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[Assistant] It's not far, and it's the path you walk every day.


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[Assistant] I know what you can do. Sing a song. That's what I do when I'm worried, like this.


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[Assistant] La la la la la ding ding dong Sing sing sing a happy song La la la la la ding ding dong I won't be scared as I walk along


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[Assistant] Her light doesn't last long, so only use it when you're really scared.


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[Assistant] The University of Notre Dame asked, what would you fight for?


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[Assistant] Now, I'm sure not many of you would be so blunt.


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[Assistant] If we could just teach them how to live their lives, if they would only listen. And to be honest, this was what I thought for a long time.


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[Assistant] It all started when I accidentally stumbled upon a paper by a few American psychologists. They had traveled 8,000 miles all the way to India for a fascinating study. And it was an experiment with sugarcane farmers.


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[Assistant] You should know that these farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. And this means that they're relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other.


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[Assistant] The farmer scored much worse on the test before the harvest.


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[Assistant] The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. Now, to give you an idea, that's comparable to losing a night's sleep, or the effects of alkalism.


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[Assistant] A few months later, I heard that Elder Shafir, a professor at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study, was coming over to Holland, where I live. So we met up in Amsterdam to talk about his revolutionary new theory of poverty. And I can sum it up in just two words. Scarcity mentality.


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[Assistant] It turns out that people behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. And what that thing is doesn't much matter. Whether it's not enough time, money or food.


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[Assistant] You could compare it to a new computer that's running 10 heavy programs at once.


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[Assistant] They're not making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they're living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions. So suddenly ...


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[Assistant] I understood why so many of our anti-poverty programs don't work.


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[Assistant] Investments in education for example are often completely ineffective. Poverty is not a lack of knowledge.


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[Assistant] A recent analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of money management training came to the conclusion that it has almost no effect at all. Now don't get me wrong.


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[Assistant] This is not to say that the poor don't learn anything. They can come out wiser, for sure. But it's not enough. Or, as Professor Shafir told me,


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[Assistant] It's like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea. I still remember sitting there perplexed.


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[Assistant] Actually, I realized I had read about the psychology of poverty before. George Orwell.


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[Assistant] One of the greatest writers who ever lived experienced poverty firsthand in the 1920s.


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[Assistant] The essence of poverty, he wrote back then, is that it annihilates the future. And he marveled at quote,


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[Assistant] We could help the poor with their paperwork or send them a text message to remind them to pay their bills. This type of solution is hugely popular with modern politicians. Mostly because, well, they cost next to nothing.


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[Assistant] These solutions are, I think, a symbol of this era, in which we so often treat the symptoms, but ignore the underlying cause. So I wonder.


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[Assistant] Why don't we just change the context in which the poor live?


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[Assistant] Or going back to our computer analogy, why keep tinkering around with the software when we can easily solve the problem by installing some extra memory instead?


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[Assistant] Now, at that point, Professor Shafir responded with a blank look. And after a few seconds, he said, Ah, I get it. You mean, you want to just hand out more money to the poor to eradicate poverty? Sure, that'd be great.


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[Assistant] But I'm afraid that brand of left-wing politics you've got in Amsterdam, it doesn't exist in the States. But is this really an old-fashioned leftist idea?


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[Assistant] It's a monthly grant, enough to pay for your basic needs. Food, shelter, education.


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[Assistant] And in the three years that followed, I read everything I could find about basic income.


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[Assistant] So when it became clear there was no money left to analyze the results, the researchers decided to back their files away in some 2,000 boxes. 25 years went by.


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[Assistant] And then, Evelyn Freje, a Canadian professor, found the records. And for three years, she subjected the data to all manner of statistical analysis, and no matter what she tried, the results were the same every time. The experiment had been a resounding success.


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[Assistant] Evelin 4j discovered that the people in Dolphin had not only become richer, but also smarter and healthier.


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[Assistant] The school performance of kids improved substantially.


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[Assistant] Domestic violence incidents were down, as were mental health complaints. And people didn't quit their jobs.


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[Assistant] The only ones who worked a little less were new mothers and students who stayed in school longer.


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[Assistant] Similar results have since been found in countless other experiments around the globe, from the US to India.


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[Assistant] And we should get rid of the vast industry of paternalistic bureaucrats when we can simply hand over their salaries to the poor they're supposed to help.


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[Assistant] Just imagine how many brilliant scientists and entrepreneurs and writers like George Orwell are now withering away in scarcity.


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[Assistant] And we can't afford not to do it, because poverty is hugely expensive.


