Here’s the rub: it’s clear that you both enjoy and profit from responding to texts associatively. So, you might give yourself a paragraph in each blog post to do that (e.g., “There are a number of different things I’m interested in in this piece: x, which does blah; y, which does blah, and z, which reminds me of blah). But after that, try to move toward the systemization that you’re interested in. Pick a single scene, a yeasty quote, and assess its meaning. How does it ground some of the thoughts in your first paragraph? What are it’s implications for the text as a whole, for postmodernism, for the subject?

Finally, the most consistent way to reach these goals? Regular writing and COMMENTING on others!!

So, postmodern work. It makes perfect sense to me that your blog posts return to the idea of the subject consistently; this is the same terrain that you’re working on in class discussions as well. Within the large area of the postmodern subject, however, you’re also beginning to focus on a couple of significant ideas that you might want to pin down for future research: the relationship between the subject and the object, and the role of the postmodern subject in relation to capitalism.

So, a quick tweak to your ideas about the death of the subject. Remember that in postmodernity, it’s not the subject ITSELF that dies, but rather the autonomous, free, self-determined subject. The “I think, therefore I am” subject, who is free to determine his life and what he is and means and how he acts in the world. In postmodern theory, that subject “dies” to the extent that it realizes that it is the creation of a number of social and economic factors, and it is no longer in control of itself. In postmodernity, we get a gendered subject (see Sherman and Fight Club), a raced subject (Nikki Lee), a capitalist subject (Fight Club), a fractured/schizophrenic subject (Fight Club, Lost in the Funhouse).

So with that in mind, it seems that there are two different avenues for you to pursue: what is the relationship between a particular postmodern subject and its object? (Or, in other words, what does a postmodern object look like? Is it different than a pre-postmodern object? In what ways?). OR, describing and analyzing the “recycled subject” in a capitalist world. Is a mass-produced subject destined to be shallow and meaningless—a copy of other subjects?

For either, I’d suggest that you choose a primary text (a novel, a set of photos, a film) and a theorist or couple of theorists that can help you develop one of these avenues. This will address your both of your goals above!