Paul Fry (Yale) on Levi-Strauss (and the rest of ‘em)

Paul Fry (Yale) on Levi-Strauss (and the rest of ‘em):
On the podcast both Derick and I made some references to Paul Fry’s literary theory course, which includes lectures on Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida.
It’s a much longer course, of course, so you can get ahead of us to get a handle on the dreaded Lacan, or see what Fry has to say on feminism and African-American criticism. The individual lecture pages linked above even have links to specific points within the videos, so you can jump right to, say, his comments on “langue” and “parole,” which were less than clear during our presentation. You also have the option to download audio or a transcript, and can get the lectures on iTunes U as well.
At 17:33 into lecture 9, Fry gives a more lengthy treatment of Levi-Strauss’s treatment of the Oedipus myth, explaining the different columns on his chart (though, he doesn’t draw this on the board; you can see it here).



Watch on YouTube.

He thinks Levi-Strauss’s treatment is pretty good in that you can even put some of the events from the story into these categories that Levi-Strauss doesn’t bring up. The examples he gives, though, make it sound like Batman logic: the letter “lambda” that starts many of the names in Oedipus’s genealogy looks like someone walking with a limp, which is related to the meaning of Oedipus’s name (“swelled foot”), which is in turn related to having a foot of clay, which is a thematic way of expressing autocthony, i.e. being born from the earth. Whatever, man.
-Mark Linsenmayer