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[Assistant] It's estimated at 500 billion dollars each year, in terms of higher healthcare spending, higher dropout rates and more crime.


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[Assistant] Now this is an incredible waste of human potential.


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[Assistant] But let's talk about the elephant in the room. How could we ever afford a basic income guarantee? Well, it's actually a lot cheaper than you may think.


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[Assistant] I really believe that the time has come for radical, new ideas. And basic income is so much more than just another policy. It is also a complete rethink of what work actually is. And in that sense, it will not only free the poor, but also the rest of us.


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[Assistant] Nowadays, millions of people feel that their jobs have little meaning or significance. A recent poll among 230,000 employees in 142 countries found that only 30% of workers actually like their jobs.


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[Assistant] And another poll found that as much as 37 percent of British workers have a job that they think doesn't even need to exist. It's like Brett Pitt says in Fight Club.


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[Assistant] Now, don't get me wrong. I mean, I'm not talking about the teachers and the garbage men and the care workers here. If they'd stop working, we'd be in trouble.


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[Assistant] Or something like that. Just imagine again.


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[Assistant] The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.


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[Assistant] There is nothing inevitable about the way we structure our society and economy right now. Ideas can and do change the world.


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[Assistant] And I think that especially in the past few years, it has become abundantly clear that we cannot stick to the status quo, that we need new ideas.


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[Assistant] About a future of rising inequality, xenophobia and climate change. But it's not enough to know what we're against.


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[Assistant] I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give.


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[Assistant] I believe in a future where an existence without poverty is not a privilege, but a right we all deserve. So here we are.


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[Assistant] Here we are, we've got the research, we've got the evidence, and we've got the means. Now, more than 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about basic income, and 100 years after George Orwell discovered the true nature of poverty, we all need to change our worldview. Because poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash. Thank you.


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[Assistant] Hi, and welcome back. Again, my name is Paul Gruber, and this is the Pronunciation Workshop's 15th training session. Congratulations, you have made it to the final session.


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[Assistant] Consonants, vowels, intonation, phrase reductions and word endings. As I told you earlier in the program, I recommend that you speak out loud when you are practicing this material and also try to listen really hard to my pronunciation.


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[Assistant] Try to hear it when I voice my Z endings.


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[Assistant] Or bring my lips forward for an R or a W sound.


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[Assistant] Okay, let's begin with some reading passages. You'll see that they start out easy and progressively become more difficult. For today, I wanted to give you some material that I thought was challenging. You will also find these passages in your workbook under session 15. Here we go. A foreign student.


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[Assistant] When a student from another country comes to study in the United States.


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[Assistant] He has to find out for himself the answers to many questions.


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[Assistant] And he has many problems to think about. Where should he live?


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[Assistant] Would it be better living in a dormitory or in a private room off campus?


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[Assistant] Should he spend all of his time studying or should he take advantage of the many cultural and social activities that are offered?


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[Assistant] At first, he may not feel that he fits in with the American culture.


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[Assistant] He may not feel confident when he speaks.


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[Assistant] Little by little, however, he learns how to handle himself in various situations.


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[Assistant] Finally, he begins to feel very secure and at home. Unfortunately, this long awaited feeling doesn't develop suddenly. It takes time.


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[Assistant] Very good. Okay, the next paragraph is on volcanoes.


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[Assistant] Volcanoes are holes in the earth's crust, which allow molten rock to escape from beneath.


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[Assistant] The molten rock or lava may flow out gently or it may be blasted high in the air with gas and ash in a violent explosion.


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[Assistant] Three quarters of them are found within a zone called the Ring of Fire.


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[Assistant] One edge of the zone stretches along the west coast of the Americas from Chile to Alaska. The other edge runs along the east coast of Asia from Siberia to New Zealand.


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[Assistant] Twenty percent of these volcanoes are located in Indonesia.


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[Assistant] Other big groupings are in Japan, the Aleutian Islands, and Central America.


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[Assistant] Very good. Okay, this next paragraph is about the Chinese language.


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[Assistant] Chinese is a most unusual language. It differs from English and most other major languages in that it has hundreds of different dialects.


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[Assistant] A person who lives in one section of the vast country of China often cannot understand a fellow Chinese who lives in another section.


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[Assistant] These two major dialects are Cantonese and Mandarin.


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[Assistant] Cantonese is a southern dialect. Mandarin, a dialect that originated in northern China, is spoken by more Chinese than any other dialect.


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[Assistant] Non-Chinese people often say that the Chinese seem to sing their language. Chinese sounds as though it is sung because many words are only one syllable long.


