William A Nericcio

NERICCIO, WILLIAM A. “Lupe Vélez Regurgitated: Cautionary, Indigestion-Causing Ruminations on ʺMexicansʺ in ʺAmericanʺ Toilets Perpetrated While Covetously Screening ʺVeronicaʺ.” In From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture, edited by MYRA MENDIBLE, 69–92. University of Texas Press, 2007.  Via ➡️ http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/714922.6.

“Artif[r]acture: Virulent Pictures, Graphic Narrative, and the Ideology of the Visual.” Mosaic: Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 28.4 (December 1995): 79-109 by William A. Nericcio.

A major early paper in the history of comics studies that argues for the cross-infiltration of prose fiction and graphic narrative at the dawn of the internet age. This piece is at the heart of my #eyegiene project.

My first publication--it changed my life! Accepted while I was finishing up my coursework at Cornell. I dedicate it to my dear friend, the late great Andrew Hewitt, Comparative Literature, '89, without whose brilliant engagement I never would have finished graduate school.

Citation: Nericcio, William A. "Autobiographies at La Frontera: The Quest for Mexican-American Narrative." The Americas Review 16.3-4 (1988): 165-87.

Part of the front material provided in Amatl Comix #1: MORE THAN MONEY--a graphic novel by the Mexican cartoonist Claudia Dominguez.

MORE THAN MONEY: A Memoir by Claudia Dominguez is a graphic novel/memoir that recounts the true story of how the author's family recovered their father after he was kidnapped in Mexico City. The reader will feel the helplessness of the kidnapping but also be heartened by the humor and warmth of people who find themselves in a crisis.

MORE THAN MONEY is the first issue from Amatl Comix, a new SDSU Press imprint. Amatl Comix publishes all the dynamic, contemporary graphic narratives we can get our hands on! Our first issue showcases the brilliant work of an up and coming Mexican comic book star, Claudia Dominguez.

Advance Word on MORE THAN MONEY!

"Unlike most mainstream representations of Latinxs in the Américas that depict us as only of European descent, Dominguez's palette celebrates us as mestizo. And while Dominguez chooses to use the traditional 6-panel layout sparingly, she does so to great kinetic effect, conveying the urgency and anxiety as it builds to the moment of exchanging money for family. She wakes our hearts and minds to the complex ways that Latinxs live as a hemispheric population connected through more than violence."

Frederick Luis Aldama, author of LATINX COMIC BOOK STORYTELLING

Roland Barthes, Mojado, in Brownface: Chisme-laced Snapshots Documenting the Preposterous and Fact-laced Claim That the Postmodern Was Born along the Borders of the Río Grande River

Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands, 2012--pages 165-191

Originally entitled "Almost Like Laredo," the first incarnation of this photo essay was as a chapter in my dissertation, The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of the Americas. The essay, largely a Barthes homage/Baudrillard french kiss/Borges mash note, is set on the U.S./Mexico border in Laredo, Texas, USA and Nuevo Laredo, Taumalipas EUM. The published version of the essay finally clawed its way to print in 2012 in Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands, edited by Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter Garcia. 



An early version of the essay lives online here: http://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/1aprilLAREDO/laredo.html 



9/18/2012 

Format: cloth 522 pages 

27 b&w illus.6 x 9

ISBN: 978-0-253-00295-2  

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=806515

In 2011, Frederick Aldama published a critical anthology entitled Analyzing World Fiction: New Horizons in Narrative Theory. This is the Afterword to that collection.

About the book:

Why are many readers drawn to stories that texture ethnic experiences and identities other than their own? How do authors such as Salman Rushdie and Maxine Hong Kingston, or filmmakers in Bollywood or Mexico City produce complex fiction that satisfies audiences worldwide? In Analyzing World Fiction, fifteen renowned luminaries use tools of narratology and insights from cognitive science and neurobiology to provide answers to these questions and more.

With essays ranging from James Phelan's "Voice, Politics, and Judgments in Their Eyes Were Watching God" and Hilary Dannenberg's "Narrating Multiculturalism in British Media: Voice and Cultural Identity in Television" to Ellen McCracken's exploration of paratextual strategies in Chicana literature, this expansive collection turns the tide on approaches to postcolonial and multicultural phenomena that tend to compress author and narrator, text and real life. Striving to celebrate the art of fiction, the voices in this anthology explore the "ingredients" that make for powerful, universally intriguing, deeply human story-weaving.

Systematically synthesizing the tools of narrative theory along with findings from the brain sciences to analyze multicultural and postcolonial film, literature, and television, the contributors pioneer new techniques for appreciating all facets of the wonder of storytelling.

William Nericcio. “How This Book Reads You: Looking Beyond New Horizons in the Analysis of World Narrative Fiction,” in New Horizons in the Analysis of World Narrative Fiction, Frederick Aldama, editor (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 269-276.

A review article for Spring (Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, Volume 50)--the piece includes analysis of Carlos Fuentes's Myself with Others: Selected Essays (1988), Stuart Ewen's All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (1988), Sylvère Lotringer's Overexposed: Treating Sexual Perversion in America (1987), and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988).

“Sick Culture: Reading Across the Disciplines With Carlos Fuentes, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Sylvère Lotringer and Stuart Ewen.” Spring 50 (1990): 159-173.

The first version of a critical rethinking of the evolution of the career of Rita Hayworth, Hollywood icon, who was born into the world as Margarita Carmen Cansino. The essay is a blend of cultural studies, ethnic studies, film history, Hollywood and more.

A brief review of TRACKING THE CHUPACABRA that appeared in Aztlán, 2012.

Select paragraph: "Among the Latina/o intelligentsia, few figures are as cherished as the infamous chupacabra (and I am not speaking only of those of us born and raised in Texas, though we are, to be sure, a special breed). Perhaps only El Chapulín Colorado/El Chavo del Ocho, Frida Kahlo, and Morrissey (Gustavo Arellano aptly outs our love affair with the ex-Smiths crooner in “¡Ask a Mexican!”) loom larger on the horizons of our consciousness than the fabled monster who haunts the pages of Benjamin Radford’s exhaustive exposé, Tracking the Chupacabra. And that’s just in terms of popular culture and folklore. When it comes to the cryptozoological, the chupacabra is the favored monster of our trans-American imaginary. Our friends the Scots may have their Nessie, the long-sought, never-captured Loch Ness monster; and our mountain brethren from Tennessee to Pennsylvania may have their Bigfoot, that monstrous (and not just in breath and body odor), hirsute, peripatetic sojourner of the American foothills and imagination; but we have our goat-sucking fiend!"

“Rend[er]ing L.C.: Susan Daitch Meets Borges & Borges, Delacroix, Marx, Derrida, Daumier and Other Textualized Bodies,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (Summer 1993) 101-116.

A longer, better illustrated version of this essay will appear in Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race

Octavio Paz, viejito, was not the rabid Marxist he was in his youth--'so it goes' Vonnegut might say. In any event, I used this essay to explore the evolution of Paz's world view, how the young radical poet evolved (some might say "devolved") into a kind of stodgy curmudgeon, going so far as to rewrite his early poetry.

Dorian Gray in reverse? Something like that. I like the piece because I wrote it in graduate school and was able to get it published early on in my academic sojourn.

The sweet lowdown on everything Speedy Gonzales--a sustained exploration of Ethnic American representation, the history of Animation, and, of course, the secret behind the naming of Speedy Gonzales ( a hint? it's sexual!).

William Anthony Nericcio, "“Autopsy of a Rat: Odd, Sundry Parables of Freddy Lopez, Speedy Gonzales, and Other Chicano/Latino Marionettes Prancing about Our First World Visual Emporium.” Camera Obscura 37 (January 1996): 189-237." A much-revised, expanded version of this journal article appears as "Chapter Three. Autopsy of a Rat: Sundry Parables of Warner Brothers Studios, Jewish American Animators, Speedy Gonzales, Freddy López, and Other Chicano/Latino Marionettes Prancing about Our First World Visual Emporium; Parable Cameos by Jacques Derrida; and, a Dirty Joke." in  Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America. (Austin: University of Texas, Press, 2007).

