This podcast looks back at the best known and some say the earliest autobiography in the Western European tradition, Augustine of Hippo's Confessions (5th Century AD / CE), takes a brief digression into the work of 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, drops by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's own Confessions (1782), explores various aspects of the self-other dynamic, and ends with an eye toward industrialization and the city as refuge... 

In this episode, I examine the excerpt from Derrida's Of Grammatology that appears in the Rivkin and Ryan reader (pages 300-331 in the second edition), paying special attention to Derrida's critique of the pattern in the Western philosophical tradition of viewing writing as secondary to speech, and, for writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, speech itself as seemingly secondary to "pure articulation"... 

In this episode, I discuss the relationship between Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, from which we get the terms sign, signifier, and signified, and later iterations of structuralism, such as Roland Barthes' "The World of Wrestling" (from Mythologies, and available on Blackboard). 

In this episode, I extend conceptions of Jacobs' narrative as filtered through various post-structuralist paradigms, in conjunction with Jacobs' biblical allusions... 

In this episode, I examine the use of the Bible in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as a rhetorical tool by which the narrator demonstrates mastery over her so-called master(s).