 21:42:15 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 10/25/99 9:23:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Akane574@cs.com
writes:
<< you know, it's really difficult for me, the lowly 16-year-old, to "jump
in,"
so to speak, in these conversations being held...oh well
-Lauren-
>>
Don't feel bad. Look, I decided, on my own, to teach meself Derrida just
because I think he's an important philosopher. And because I figured I'd
need to know him if I wanted to go to graduate school.
So I started reading his Of Grammatology. And beside encountering this hair
curling prose, I found out he was writing in response to a bunch of other
books, most of which I hadn't read. So as I encountered Derrida's reference
to these other books, I thought I'd read them. In the process of reading Of
Grammatology I read:
Saussere -- Course in General Linguistics
Plato -- Phaedrus
Rousseau -- Discourses, Essay on the Origin of Language, some of Social
Contract
Claude Levi - Strauss -- Tristes Tropiques (a chapter in a book), A Writing
Lesson
and basically gave up after that and just finished Of Grammatology. I picked
up some stuff on phenomenology, some Barthes, a shorter work by Heidegger...
On top of that, I took a course in literary theory and had some of it
explained to me. Then I read some of Eco's stuff, and have some background
in hermeneutics as well -- three or four textbooks in that area, some of
which involved linguistics.
After all that, the best I can say is that I have a pretty good view of a
subject I still don't really understand :) I'm serious. I see I've just
scratched the surface a bit. A teeny little bit.
But I had to work pretty hard to see that.
Jim