Nericcio, William Anthony. (2015). Latina/o Dystopias on the Verge of an Electric, Pathological Tomorrow: Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 48(1), 48-54.

A critical article focused on pathbreaking director Alex Rivera's SLEEP DEALER

I am beginning to think that the recent history of our Southern California has less to do with Mengele and Hitler and more to do with the redoubtable Marquis de Sade:

"No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain; its impressions are unmistakable.""One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater."

The 120 Days of Sodom, The Marquis de Sade

Hit me, hit me.Strike me, strike me.Love me, love me.The peculiar and particular attention paid Mexican bodies by a predominantly Anglo Californian Llw enforcement community reaches heights that we must think past the easy solution of racism to answer.Following my late-lamented theoretical informant, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes, who knew so much that he missed the ambulance with his name written on it, I think it's important if disturbing to think about the pleasure that comes from such acts as walloping an undocumented immigrant on the head and body, pinioning their arms behind their backs as they scream in an incomprehensible tongue.Pleasure? Yes, pleasure. Sexual pleasure of a decidedly Sadistic twist. The exotic we know is erotic, and I am beginning to think that the recent history of our Southern Californian cultural space, Rodney King, the Rebellion in LA, the beatings of various Mexicans, has more to do with de Sade than it does with Hitler or Mengele or whatever. That is, that at root, there is an erotic dimension to these beatings.

{Hit this link for the entire short essay: http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2002/61/nerricio.html}

Ghost in the Mirror : Gilbert Hernandez's Errata Stigmata Revisited is a short piece I authored for Hilobrow.com, Hermenaut-founder Joshua Glenn's online magazine: http://www.hilobrow.com/2019/05/15/seriocomic-20/

Published 16 May 2019.

Glenn, an able editor, has pruning shears like Edward Scissorhands; So I posted the uncut, director's version here: http://textmex.blogspot.com/2019/05/repost-from-mextasyblogspotcom-my.html#.XOwKzC2ZMo8

The 'director's cut' of this essay appears in Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America--it is larger, has better pictures, and all of the jokes that did not make the cut in this, the first published edition of this essay. Get it here: http://amzn.to/textmex

The foibles of memory--I always had remembered my piece on Mexican-American autobiography in AMERICAS REVIEW as my "first publication"... but my actual first pub was this piece for a journal published by Romance Studies at Cornell. It's a close reading of Sandra Cisneros's THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET with groovy cameos by Paul de Man, Edmundo Desnoes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Cherrie Moraga, and Toni Morrison.

Nericcio, William A. “The Politics of Latina Self-Invention.” Entralogos 1 (1987): 5-14.

'She lacerates herself with memory.'
From the screenplay of Suddenly Last Summer (1959) Tennessee Williams & Gore Vidal

"Remembering"  ¿What Is Truth At The Border?

William Anthony Nericcio

{i}  I love the word "remember" as much as I like remembering. And I love "remember" as much as for what it means as for the way it masks certain ravaging, destructive processes essential to the dynamic of memory. In essence, the only reason you have to remember 'something' is that you have dismembered or forgotten it.

{ii}  Dismember: to take apart. The word most often appears in lurid crime reports or, not coincidentally, in business press accounts of corporate "progress." Murdered bodies and dismantled small businesses are the objects of dismemberment. They are, also, sometimes hard to remember.

{iii}  Memory embodies a destructive and creative process driven by desire. Therein rests its complexity as well as our necessity for describing its processes.

{iv} I must remember. I have no choice. And as I have no choice, no way of short-circuiting the desires of my unruly unconscious, I fall to reason and to rhetoric to somehow master--if only temporarily--the inchoate, sensual intrigues of memory.

{v}  And it is the border I remember most. The border I could not completely dismember and will never leave.

more? http://sdsupress.sdsu.edu/truth.html

The long, sordid, twisted tale of a book becoming a website becoming a gallery exhibition becoming a TV documentary series #mextasy #textmex #miraclesdohappen

For the final version of the essay--the pdf here on academia.edu is a corrected galley--go to Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, edited by Frederick Aldama:  http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137366450

A tribute to Jean Baudrillard from 2007.

The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies {defunct}
ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 4, Number 3 (October, 2007)
Special Issue: Remembering Baudrillard

permalink: https://web.archive.org/web/20080205151605/http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_3/v4-3-article25-nericcio.html


Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America

William A. Nericcio (Department of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University)

The table of contents, acknowledgement page, dedication and first chapter of my Cornell dissertation -- never published. Many of the essays that appear in the dissertation eventually appeared in print--some are included in this academia.edu archive.

A new book from Frederick Luis "Fede" Aldama and William "Memo" Nericcio--two devious, cultural studies infected/inflected minds, born of Tejas and Califas, combine their imaginations for this novel book filled with dialogue, full color images, memory, cultural criticism, y mucho mas more!

Coming December 2019 from the Ohio State University Press--preorder here: http://bit.ly/browntv

http://amzn.to/textmex

A rogues' gallery of Mexican bandits, bombshells, lotharios, and thieves saturates American popular culture. Remember Speedy Gonzalez? "Mexican Spitfire" Lupe Vélez? The Frito Bandito? Familiar and reassuring—at least to Anglos—these Mexican stereotypes are not a people but a text, a carefully woven, articulated, and consumer-ready commodity. In this original, provocative, and highly entertaining book, William Anthony Nericcio deconstructs Tex[t]-Mexicans in films, television, advertising, comic books, toys, literature, and even critical theory, revealing them to be less flesh-and-blood than "seductive hallucinations," less reality than consumer products, a kind of "digital crack."

"Marvels! Rompecabezas! And cartoons that bite into the mind appear throughout this long-awaited book that promises to reshape and refocus how we see Mexicans in the Americas and how we are taught and seduced to mis/understand our human potentials for solidarity. This is the closest Latin@ studies has come to a revolutionary vision of how American culture works through its image machines, a vision that cuts through to the roots of the U.S. propaganda archive on Mexican, Tex-Mex, Latino, Chicano/a humanity. Nericcio exposes, deciphers, historicizes, and 'cuts-up' the postcards, movies, captions, poems, and adverts that plaster dehumanization (he calls them miscegenated semantic oddities') through our brains. For him, understanding the sweet and sour hallucinations is not enough. He wants the flashing waters of our critical education to become instruments of restoration. In this book, Walter Benjamin meets
Italo Calvino and they morph into Nericcio. Orale!"

—Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University


Direct purchase link @ Amazon
http://amzn.to/textmex

Publisher's book page
https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/nertex

THE HURT BUSINESS: OLIVER MAYER'S EARLY WORKS [+] PLUS, edited by William A. Nericcio, contains the full, edited, updated scripts from Oliver Mayer's plays YOUNG VALIANT, BLADE TO THE HEAT and JOY OF THE DESOLATE; it also includes interviews with Mayer, critical analyses, photographs, ephemera, and other textual surprises. Mayer, an Associate Professor at USC's School of Theatre did his undergraduate work at Worcester College, Oxford and Cornell University, where he graduated--his MFA was completed at Columbia University. Mayer, whose literary papers are archived at the Stanford University Libraries, was voted one of the nation's "100 Coolest" people by BUZZ Magazine in the late 90s, and, having survived this brush with fame and fortune, his work continues to grow and evolve positioning him as one of the more singular post-movimiento Chicano voices in the American Arts scene. Hyperbole Books, an imprint of SDSU Press, is thrilled to showcase his early works in this handsome edition.

