Dear Students,

As you know by now, I need to take at least this week off from teaching. We are so close to the end of the semester, and you are a good group so I am confident that holding class via email this week will get us through! Since there is plenty of work for you to do (between the next paper/s, reading and synthesizing ideas in the non-literary course-pack, and finishing the final project) I hope that you will use this time away from class to work productively towards achieving goals for the course. I apologize up front for the length of this email. Please read it carefully! Respond got it and read it! if you would. . .

I received an email from many of you, wishing me well, and I will respond to these eventually, and I encourage all of you to message me with ideas and questions that you have in the upcoming days. I will check my email over the next three days several times a day to get back with you asap. In the meantime, here’s a little more course business until my next group email. Please make sure that you check your email on Sunday night when I will update you for sure about next week. I’ll expect each of you to reply to this message. It will be your class participation for this week. : )

1. REQUIRES AN ANSWER --FINAL PROJECTS. . . I had originally slated the last two class periods for sharing final projects and would like to know which of you would like to present yours next Thursday in class. We will need to do at least 6 of them on Thursday if we are to spread this out over two days. I know what most of you are planning to do, but I’m still waiting to hear from others. I can help you with your plans if you give me an idea!

1A REQUIRES AN ANSWER An alternative to this--and this will work only if EVERY student in the class agrees to it--is to have a regular class on Thursday and then have all projects presented on Tuesday, the last day, and stay longer that day, i.e., until everyone has presented their 3-5-7 minutes. We could order pizza and have a little dinner celebration afterwards.

2. JOURNALS (requires turning in. . )--please turn in your journal (everyone) this THursday before 4 pm to Cynthia Burton in the Advising Office. You can ask her to put it in a U-M envelope if you want to make sure that no one sees it but me. I will try to have these available to you sometime on the weekend or Monday, at the latest. If you need something from your journal (notes from a non-literary CP reading or something you are developing for the final project), please make sure that you photocopy it for yourself so that you have access to it! Art projects that are not in the journal itself, I will see when I return. A short write up of what you experienced or got from it in your journal will be enough for now.

3. (requires, reading, thinking and writing. . . ) The Dec. 7 paper deadline is moved to Dec. 8 at noon but you should bring notes or an outline to class on Tues., Dec. 7 . The paper should be a synthesis of readings from the non-literary course pack. about the Self, the Other, and the Self as Other. It should be your attempt to take what others have written about the self and put these into a coherent statement about “theories of ‘self’.” Think of this as a report or state of the research you would give to someone else about what philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists look at when delineating different theories of the self. You should include actual quotes from the readings in the “other” coursepack and comments on these. I hope that we will discuss the ideas that arise as most significant as a summary of where researchers have gone and are going with respect to our topic, so please prepare readings carefully and put marks in the margins. The CP readings that I have already assigned include:
the following: 9/30 McAdams (35 ff), Woodward (162 ff); 11/4 Weber (110-134); 11/16 Mohanty 46-59; 11/18 Woodward (175-188);by today (Jung 3--34, Urban 71-90).

To round these readings out, please read these:
Weber, 102-110
Young-Eisendrath: The self in analysis, CP 93-101
Aron, “Including Others in the Self”, CP 1-11


From the others, I recommend that you skim through them or glance at them to see what interests you the most.

Cicchetti, for instance, gives a useful quick overview of Self studies. . . about self as subject “I” that does, creates, etc. and the “me aspect”--the known. . ., p. 14-15 give a good overview of the development of the self in early childhood (4 phases)

You may find Jung’s Development of Personality useful--it is easy to follow. Also, you should take a look at the Jung book I have on reserve for you in the EQ library, called _Man and his Symbols_ which is a great resource and something you will benefit from leafing through.

Simonds excerpt is intended to get you to think about self-help culture. She claims: “My interviews show that readers approach self-help books hoping to discover how to achieve a balance between self and other, and to develop self-identity they feel they lack.” She calls self-help books “ideologically powerful instruments of cultural commerce that are linked both with the proliferation of buyable therapy, in which assistance comes to be seen as a purchasable commodity, and with the increasing volume of the marketplace for leisure consumption.” Best yet: “Women may read self-help books because we have problems that are not addressed in other ways. Alternatively, the existence of--and the reading of --self help books may convince us that we have problems that mut be addressed. Self-help books may both mirror cultural values and participate in the creation of them.”. . ..

Sedikides is good on cultural differences and on individual vs. collective self, see esp. p. 64 on. . .

It is good to look at D. P. Wolf’s beginning of her article

The best way to approach this paper is to

1) Sit someplace comfortable and read straight through big chunks of the CP, underlining or highlighting the parts that you find most interesting;

2) Identify several of the terms you might define “self-expansion”, “relational self, “ “fragmented self” as these terms are used by others. If you wish, you may approach this as follows: write up brief summaries of a number of the articles (1 page each) or terms used in several articles, each with a heading (for example): “The individuated self”, “the individual self”, “the collective Self”, “I” and “me”, “the expanded self” , “the changing self” (etc.) and add one new term of your own invention that you then define. Ideas I got reading Ciccheti were: the “self systematizer” and the “self sentitivitizer” and “self separation. When she talks about a self-constructed self vs. an “other constructed self” you may see how I came up with these. If you would like to do the latter as a more creative assignment, you can illustrate it or design what it might look like if you were leaving a description someone from another planet could follow.

Thanks again, everybody for your patience and help. Good luck with your independent work this week!

best regards,
Janet