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[Assistant] And because the tone of voice changes for each word. As in English, many words have more than one meaning. The speaker's tone of voice indicates each word's specific meaning.


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[Assistant] Even more fascinating than the variety of spoken sounds is the Chinese written language. It has no alphabet. Instead, it employs signs called characters.


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[Assistant] Each spoken word in the language is represented by a separate character.


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[Assistant] Originally, the characters were drawings that depicted the meanings of the words.


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[Assistant] But over the years, they have simplified and most no longer look like the things they represent.


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[Assistant] Very good. Okay, this next paragraph is on the supercontinent.


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[Assistant] Around 100 to 150 million years ago, there may have been only one continent on our planet. At least, that is what some Earth scientists have decided after years of research.


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[Assistant] If you look at the map of the world carefully, you can see that the present day continents could be thought of as the pieces to a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.


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[Assistant] In your imagination, carefully put the pieces together to form the supercontinent.


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[Assistant] You will see that if you took away the South Atlantic Ocean and pressed South America,


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[Assistant] And Africa together, they would fit very nicely.


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[Assistant] You could continue removing oceans and seas and put other parts of the world together quite easily.


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[Assistant] Until you get to those last two pieces of Australia and Antarctica. Scientists believe that the continents of Australia and Antarctica were once linked together.


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[Assistant] Okay, the video for this session continues on Session 15, Part 2.


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[Assistant] B. Please go to that now. Session 15, Part B. I'll see you there.


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[Assistant] This is very good way to comfort someone. Let's just...


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[Assistant] I thought showing him the power of the flayer might convince him to surrender.


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[Assistant] You needn't worry, we gave warning for them to evacuate well in advance


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[Assistant] Of course, the damage to the city was significant, but we did everything we could to minimize it.


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[Assistant] Uhm, there's a beautiful book on this topic by David Kahn called The Code Breakers that covers the history of cryptography all the way from the Babylonian era to the present.


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[Assistant] Here I'm just going to give you a few examples of historical ciphers, all of which are badly broken.


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[Assistant] So to talk about ciphers, the first thing I'm going to do is introduce our friends, Alice and Bob, who are going to be with us for the rest of the quarter. So Alice and Bob are trying to communicate securely, uh, and there is an attacker who's trying to eavesdrop on their conversation.


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[Assistant] So now they're gonna use a cipher, which is a pair of algorithms, an encryption algorithm denoted by E, and a decryption algorithm, D.


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[Assistant] And then it outputs a ciphertext, which is the encryption of the message M using the key K. I'm always gonna write the key first, and when I write colon equals, what I mean is that the expression defines what C, what the variable C stands for.


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[Assistant] Now the ciphertext is transmitted over the internet to Bob somehow. Actually, it could be transmitted over the internet.


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[Assistant] So the decryption algorithm outputs the original plaintext message.


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[Assistant] Now the reason we say that these, the reason we say that these are symmetric ciphers is that both the encryptor and decryptor actually use the same key key. As we'll see later in the course, there are ciphers where the encryptor uses one key and the decryptor uses a different key. But here we're just going to focus on symmetric cipher where both sides use the same


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[Assistant] So let me give you a few historic examples, uh, of ciphers. The first example, the simplest one, is called a substitution cipher. I'm sure all of you played with substitution ciphers when you were in kindergarten. Uh, basically a key for a substitution cipher is a substitution table.


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[Assistant] That basically says how to map our letters. So here, for example, the letter A would be mapped to C, the letter B would be mapped to W, the letter C would be mapped to N, so on and so forth, and then the letter Z would be mapped, say, to A.


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[Assistant] So this is one example of a key for a substitution cipher. So just to practice the notation we introduced before, the encryption of a certain message using this key, let's say the message is B, C,


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[Assistant] The encryption of this message using this key here would be, uh, is done by substituting one letter at a time. So B becomes W, C becomes N, Z becomes A, and A becomes, uh, C. So the encryption of B, C, Z, A is W, N, A, C, and this defines the ciphertext.


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[Assistant] Similarly, we can decrypt the ciphertext using the same key, and of course we'll get back the original message.


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[Assistant] Okay, so just for historical reasons, there's one example of something that's related to the substitution cipher called the Caesar cipher. The Caesar cipher actually is not really a cipher at all. And the reason is that it doesn't have a key.


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[Assistant] What a Caesar cipher is, is basically a substitution cipher where the substitution is fixed. Namely, it's a shift by three.


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[Assistant] So again, this is not a cipher because there is no key. The key is fixed. So if an attacker knows how our encryption scheme works, he can easily decrypt the message. The key is not random and therefore decryption is very easy once you understand how the scheme actually works.