infolink: http://hype.sdsu.edu/mayer/

From April to May 2007, some of the most celebrated scholars of American Literature, cultural studies, and California history joined with noted artists, performers, and photographers for a unique John Steinbeck celebration at San Diego State University. Homer from Salinas: John Steinbeck's Enduring Voice for California collects these lectures, screenings, debates, discussions, and visual artifacts into one handy volume that unfolds as a mélange of old school “conference proceedings,” next-generation, Web 2.0 journalism, and a scrapbook. The collection, edited by William A. Nericcio, includes outstanding pieces by Jeffrey Charles, Charles Wollenberg, William Deverell, Francisco X. Alarcón, Hernán Moreno-Hinojosa, Pam Muñoz Ryan, Paul Wong, Fred Gardaphé, Arturo J. Aldama, Michael Harper, Joanna Brooks, Arthur Ollman, Louis Hock, and Susan Shillingslaw.

direct link: http://www.amazon.com/Homer-Salinas-Steinbecks-Enduring-California/dp/1879691892/ref=aag_m_pw_dp?ie=UTF8&m=A119ICNS1106UD

Ateliers de recherche: Images of Fashion & Death in American TV American Television in the 21st Century @EHESS (SIÈGE), Ecole de Haute Etude, 190-198 AVENUE DE FRANCE 75244 PARIS
Lectures, April 5 & 6, 2016 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153774748593653&l=b497e9cbcc

This essay was only published on the World Wide Web--it appears here for reference and not citation; a version of it will appear in Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race.

This essay is best experienced online: https://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/RobertFrank/frank.html

Lovers of film, photography, and literature are often left to pursue their insatiable aesthetic desires only one medium at a time. 

Happily, the work of Robert Frank presents a singular opportunity to bring together and enjoy these three dynamic and increasingly incestuous media simultaneouly. 

In the pages that follow, brace yourself for a multi-media screening presentation, lecture, and discussion will consider...

a). Robert Frank’s infamous short film Pull My Daisy, adapted from a play by Beat poet deities Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg...

b). selected Robert Frank photographic plates including “Elevator--Miami Beach” and “Television Studio, Burbank, California.” ...

c). selected works by Beat poets and writers...

The goal of this piece, originally produced for MOPA in San Diego, was to see how the aesthetic dynamics of one medium impacts upon the development of other related media: how, for example, Robert Frank’s work as a photographer in “The Americans” evocatively contaminates his camera-work in Pull My Daisy; or how Beat literary aesthetics impacts upon Frank’s narrative strategies as a photographer and film-maker.

In a presentation that owes as much to the Tejano founder of cultural studies Americo Paredes's George Washington Gómez and With a Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and its Hero as it does to the caped crusader of French Post Structrualism, Michel Foucault, whose Discipline and Punish has emerged as a veritable playbook for Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, with their legion of jackbooted neo-fascist thugs, cultural critic Bill Nericcio looks to recent developments in film, literature, and culture that are focused on the U.S./Mexico border.  The lecture focuses on the work of director Alex Rivera (Sleep Dealer), writer Salvador Plascencia (People of Paper), painters Izel Vargas, Nanibah Chacón, & Audrya Flores, and journalism/scalawag Gustavo Arellano (Ask a Mexican).

The Boise State community is invited to a lecture on Mexican culture at 7 p.m. Friday, April 11, in the Student Union Farnsworth Room. The free event is part of Mexico Week, which runs through April 12. Click here for the full schedule.

William Nericcio, professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University, will present “Orgasmic, Semiotic Cataclysms of Eyegiene & Mextasy: Digressions of Film Studies, Ethnic Studies, & Cultural Studies in the Televisual, Techno-Ontological Age of the Smartphone.” This presentation analyzes the various ways in which Mexicans are perceived and presented by the U.S. media.

Nericcio is the author of “Tex(t)-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the ‘Mexican’ in America” and the forthcoming text “Eyegiene.”

Mexico Week aims to promote and expand the community’s awakening to all things Mexican. This event is presented by Boise State University, the Third Cinema Group, the Arts and Humanities Institute and the Cultural and Ethnic Diversity Board.

http://news.boisestate.edu/update/2014/04/08/mexico-week-event-examines-mexicans-perceived-media/

A public lecture: Rome, Italy

10 april, 15h-16.30
Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (Faculty of Arts)
Aula Magna  | via di Ripetta, 2 ROME ITALY
Discussant: Antonio Rafele (Université Lille 3), Federico Tarquini (Università della Tuscia), Tito Vagni (IULM, Milano)

From Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives to Nancy Oliver and Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl to Spike Jonze’s Her: A Brief Illustrated History of Affective Disorders Exacerbated by Object/Technology Fetishism, or “How I Learned to Love my Phone”

http://www.sdpsychoanalyticcenter.org/community-connections/events/ira-levin’s-stepford-wives-nancy-oliver-and-craig-gillespie’s-lars-and

A cultural studies primer probing the semiotic peculiarity of Scarface memorabilia--the ubiquity of the same in Northern Mexico and the American Southwest and the uncanny set of circumstance where an Italian American actor, Al Pacino, comes to signify as an worshiped avatar of criminal potentiality for 'real' and cinematic narcos the world over.

"Film and Its Others: Watching Journalists Watch Sheriffs Watch Pee-wee Herman Watch" for the Looking Out/Looking Over: A Conference on Lesbian and Gay Male Film Conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the California Council for the Humanities, at the University of California, Davis--Davis, California, May 14-15, 1993.

An edited and expanded version of this essay from the 90s appears online here: http://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/watchpeeWEE/  The published version of the paper appears either above or below (depending on where academia.edu puts it in their next design 'upgrade').

A newly revised version of this essay will appear in Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race with UT Press, when I finally get around to sending them the completed manuscript.

From Westworld to Black Mirror,  From Ex-Machina to Futurama, the world of entertainment is mesmerized by our ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence, robotics, and super-computing. In honor of this machine-dominating turn of events (where even your innocent smartphone knows more about you than you do) our playful, experimental and improvisational Fall 2018 section of Introduction to Literature will be a wonderland filled with bizarre, alluring fictional bodies (some robots masquerading as humans; some humans with little humanity at all).

Along the way we will read and witness some incredible storytelling. We will prowl the remarkable and haunting nightmares of Ira Levin's THE STEPFORD WIVES and peruse the haunting hallucinations of Franz Kafka; the madness-laced prose of Charlotte Perkins Gilman will beguile us even as the psychologically complex (both hilarious and sad) painting of Jean-Michel Basquiat tempt us to see beyond machines to the bad wiring that has always infected what we call "the human."

But we will only have 15 weeks to introduce ourselves to the range of artifacts that masquerade as Literature at the dawn of the 21st Century, so things will zip along at an amphetamine-laced pace! Make no mistake about it: this is NOT a survey of long, white-haired, sedate, upper-crust, high literature folks--we will be as obsessed with art, film, photography, and the internet, as we will the trappings of traditional literature.

More an introduction to Cultural Studies than a long-in-the-tooth worship festival of the old classics (sorry Shakespeare, get-out th'way Milton, adios Edmund Spenser), our multi-media exercise in fictional fetishism will try to set itself apart with vivacious books, paintings, and film filled with tortured, robotic, broken imaginations.  We will be strive to be eccentric (ex-centric, outside the circle) as we explore the world of alternative subjectivities, "televisual" constructions (think Facebook) where individuals make and remake themselves on a daily basis. 

The phrase "Robotic Erotic Electric" will drive our curiousity as we try to understand why our species creates versions of itself that it then re-markets (to itself) in various media: books, film, photography, the web, etc. Are we becoming more "machine" as we fuse our consciousness with our smartphone and share our deepest intimacies with Mark Zuckerberg and the invisible, nameless folks running Tinder? It turns out that the seductive fantasies, grotesque nightmares, and alluring hallucinations that our creative writers, directors, photographers, artists, philosophers make (shamans of fiction, all) form a key part of what we call our psyche: the psychology or soul that passes for the person you tell people you are.

The class is open to all majors and minors and presumes no prior love or, even, experience with literature and cultural studies.

