The following very short essays are not, strictly speaking, required reading though I hope that you might at least look them over. The first, by Gary Leupp, performs a spirited demolition job on 300 as a racist, historically inept piece of postmodern propaganda. The second– by Slavoj Zizek, whose First as Tragedy, Then as Farce we’ll be reading at semester’s end– inverts that kind of reading.
From our friend MM Baktin, who gave us the chronotope:
“[A]t any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between different schools, circles and so forth….” (The Dialogic Imagination 291).
Vis a vis Jeff’s presentation, here’s a comment piece from the Guardian that discusses gaming and the recent release of footage from an Apache helipcopter attack in Baghdad.