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[Assistant] Okay, so now let's go back to the substitution cipher where the keys really are chosen at random. The substitution table are chosen at random. And let's see how we break this substitution cipher. Turns out to be very easy to break. The first question is how big is the key space? How many different keys are there, assuming we have 26 letters?


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[Assistant] So I hope all of you said that the number of keys is 26 factorial because a key, a substitution key is simply a table, a permutation of all 26 letters. The number of permutations of 26 letters is 26 factorial.


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[Assistant] If you calculate this out, 26 factorial is about 2 to the 88, which means that describing a key in a substitution cipher takes about 88 bits. So each key


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[Assistant] Is represented by about 88 bits. Now, this is a perfectly fine size for a key space. In fact, we're going to be seeing ciphers that are perfectly secure or, you know, that are adequately secure with key spaces that are roughly of this size.


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[Assistant] However, even though the substitution cipher has a large key space of size 2 to the 88, it's still terribly insecure. So let's see how to break it.


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[Assistant] Uh, and to break it, we're gonna be using letter frequencies.


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[Assistant] So I imagine all of you know that in fact E is the most common letter, and that is gonna, if we make that quantitative, that's gonna help us break a substitution cipher. So just given the ciphertext, we can already recover the plaintiff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the way we do that is first of all using frequencies of English letters. So here's how this works. So you give me an encrypted message using a substitution cipher. What I know is, all I know is that the message is in English, the plain text is in English


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[Assistant] And I know that the letter E is the most frequent letter in English and in fact it appears 12.7% of the time in standard English texts.


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[Assistant] So what I'll do is I'll look at the ciphertext you gave me and I'm gonna count how many times every letter appears. Now the most common letter in the ciphertext is going to be the encryption of the letter E with very high probability. So now I'm able to recover one entry in the key table.


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[Assistant] Namely the letter, namely now I know what the letter E knocks to.


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[Assistant] The next most common letter in English is the letter T that appears about 9.1% of the time. So now again I count how many times each letter appears in the cipher text and the second most frequent letter is very likely to be the encryption of the letter T.


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[Assistant] So now I've recovered the second entry in the key table. And I can continue this way. In fact, the letter A is the next most common letter. It appears 8.1% of the time. So now I can guess that the third most common letter in the ciphertext is the encryption of the letter A. And now I've recovered three entries in the key table. Well, so now what do I do?


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[Assistant] The remaining letters in English appear roughly the same amount of time other than some rare letters like Q and X.


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[Assistant] So the next idea is to use frequencies of pairs of letters. Sometimes these are called diagrams. So what I'll do is I'll count how many times each pair of letters appears in the cipher text. And I know that in English, the most common pairs of letters are things like HE,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A-N, I-N, I guess, uh, T-H is another common pair of letters. And so I know that the most common pair of letters in the ciphertext is likely to be the encryption of one of these four pairs.


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[Assistant] And so by trial and error, I can sort of figure out more entry, more elements in the key table, and again by more trial and error, I this way, by looking at trigrams, I can actually figure out the entire key table.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the bottom line here is that in fact this substitution cipher is vulnerable to the worst possible type of attack, namely a cipher text only attack. Just given the cipher text, the attacker can recover the decryption key and therefore recover the original plain text.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So there's really no point in encrypting anything using a substitution cipher because the attacker can easily decrypt it all. You might as well send your plaintext completely in the clear.


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[Assistant] So now we're gonna fast forward to the Renaissance and I guess we're moving from the Roman era to the Renaissance and look at a cipher designed by a fellow named Vigenere who lived in the 16th century. He designed a couple of ciphers. Here I'm gonna show you a variant of one of his ciphers. This is called a Vigenere cipher.


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[Assistant] So in a Vigenere Cipher, the key is a word, in this case the word is crypto, it's got six letters in it. And then to encrypt the message, what you do is you write the message under the key, so in this case the message is what a nice day today.


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[Assistant] And then you replicate the key as many times as needed to cover the message.


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[Assistant] And you do this for all the letters. And remember, whenever you add, you add modulo 26. So if you go past Z, you go back to A.


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[Assistant] So that's the Vigenere Cipher, and in fact decryption is just as easy as encryption. Basically the way you would decrypt is again you would write the cipher text under the key, you would replicate the key, and then you would subtract.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So breaking a Vigenere cipher is actually quite easy. Let me show you how you do it. The first thing we need to do is we need to assume that we know the length of the key. Let's just assume we know that in this case the length of the key is six.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then what we do is we break the ciphertext into groups of six letters each. Okay, so we're gonna get a bunch, a bunch of groups like this. Each one, uh, contains six letters.