The web gateway to my new fall introduction to literature/cultural studies class at SDSU, Fall 2017  | website: http://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/2017/fall/index.html

The stories that swirl around us these days are filled with mirrors—from Alice in Wonderland to The Matrix, from Black Mirror to Breaking Bad and Mad Men (both Walter White and Don Draper have peculiar and haunting mirror-selves in the form of "Heisenberg" and "Dick Whitman"--their alter-egos). Consider as well how the world of literature, film, poetry, painting, photography, and, even, music (Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors”) are filled with these reflecting shards of sensual glass we call mirrors.

Inspired by this, our class will walk together into these haunting, sensual, disturbing, evocative mirrors, reading books, watching movies, and seeing photography and art that uses these mirrors as a dominating figure or organizational symbol. All of our adventures this semester will fall into the category of the what we will be calling the #mirrortext--a fabricated tale (written, filmed, streamed, performed) that acts like a mirror: for better and for worse.

The working list of texts includes oil paintings by Rene Magritte, novels by Carlos Fuentes and Wilhelm Jensen, cinema from Orson Welles, photography by Francesca Woodman and much more to come.  Open to all majors and minors with no expertise in literature, art, etc expected or preferred.

naked (adj.) Old English nacod "nude, bare; empty," also "not fully clothed," from Proto-Germanic *nakwadaz (source also of Old Frisian nakad, Middle Dutch naket, Dutch naakt, Old High German nackot, German nackt, Old Norse nökkviðr, Old Swedish nakuþer, Gothic naqaþs "naked"), from PIE root *nogw- "naked" (source also of Sanskrit nagna, Hittite nekumant-, Old Persian *nagna-, Greek gymnos, Latin nudus, Lithuanian nuogas, Old Church Slavonic nagu-, Russian nagoi, Old Irish nocht, Welsh noeth "bare, naked"). Related: Nakedly; nakedness. Naked eye is from 1660s, unnecessary in a world before telescopes and microscopes.

Bare. Unclothed. Revealed. Unadorned. Without cover. In a word, “naked.”

In this 2017 version of English 301 entitled Naked I/Eyes and Psychedelic Mirrors, we will use concepts of "the naked," "psyche," and "the psychedelic"  to explore the minds, bodies and art of women and men throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Along the way, we will spend time hanging out with individuals who are anything but normal and by the end of the semester we may well decide that “normal” is the last thing we want when we are looking at fiction, at storytelling.

The various naked minds, bodies, and psyches we encounter this term will teach us to rethink what it is we think of when we imagine the dimensions of the human mind--in the process we will learn just how instrumental literature can be in exposing the riches and excesses of this mind. We will not limit ourself to the written word in this seminar, as we will explore also naked eyes/I’s from the visual arts and cinema. If we do things right, odds are your eyes and “I” will be moved by these encounters.

This course is open to all undergraduates without regard to your selected major and assumes no expertise in literature, film or fine art. If you are curious about naked artists, naked souls and naked eyes, then you are in for one hell of a ride. With your dynamic participation, our adventure promises to be a spectacle and then some!

The working list of authors/works include: Appignanesi & Zarate's Freud for Beginners; Ballard's Crash, Garcia's Photography as Fiction; Benjamin's Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men; Daitch's LC, Allmer's This is Magritte; Emmerling's Basquiat; Mayer's The Hurt Business; Yuknavitch's Chronology of Water; Hernandez's Human Diastrophism, Powell's Peeping Tom, Hartley's Flirt, and Ware's Acme Novelty Library.

See it live online here: http://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/2017/spring/index.html

It lies. 

The SDSU catalogue lies.

You open it and it tells you, "Psychological novel from its inception to present, including major works from a variety of cultures. Readings designed to aid students in discovering insights that great novelists have unearthed in their explorations of the human psyche. Prerequisites: Completion of the General Education requirement in Foundations II.C., Humanities." Don't listen to it. Don't fall for that scam. It's perjury with a capital "P."

Well, OK, maybe "lie" is too strong a word, too bold a claim. Let's just say, keeping it between you and me, that the old boiler-plate catalogue description tries to do too much and say too much, when all you really have to know about our peculiar summer exploration is that we will be spending a lot of time in the dark, a lot of time in the dark naked.

Ok, so now, I am lying.

Psychology, the human psyche in general--especially if we are to be influenced by the writing of a guy named Sigmund Freud--is a place of the dark, a place that is hidden, a place that is raw, closeted, clever, evasive, but, at the same time, it is a place as well that is very, very, naked, open, exposed, and at risk.

You doubt me? Start writing down your dreams during the course of this term and you'll shortly be very surprised by what you'll see. You'll see too much, be too naked on the page and on the silver screen. Not surprisingly, that's what the writers, artists, and directors we will experience have in store for us in the days that follow.

In the six fast weeks that comprise this class, we will make the time to study closely a very particular and ultra-peculiar branch of "literature"--and let me make it clear here in the syllabus that when I write "literature" or use the word "text," I am talking about novels, short stories, and poetry--you'd expect that--, but I am speaking as well about films, graphic art, painting, and photography as well: in short, if it is capable of expressing a story, a dark sordid pulp fictiony and film noirish exposé on the workings of the soul, on the gyrations of the human mind, we are going to be down on it like gum on the shoe of a detective.

"Film Noir" is a key genre from the medium of Film; "Pulp Fiction," trashy, dark, and cheap, is a key genre from the medium of Writing--one of the most interesting developments in publishing and writing in the 20th Century. Each give us weapons to unpack and lay bare the workings, the deep, dark, quirky, sexy, and obscene dynamics of the unconscious mind.

Online syllabus:
http://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/2006/summer/naked/index.html

Day to Day course calendar:
http://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/2006/summer/naked/daytodayMENU.html

REQUIRED WORKS | BOOKS | AVAILABLE AT THE CAMPUS BOOKSTORE (not in any meaningful order)
 
Edgar Allen Poe Short Stories, TBA
Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Charles Bukowski Pulp
Gabriel García Márquez Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Ann Bannon I am a Woman
Gilbert Hernandez Blood of Palomar
Daniel Chavarria Adios Muchachos
Chris Ware Acme Novelty Library

REQUIRED WORK | BOOK | PURCHASED IN CLASS

Rosina Conde Woman on the Road

REQUIRED WORK | FILM | SCREENED FOR FREE IN CLASS
 
Chris Marker La Jetee, 1962
Fritz Lang M, 1931
Frank Tuttle This Gun For Hire, 1942
Orson Welles Touch of Evil, 1958
Henri-Georges Clouzot Les Diaboliques, 1955
Orson Welles The Lady From Shanghai, 1947
Charles Vidor Gilda. 1946
Quentin Tarantino Pulp Fiction, 1994
Georges Franjou Eyes Without a Face, 1959

Shocking!  Outrageous!  Obscene!  Yes, this class will be all of that and more as we delve into literary and cinematic meditations on everyone's favorite extracurricular activity.  But this class will be more than just an excuse to ogle voyeuristically at gorgeously entwined bodies, more than an indecent perusal of erotic excesses.  Truth be told, some of the finest works in literature and film depend on sex and sexuality to drive their storylines.  While a study of human sexuality in literature and film will be the order of the day, other crucial sex-related themes will drive our curiosity; these include: psychological pathology, fetishism, taboos, the nature of human desire, voyeurism, masochism, etc. etc. 

See the full online syllabus here: http://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/2009/spring/sex/

This is not just an "introduction to literature" class--or, at the very least, that phrase, that description, does not embody our ambitions nor our dreams. Our Fall 2015 experimental literary/art/cinema/web festival will focus on the metaphor of "hallucinating mirrors" as we explore the deliciously and outrageously damaged psyches, minds, and art of women and men in some of the most challenging and eye-opening texts you’ve ever sampled before.

And we come to this collaborative hallucinatory experiment focused on literature at a weird moment in history, a watershed epoch in the history of technology/knowledge--a moment, as rumors have it, where we are witnessing the Death of the Book.

