The Relevance of Personal Life

It appears that Norton might get a bit sticky in regards to our readings this week.  After all of our critical and analytical studies - and, especially after all of this week’s deconstructing - we know how the written word can be deciphered in many ways. 

In the Norton intro to Foucault’s pieces, it is written, “The relevance of his personal life to the work is debatable, but Foucault’s own growing interest in ‘the care of the self’ in his later years suggests that separating private and public is no easy task” (1470).  Then, in the first sentence of the next paragraph we read, “Our selections present work particularly important to literary and cultural studies.” However, wouldn’t we agree that “humanism,” or as Norton explains, “the postmedival understanding of who and what individuals are” is not mired in a literal study, but certainly a discussion involving culture and anthropology.  For our purposes, what do “literary and cultural studies” not include?

How does one analyze and critique these critical pieces about analysis and criticism?  How much does Foucault’s biography impact his arguments exploring a vast expanse of many topics:  medicine, prison, and sexuality?  How can a discussion about these broad and polarizing subjects not somehow impact the debate of anyone’s personal influences?  It reminds me of some other literary critics:  United States Supreme Court justices. Ideally, they must remove their own personal belief systems from their judgments and arguments when interpreting the written law.  Yet, society generally continues to scrutinize and analyze their backgrounds in an attempt to find out where their decisions, suggestions and conclusions originate. 

Also, since - as a class - we have embraced the viability and functions of a blog, I found this part of Foucault’s piece very interesting: “an anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author.  In this sense, the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society” (1481).

Even in our own blog postings, in our relatively small group of 11, we still are unsure of who wrote what, especially when that poster has a “name” that is not their own.  In this case, who is the author, and how does our comprehension of what that “author” wrote change whether, or not, we are authors or writers?  What of the overall impact of the written word via the Internet in general?