Welcome back English Majors, new and old! Spring Semester is in full swing, and there are plenty of literary adventures to be had!
Before your “To Be Read” list gets too long, you might be interested in checking out the latest article from our very own Dr. Robert Hughes. His article “Irigaray’s figures of home and the malformation of male subjectivity” focuses on a contemporary French feminist philosopher named Luce Irigaray and why (in her view) it’s so complicated being a boy.
If you’d like, here is a more in-depth description of the essay:
This essay illuminates the recent philosophy of Luce Irigaray by following how she develops her key trope of home. Thus, it elaborates her critique of a certain closed “homely” formation of man’s subjectivity and it advances her thesis that woman might function as the salutary advent of the other sex, unhousing man, exposing his subjectivity as not-whole and sheltering him in a more open and unhomely existential home. The first section outlines man’s efforts to carve form and thought from primordial flux and to establish a world and home defined by discrete objects. However, as the second section shows, man goes too far, enveloping himself in fantasies that maladaptively deny the incompletion of human existence. Man would do better, Irigaray argues, to grant the universe its living sense of becoming. The final section reads Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion in Homer’s Odyssey to elaborate upon Irigaray’s privileging of woman as home.
So, if you see Dr. Hughes around campus, be sure to congratulate him on his most recent publication!