But is it a “death” or a murder?

And, if the latter, “Who done it?”

The first suspect? The Movies or cinema (if you want to be fancy)--the heralded and infamous wonders of the silver screen heaping gasoline on the already burning, pristine pages of literary history. Next suspect? Television, the infamous "boob-tube," a technological innovation that invaded every home in America and turned us all into a nation of brain-addled, screen-sucking zombies. Next Perp? Computers and the Internet, with their insidiously addictive delights--memes that last a day or two but yank on the collective unconscious like heroin or worse. The last likely suspect? Our ubiquitous smartphones and social media apps—Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram lighting the match that burned Literature forever.

But don’t worry—there’s a happy ending (the ghost of literature not at all keen on making an early exit). The premise of this 16 week class is that the ghostly hallucination of literature will live on—evolving, mutating, transmogrifying. Literature survives and thrives, in books, on screens, in theatres, and, even, scrawled on bathroom walls… The need to leave a trace of ourselves, a tattoo of our existence, cannot be killed.

Fall 2015 Introduction to Literature seminar at San Diego State University--the online syllabus is here: http://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/2015/fall/

Our utterly experimental and improvisational Spring 2014 section of  "Introduction to Literature" (Engl 220.3—schedule # 21066) will be a veritable wonderland filled with bizarre, alluring fictional bodies. It is called "Robotic, Erotic, Electric" and in it we will review the magnicent range of fictional works focused on issues of identity, technology, sexuality, and something I call the "ersatz human." From the remarkable and haunting paintings of Rene Magritte to the irreverent and haunting hallucinations of Franz Kafka, from the dark, sensual nightmare of a 21st century Siggy Freud in the mad prose of Lidia Yuknavitch, to the curious and eccentric borderlands in the writings of yours truly, our catalogue of textual and screened delights has enough controversy, outrage, and mystery to keep us busy for a lifetime. Some of the ideas we will pursue? What is a "human"? of, for that matter, "the transhuman." "Why do we make objects that resemble ourselves" and "why do they freak us out"--am I the only one on the planet who gets freaked out by ventriloquist dolls? by mannequins? ... and why do folks who write novels, make movies, and do art spend so much time creating these ersatz, "human" facsimiles!????

But as we have only 15 weeks to introduce ourselves to the range of artifacts that pass as literature at the dawn of the 21st Century, things will zip along at an amphetamine-laced pace! Make no mistake about it: this is NOT a survey of long, white-haired, sedate, upper-crust, high literature--we will be as obsessed with film, photography, and the internet, as we will the trappings of traditional literature.  More an introduction to Cultural Studies than a long-in-the-tooth worship festival of the old classics (sorry Shakespeare, get-out th'way Milton, adios Edmund Spenser), our multi-media exercise in fictional fetishism will try to set itself apart with vivacious books, paintings, and film filled with tortured, naked, broken imaginations.

We will be eccentric—ex-centric, outside the circle—as we explore the world of alternative subjectivities, "televisual" constructions (think Facebook) where individuals make and remake themselves on a daily basis.  The robotic electric will drive our curious thirst as we try to understand why our species creates versions of itself that it then re-markets (to itself) in various media: books, film, photography, the web, etc.  It turns out that the seductive fantasies, grotesque nightmares, and alluring hallucinations that our creative writers, directors, photographers, artists, philosophers make—shamans of fiction, all—form a key part of what we call our psyche: the psychology or soul that passes for the person you tell people you are. Various folks will help us on our way: Franz Kafka, that dark closeted hallucinator whose bizarre imagination rewrites the course of 20th century literature; Robert Crumb the graphic artist and novelist, whose version of Kafka reveals the nightmare world of a literary superstar with cunning new insight and vicious wit;  there are others, as the final lineup still in flux.

In Spring 2011, my esteemed colleague, Professor Quentin Bailey, taught a memorable seminar for the English and Comparative Literature graduate program entitled "Police and Panopticons." It is in that vein, but with a decidedly different line-up of texts, that I now propose to teach a seminar on Voyeurism and Surveillance entitled "American Panopticons." Please don't tell Dr. Bailey that I stole his idea; he may set those aforementioned police on my tail (or, worse yet, the ghost of Michel Foucault). Seriously, when it comes to the dizzying mirror of the panopticon, invented by Brit polymath Jeremy Bentham in 1791, there is plenty of good material on both sides of the Atlantic, and so it is that in my first American Literature graduate seminar in ages, I turn my eye to Uncle Sam's mirror and to the cultural space of the United States with a course focused on seeing, subjectivity, television, film, art, and more.The book, art, and film list includes Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, Robert Storr et al's Gary Panter, Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives, Oliver Mayer's The Hurt Business, yours truly's Tex[t]-Mex, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Gilbert Hernandez's Human Diastrophism, David Lynch's Blue Velvet,  Paul Virilio's War and Cinema, Nathanael West's Day of the Locust, Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Chris Ware's Acme Novely Library, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Hal Hartley's Flirt, John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, Klaus Honnef's Andy Warhol and Sophia Coppola's Somewhere. Photography by Diane Arbus, essays by Susan Sontag, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault, and more may supplement our main readings/screenings/sightings.Through all of these masterworks lurks a deep and abiding curiosity about screens, representations, subjectivity, simulacra, celebrity, and mimesis. The goal of our seminar will be to give ourselves over to a kind of intellectual scopophilia, a libidinally-laced "satisfaction derived principally from looking." Many dominant themes will vie for our attention: "seeing and the Subject," "traces of Hollywood," "the cinematics of war/warring cinematics," and more. Most interesting of all, perhaps, will be our examination of how screen culture (Hollywood, cameras, motion pictures, {and now} tablets and smartphones) "seep" in/through culture--it gets to the point that you can't imagine a piece of fiction not somehow "touched" by the eye/I of the screen. I am presently finishing a book that looks at the consequences of this "touching"--an almost viral form of reproduction that leads to the formation of "televisual subjectivities."This graduate seminar is listed both as an English American Literature seminar (Engl 725) and a MALAS cultural studies seminar (MALAS 600B), and is open to graduate students in all fields and disciplines--graduate students in Theatre, Film, Art, Women's Studies, Chicana/o Studies, and Anthropology are invited to consider adding this class to their Spring 2012 roster of courses; advanced undergraduates should write memo@sdsu.edu if they are interested in auditing a seminar or two.Panopti-economicsWhat you can expect, what is expected...how to succeed in a literature/cultural studies/interdisciplinary seminar...preparationgraduate seminar course (the closest you can get to doing doctoral level work in the humanities at SDSU) is a pretty serious thing. Or, better put: it can be a pretty serious thing... but not serious in the heart-attack sense; more like serious in the "great, now i have to be accountable for my intellectual range, preparation, and imagination" sense.My expectation, of course, is that you will enter each seminar session having carefully completed the assigned reading for a given day.  But you should also know that my desire far outstrips my expectations!  My desire is that you will have both prepared the material by doing the reading, but that you will also have “prepared” the material as if you were the professor for the class.  That means doing the reading, surveying recent research in the field of said work, looking up published reviews and scholarship that focus on said work, and preparing questions (both discussion questions and close-reading-related questions) to share with your professor and your colleagues.  And because we are a hybrid animal, with literature-fetishizing folks, cultural studies-devoted gente, and other, assorted malcontents, this will give all of you the chance to share your various knowledges, experiences, and research with the group in a way that will be transformative. When we are undergraduates, it is easy, perhaps, to sit in the back of the room and listen.  And while you can still get away with this as a graduate student, you must also consider that said silence does your colleagues a disservice. We will be prowling through issues of aesthetics, visual culture, political science, history, and American Studies for four long months together; promise me, and promise yourself that you will use the time we have together to share the amazing contours of your imagination!

ENGLISH 700 
Chasing Derrida
Lights, Camera, Philosophy
Professor William Nericcio
bennington bookWith the work of Jacques Derrida we will have been, from the beginning, always already, chasing--pursuing the elusive shadow of a brilliant mind that has already anticipated our coming. He wants us to chase, or, (better put, as he has recently left the realm of this chaotic planet), he wanted us to chase. Jacques Derrida: the wily flirt, and we, his would-be, adoring suitors. This graduate seminar will dedicate itself to a hunt, a safari, a quest for Derrida and his major works, but I need to confess that the focus will be on his later writings --sometimes at the expense of his earlier operatic odysseys. So we will read Memoirs for the Blind, Derrida (written with Geoffrey Bennington), , Archive Fever,  and Paper Machine--leaving us no time for the vagaries and delights of GLAS and Of Grammatology.  Rest assured we will not spend all our time wrestling with ponderous philosophical tomes. Derrida was and is, in edition to being a philosopher, an artist, an autobiographer, a film star(!), and a celebrity. And to chase him will mean that we will, at times, have to ignore him, in order to get him--and really, entre nous, that is deconstruction in a nutshell.

Derrida was a big flirt, really, and the only way to snag our quarry, will be to go the other way, to give our handsome prey the brush-off, ignore the seductive charms of his alluring trace. To that end, the class includes films by director Hal Hartley (Flirt) and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind) and Kirby Dick/Amy Ziering Kofman (Derrida); each of these cinematic visionaries cleverly parse the sinewy, luscious labyrinths of Derridean architecture in a way that deepens our understanding. This class is open to all graduate students in all disciplines; adventurous undergraduates are also welcome to take the course for E499 credit with the permission of your resident Derrida channeler for this holy philosophical quest, Bill Nericcio (memo@sdsu.edu).  This seminar is for students with an open mind to intellectual history and philosophy, especially with regard to the way these fields intersect with literature and her sister arts. If you are curious and love to read, this class will be a pleasure; chasing Derrida may become a lifelong avocation. Slackers, however, will experience all the joy of a root canal as the readings will come fast and furious and this is NOT the kind of class where you can only do SOME of the readings.

Brace yourself for a Study Abroad class where we will devour as much of the cutting-edge art, film, literature, photography, theatre, and club-life of the planet's greatest city as is humanly possible. We will become curious and savvy 21st century cultural anthropologists as our field work sends us to all parts of London and beyond--in less that four weeks time, we will become one with the flesh and fabric of an incredible urban body, allowing sensual visual/viral elements to infect our minds and change the way we see (and think, and write) in the process. Travel and study abroad is a unique experience--like some sort of psychological tattoo it etches itself into and onto our minds and bodies changing our vision (and our lives) in the process. London will prove no different!

The focus of our class may, at first, strike you as a bit of a surprise as reading the SDSU catalogue's description for Anthropology 439 is enough to make one doze off or run away!


ANTH 439: (3 units) Cultural Comparisons through Film 
Principles of cultural anthropology to include signs and proxemics, cultural prerequisites, kinship and social organization, and law and values. Feature and documentary films.  [This course fulfills SDSU upper division explorations under area B--Social and Behavioral Sciences as well as cultural diversity requirements.]

Holy Social Sciences Batman! "Signs and proxemics" sounds like a new medical procedure you might want to avoid!

Our class will move in a slightly different direction--more 21st-century than medieval as we discover how "seeing" through London's EYE impacts on world visual culture. Using various literary, cinematic, and anthropological tactics, we will merge ourselves with the vibrant circuitry of Europe's greatest city; in the process, we will study and draw conclusions regarding creative communities and individuals performing or filming in the United Kingdom. If it is filmed in London, on film in London, about film, etc, we will pursue it--our field trips will be as likely to check out the screening of hot, new films in cutting-edge locales as it will be to encounter breakout performance art in a pub theatre.

In the weeks that follow, a great and lasting social science, anthropology (or Literature or MALAS, depending how you are taking this course for credit), will run headlong into the silver screen on the streets of London. And we will be there to watch the impact. Our four-week long adventure assumes no experience in the field of anthropology or literature or film, nor does it assume you know the difference between pulling focus, harassing a key grip, or calling “speed.” Lastly, we most certainly do not not assume a command of the streets of London.

What do we assume of students taking this amazing London-based class? Curiosity. Wait, that’s too lame. Not just “curiosity” but a thirst, a passion, a lust for new knowledge, novel insights, and beautiful, sometimes provocative, spectacles.

The films and field trips that will make up our class are a mix of visual delights--both films that feature London and the United Kingdom, and classic and independent films seen in some of London's amazing movie palaces! Our course this term is designed as a moveable feast, as we prowl across London in search of cutting edge, classic, and even, in a few cases, older art in order to gauge what drives the aesthetic imagination of the ARTS metropolis of Europe. The bulk of our seminar on wheels will be taken up with outings to the amazing number of arts altars dotted across the London landscape.

Love him or hate him, that cigar-chomping, sex-mad, disciple-craving genius from Vienna, the one and only Sigmund Freud, knew something when it came to figuring out the deliciously mixed-up minds of neurotic girls and boys-call them insane, mad, crazy, hysterical, etc, he knew his way around a psychopath. This new and improved 2005 version of the E301 Psychological Novel class has been re-titled and re-imagined with books, movies, art, and photography that either owe their existence to Freud (aka Siggy's Bastard Children), or, alternatively, are made richer by coming into close contact with Freud's ideas, theories, suspicions, and questions (aka Freud's Sexy Beasts).  So we will read works by Freud--the DORA case history where Freud figures the answer to a befuddled neurotic hotty's problems are a kiss on HIS lips; watch films by Hitchcock (SPELLBOUND) and others; scan pages and pages of canvases and prints by Remedios Varo and Van Gogh, and others to be announced. This general education class is OPEN to all majors; we will try to answer to the demands of bookish, nebbish English Lit nerds AND the unwashed, illiterate, haters of culture for whom an encounter with a book, or a trip to an art gallery requires therapy!  In short, come one, come all--you are in for one hell of an experiment.  There will be one paper; several shorter in-class assignments; an optional presentation; and other surprises.  Comparative Literature majors who have already taken E301 are welcome to take this class and receive credit for it as CompLit 499 or English 499 Special Study.

Our grand summer seminar, our adventure in intellectual inquiry, begins with the unspectacular premise that the human animal is a curious species. Evidence for this banal contention will be provided by various human aesthetic artifacts including short stories, novels, sequential art (graphic narrative), documentary films and movies. What becomes clear in these varied media is that the curiosity of Homo Sapiens manifests itself in creative acts of art wherein men and women themselves figure as the focus of these creative exercises. But we can't just leave it at that. Looking closer, we find that the men and women we meet in books, films, art etc. are not exactly like the ones we meet in elevators, bars, churches, street corners and shopping malls. These men and women are more honest, more troubled, less in control and utterly MORE interesting. Veils cast aside, these men and women reveal themselves to be a splendid cast of deranged and intoxicatingly honest informers, revealing the damaged psyches that drive their day to day existence. In these people and in these creative works we come to better understand the hidden and obvious psychological tattoos that permanently mark and determine what the ancients called the soul, what Freud called the "unconscious" and what we usually call the human mind.

DISCLAIMER: this GENERAL EDUCATION class will deal with ADULT issues and activities. If you are squeamish about insanity, human sexuality, erotic taboos or if graphic art, literature and film leave you weak, angry, disgusted etc., PLEASE drop this class BEFORE you get the urge to call on your parents and clergy to remove me from my job! This is a university-level course exploring usually hidden elements of the human psyche: you should EXPECT to be disturbed and moved.

"Osmosis, fracture, desire in the Chicana/o Tex[t]-Mex"--what an awkward mouthful!

And yet I am arrogant enough to believe this ungainly amalgamation of words will prove a valuable intellectual, cultural and political adventure. For American Literature zealots, our course represents a rigorous survey of an engaging body of 20th century US literary work. For Comparative Literature mavens, my own favorites as said designation represents my own pedigree, the class represents a literary tour that requires a systematic and non-systematic fusion of diverse national literary traditions: a "Unitedstatesian" (estadounidense) literary legacy with its links to various motherlands including England and Germany, and of a Mexican literary tradition, with its own attendant links to Spain among others--in short, Chicano/a Literature as the quintessential comparative literary matrix. For MA English Literature acolytes, know that the authors assembled for this "Latino" literary section are as likely to have cut their teeth on Joyce and Dickens as on Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and Carlos Fuentes, so that your UK-focused inquiries to date will profit you handsomely in this context--in addition, note that your attendant hermeneutic footman, W. Nericcio, while a "full-blooded" Chicano from Laredo, Texas, also has a London-born Great Grandmother's DNA spiraling through his chromosomes. MFA acolytes too, both poetry partisans and fiction junkys alike, will find much to gain from a careful reading of the assembled artists. Last but certainly not least, DRWS vassals, might also find some provocative examples of rhetorical intrigue afoot in the code and culture switching shenanigans of these Chicana/o fabulists. 

Osmosis: "Living cells," "Diffusion... through a semi-permeable membrane" "porous partition." These loaded phrases, culled from the metaphorically rich confines of the biological sciences, are not without some value in speaking to processes of the culturally informed textual production of Chicano and Chicana artists. Mexico and United States, adjacent, cultural structures share common substances: histories, finances, and semiotic spheres. How appropriate that the biological sciences should provide for those of us who study the arts and culture, a ready model to describe processes to be found in the border dividing, but, also, and importantly, the borders which define the cultual dynamics between the United States and Mexico. And it is no more evident than in literature that the permeable flow and exchange of bodies, ideas, canvases, and books that one witnesses the synergy, the mestizo dynamics of art history in Northern Mexico and the Southwest United States.

Why linger upon the process of osmosis? Mainly for a change of pace. Earlier scholarly and cultural studies this century have lingered upon the lands and people bordering northern Mexico and the Southwest United States as subjected sites--always tainted by the very real war which forever altered the geographic, not to mention the geopolitical, contours of the Americas--1848 looms as large for a study of the Southwest as 1776 or 1492 does for other regions of inquiry. The border is wound, the border as site of conflict, the border as hyphen or, even, following Derrida, as "hymen." All these terms are useful for describing processes, literatures, arts and communities at the border.

Osmosis, though, emphasizes another no less important characteristic of, and here especially, of arts and artifacts produced by Mexican and Chicana/o artists and writers--that is the sometimes slow, sometimes fast process of secretion, absorption and evaporation across the border dividing the United States and Mexico. To speak to the complexity of this osmosis is difficult; to trace how one artist, or a school of artists for that matter, saturate the vision of others working across the US/Mexican border is an exercise in a rigorous form of cultural, not to mention semiotic, archeaology--consider in this regard how the prose fiction of William Faulkner, translated into Spanish, impacts upon the developing aesthetic sensibilities of Gabriel García Márquez and his circle of friends, only to then return to the states as the Colombian Nobel prize winners fiction inspires the muse of Toni Morrison, only to have Morrison’s powerful narratives foster literary issues from creative imagination of Marisela Norte (Chicana poet) and the late Arturo Islas (Chicano novelist). Across and back again, visual and literary seeds flow through the semi-permeable fixity of the border--here, the migra or aesthetic border patrol stops no vehicles (or, perhaps, only an occasional one), said artists yielding lasting impact upon computer screens, paper, and canvases on both sides of the border and, in some instances, the silver screen.

"os mo sis \a:-'smo--s*s, a:z-'mo--\; osmotic \a:-'sma:t-ik\ n. [nl, short for endosmosis: alt. of obs. endosmose, fr. Fr. end- + Gk osmos act, impulse] of pushing, fr. othein to push; akin to Skt vadhati he strikes] 1. the tendency of a fluid to pass through a semi-permeable membrane, as the wall of a living cell... 2. the diffusion of fluids through a membrane or porous partition. "

Issues of simulation (and stimulation, of a sort) will be our primary terrain in this rambling tour of American cinema, literature, graphic narrative, and more. For some reason, and on more than one occasion, literary titans with an American background, or an "American" background, have authored works focused on issues of simulation and dissimulation, miming, aping, copying, mirroring, etc. These narratives of mimesis are also at once mimetic narratives, echoing/shadowing/mirroring prior narratives. For instance, you don't have to be Jorge Luis Borges (see "The Circular Ruins" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") to understand that literary history is a grand symphony of mimicry and mocking--that Melville's Moby Dick, is, in some ways, a rewriting of the Old Testament (the Old Testament, itself, being but a treasure trove of revised Assyrian mythologies--and god knows who they lifted their tales from).

In this review of largely 20th century American literary classics and curiosities, we will focus on all sorts of mimetic acts, from the exposes/enactments/embodiments of Hollywood that drive Nathanael West's imagination in DAY OF THE LOCUST, and Billy Wilder's fancy in SUNSET BOULEVARD to the recreations of Latin America and the U.S/Mexico border that fuel Gilbert Hernandez's HUMAN DIASTROPHISM, and Alex Rivera's SLEEP DEALER, to the meditations on human surrogacy afoot in Craig Gillespie & Nancy Oliver's LARS AND THE REAL GIRL and Ira Levin's STEPFORD WIVES.  Always already, we will lurk in/at/on/with the uncanny valley.

Buckle your seatbelts and order up some eye-protection--this is NOT just an "introduction to literature" class--that I can guarantee.

Our Spring 2015 experimental literary/ cinematic festival will emerge out of the twisted corridors of something I am calling I/eyegasm as we explore the deliciously and outrageously damaged psyches, minds, and art of women and men in some of the tastiest, most exotic and eye-opening literature, film, art, photography, and poetry this side of the planet.

Let's begin with some definitions:

eye, n.
Etymology:  Cognate with Old Frisian āge , āch , Old Dutch ouga (Middle Dutch ōghe)
1. The organ of sight. a. Either of the paired globular organs of sight in the head of humans and other vertebrates.The basic components of the vertebrate eye are a transparent cornea, an iris with a central (circular or slit-like) pupil, a lens for focusing, and a sensitive retina lining the back of the eye. Light entering the eye is focused by the lens to form an image on the cells of the retina, from which nervous impulses are conveyed to the brain.

I, pronoun
I /aɪ/ is the first-person singular nominative case personal pronoun in Modern English. It is used to refer to one's self and is capitalized, although other pronouns, such as he or she, are not capitalized. In Australian English, British English and Irish English, me can refer to someone's possessions (see archaic and non-standard forms of English personal pronouns).

orgasm, n.
Etymology:  < post-classical Latin orgasmus excitement or violent action in a bodily organ or part (1652 in the passage translated in quot. 1684 at sense 1; compare also quot. 1646 at sense 3) < Greek ὀργασμός , in scholia (medieval Greek or earlier) on Hippocrates On Humours 3 < ancient Greek ὀργᾶν to swell with sexual desire).
1. A sudden movement, spasm, contraction, or convulsion. Obs. 2. Originally: a surge of sexual excitement; the rut; oestrus. In later use: sexual climax, (also) an instance of this (cf. climax).

Enthralled by these treats from the dictionary, we are now safe to grapple with our neologism, or "new word" course focus: I-gasm or Eyegasm.  I/Eyegasm is a word (maybe, also, a symbol) that reflects our semester-long obsession with issues of identity and subjectivity.

But there is more to it than that!

I/Eyegasm also embodies a common experience--that mesh of our minds with technology, touching/seeing screens (computer screens, smartphone screens, television screens) that come to dominate our world view (and maybe, even, our lives).

Eyes wide open, so to speak, these screens become electric, naked mirrors, concealing nothing, revealing all. What may come as a surprise is that literature is the one place we will find artists, famous and not so famous, whose stories provide us with protection, intellectual shields or a sort, that open our eyes to brave new worlds.  But these books, movies, and the rest are not without their tricks, not without their surprises, and the fractured souls they flaunt before our eyes will test our intellect, imagination, and, most deeply, our emotions--they may even tattoo our psyche!

Originally entitled "Almost Like Laredo," the first incarnation of this photo essay was as a chapter in my dissertation, The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of the Americas. The essay, largely a Barthes homage/Baudrillard french kiss/Borges mash note, is set on the U.S./Mexico border in Laredo, Texas, USA and Nuevo Laredo, Taumalipas EUM. The published version of the essay finally clawed its way to print in 2012 in Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands, edited by Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter Garcia.

An early version of the essay lives online here: http://eyegiene.sdsu.edu/1aprilLAREDO/laredo.html

9/18/2012
Format: cloth 522 pages
27 b&w illus.6 x 9
ISBN: 978-0-253-00295-2 
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=806515

An article by Alexander I. Olson on the Tea Party in California, circa 2011--the illustration for the piece is by my cousin ("primo"), Guillermo Nericcio García, with whom I occasionally partner on the #mextasy project, http://mextasy.blogspot.com

An unpublished chapter from a book entitled the {B}order of Things--an anthology SDSU Press never got around to publishing.  The chapter features a story by Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets comic book fame and a close reading of the short story.

I stumbled upon this artifact--a handout from a guest lecture I delivered back at Cornell University, after I had been hired by San Diego State.  I believe it was a supplement to this presentation: “Fractured Border” for the Environment and Latino Imaginations Conference, Cornell University Program in Hispanic American Studies and the A. D. White Society for the Humanities--Ithaca, New York, May 1, 1992 .

Reviewed Work: To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate: The Italian/American Writer, an Other American by Anthony Julian Tamburri
Review by: William A. Nericcio
World Literature Today
Vol. 67, No. 1, Russian Literature at a Crossroads (Winter, 1993), pp. 247-248 (2 pages)
Published By: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
https://doi.org/10.2307/40149058
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40149058


Published now some 30 years ago, this was one of my first published works--an engaging, I hope, conversation with my friend Anthony Tamburri. His book, short and sweet, remains a masterwork of Ethnic American cultural criticism

A Book Review of Graphic Borders/ Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. Aldama, Frederick Luis & Christopher González eds. | University of Texas Press, 2016. 316 pp. ISBN 9781477309155. Reviewed by William Anthony Nericcio, San Diego State University

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Pulp by Charles Bukowski
Review by: William Anthony Nericcio
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Focus on Luisa Valenzuela (Autumn, 1995), pp. 791-792
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Face of an Angel by Denise Chávez
Review by: William Nericcio
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Focus on Luisa Valenzuela (Autumn, 1995), p. 792
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez
Review by: William Nericcio
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Winter, 1994), p. 141
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Useless Servants by Rolando Hinojosa
Review by: William Anthony Nericcio
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 1, Postmodernism/Postcolonialism (Winter, 1995), pp. 139-140
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Reviewed Work(s): The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña by Dagoberto Gilb
Review by: William Nericcio
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 4, Focus on Luisa Valenzuela (Autumn, 1995), pp. 794-795
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert by Rudolfo Anaya
Review by: William Anthony Nericcio
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 4, Assia Djebar: 1996 Neustadt International Prize for Literature (Autumn, 1996), pp. 957-958
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

October 1, 2009 at 5pm, AH 4131, The Italian Program at SDSU {in the Department of European Studies}, presents the first Italian American Lecture Series: "Race, Ethnicity, Desire, and the Construction of the "American" Self: Tempestuous Italian-American Fantasies in John Fante's Ask the Dust (1939)."

http://textmex.blogspot.com/2009/09/william-nericcio-on-john-fante-italian.html

Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious is a traveling stereotype {freak show/art exhibit} based on the work of William "Memo" Nericcio and Guillermo Nericcio García--it has previously toured appearing in the august hallways of the American Studies Program, Ann Arbor, Michigan (University of Michigan); San Ysidro, California (as Xicanoholic) at theFront, Casa Familiar; McAllen, Texas at South Texas College's Pecan campus Art Gallery; Laredo, Texas at the the Laredo Center of the Arts; at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa (April 8, 2011); and, most recently, at the Fullerton Public Library!

The latest in a series of exhibitions/presentations/charlas focused on Latina/o figuration in mass culture--new to this series of lectures and presentations was the evolution of stereotypes in a watershed moment with regard to smartphones and streaming media.

Dallas, Texas and Richland College! Something "Mexican" Your Way Goeth!!!! Hold onto your sombreros for "Tales of Mextasy: Rethinking "Mexicans" on TVs, Smartphones, and the Internet" Wednesday February 11, 2015, at 4pm in Sabine Hall 118 #mextasy #textmex

http://mextasy.blogspot.com/2015/02/mextasy-cavalcade-of-desmadres-and.html

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153057851223653&l=c057e8f8b8

"The UTEP Department of Communications and the Chicano Studies program presents a lecture and exhibit by Dr. William Anthony Nericcio that examines American visual culture reflecting images and stereotypes of Latinas/os. “Mextasy: Seductive Hallucinations of Latina/o Mannequins Prowling the American Unconscious” opens at  5:30 pm, Wednesday, Oct. 15 in Quinn Hall, Room 212 at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Mextasy is a traveling art show/exhibit based on the work of William “Memo” Nericcio and Guillermo Nericcio García. Mextasy both reflects and expands upon Nericcio’s 2007 book with UT Press, “Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the Mexican in America.” In addition to racist artifacts from American mass culture (the bread and butter of Uncle Sam’s unconscious), the show also features works that “xicanosmotic,” that is, works by Mexican-American artists where the delicious tattoo of the Mexican/US frontera is writ large as in the deliriously delicious semiotic tracings of Raul Gonzalez III, Perry Vasquez, Izel Vargas, and Marisela Norte.

Nericcio’s talk includes readings from his new book “Eyegiene: Permutations of Subjectivity in the Televisual Age of Sex and Race.” Dr. William Anthony Nericcio is professor of Chicano Studies and Latin American Studies, English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. He is director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the San Diego State University Press. For more information, visit http://mextasy.blogspot.com/  --See more at: http://www.theprospectordaily.com/2014/10/08/mextasy-exhibit-coming-to-utep

More info: http://mextasy.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-is-mextasy-primer-for-utep-mextasy.html

Story on the exhibition/lecture: http://borderzine.com/2014/11/the-mextasy-of-william-nericcio-dashes-stereotypes-and-builds-mexicanidad/

One can dream or speculate about the geo-techno-logical shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, Freud, his contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to MCI or AT&amp;T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail. I would have liked to devote my whole lecture to this retrospective science fiction. I would have liked to imagine with you the scene of that other archive after the earthquake and after the “après-coups” of its aftershocks. This is indeed where we are. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever1

In the twenty-first century, in literature and film, the predominant genre will already have been dystopia. A raging age of war (drones) and disease (ebola, SARS, AIDS), there is little room for hope in an era that worships mass consumption masking as playful mass destruction (video games), or mass destruction masking as playful mass consumption (crack cocaine, booze). Still, there are a few powerful examples of dystopia that give us another way to ponder the encroaching darkness of fascist futures. Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008) is that kind of movie—a contemporary story set on the U.S./Mexico border in the very near future, where the water crisis in the American Southwest has given way to full-on, water wars; where corporate entities have private armies and corporate drone air forces that police the skies with ruthless precision. Sleep Dealer, in the writer/director’s own words, “is a science-fiction [movie] set on the U.S./Mexico border that tells the story of Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña), a young man from Mexico who dreams of coming to the United States. However, in this brave new borderland, crossing is impossible, and Memo ‘migrates’ in a new way—over the net. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 90, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2015, 48–54