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[Assistant] Now what do we know about these six letters? We know that in fact they're all encrypted using the same letter in the ciphertext. All of these are encrypted using the letter C. In other words,


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[Assistant] So if we collect all these letters, then the most common letter among the set is likely to be the encryption of E.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right? E is the most common letter in English. Therefore, if I look at every sixth letter, the most common letter in that set is likely to be the encryption of the letter E. Aha!


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[Assistant] So, let's just suppose that in fact the most common letter, uh, every sixth letter happens to be the letter H.


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[Assistant] Then we know that E plus the first letter of the key is equal to H. That says that the first letter of the key is equal to H minus E. And in fact, that is the letter C.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So now we've recovered the first letter of the key. And now we can continue doing this with the second letter. So we look at the second letter in every group of six characters. And again, we repeat the same exercise. We find the most common letter among the sets. And we know that the most, this most common letter is likely the encryption of E.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And therefore whatever this letter e, whatever this most common letter is, if we subtract e from it, we're going to get the second letter of the key. And so on and so forth with the third letter every six characters. And this way we recover the entire key and that allows us to decrypt the message.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now the only caveat is that I had to assume ahead of time that I know the length of the key, which in this case is six. But if I don't know the length of the key ahead of time that's not a problem either. What I would do is I would run this decryption procedure


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Assuming the key length is one. Then I'd run it assuming the key length is two. Then I would run it assuming the key length is three. And so on and so on and so on until finally I get a message, I get a decryption that makes sense, that's sensical. And once I do that I know that I've kind of recovered the right length of the key.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I know that I've also recovered the right key and therefore the right message.


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[Assistant] Okay, so very, very quickly you can recover, you can decrypt region-air cipher. Again, this is a ciphertext-only attack.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The interesting thing is that Vigenere had a good idea here. This addition mod 26 is actually a good idea, and we'll see that later, except it's executed very poorly here. And so we'll correct that a little bit later.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, we're gonna fast forward now from the Renaissance to, uh, to the 19th century where everything became electric. And so people wanted to design ciphers that use electric motors. In particular, uh, these ciphers are called rotor machines because they use rotors.


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[Assistant] So an early example is called a Heber machine, which uses a single rotor. Here you have a picture of this machine. The motor, I guess the rotor is over here.


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[Assistant] And the secret key is captured by this disk here. It's embedded inside of this disk.


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[Assistant] Which rotate by one notch every time you press a key on the typewriter. Okay, so every time you hit a key,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The disk, uh, rotates by one notch. Now what does this key do? Well, the key actually encodes a substitution table. So, uh, and therefore the, the disk actually is the secret key. And as I said, this disk encodes a substitution table. In this case, if you happen to press C as the first letter, output would be the letter T.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then the disk would rotate by one notch. After rotating by one notch, the new substitution table becomes the one shown here. You see that E basically moves up and then the remaining letters move down. So imagine this is basically a two dimensional rendering of the disk rotating by one notch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in particular, if we hit the letter C three times, the first time we would output, the output would be T, the second time the output would be S, and the third time the output would be K.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So this is how these single rotor machine works. And as it turned out very quickly after it was advertised, it was again broken basically using letter frequencies, diagram frequencies, and trigram frequencies. It's not that hard given enough ciphertext to directly recover the secret key and then the message. Again, a ciphertext only attack.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So to kind of work against these frequency attacks, these statistical attacks, these rotor machines became more and more complicated over time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Until finally, I'm sure you've all heard of the Enigma. The Enigma is kind of a complicated rotor machine. It uses three, four or five rotors. There are different versions of the Enigma machine. Here you see an example of the Enigma machine with three rotors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The secret key in the Enigma machine is the initial setting of the rotors. Okay, so in the case of three rotors there would be 26 cube possible different keys.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, search using a computer through two to the eighteen different keys, uh, very, very quickly. You know, my wristwatch can do it in just a few seconds, I guess.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, uh, this Enigma machine was already was using relatively small key spaces, but I'm sure you've all heard that the British cryptographers at Bellesquieu Park


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're able to mount ciphertext-only attacks on the Enigma machine. They were able to decrypt German ciphers, uh, back in World War II and that played an important role, uh, in many different battles, uh, during the war.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After the war, I guess that was the end kind of the mechanical age and started the digital age where folks were using computers. Uhm, and as the world kind of migrated to using computers, the government realized that it's buying a lot of digital equipment from industry.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so they wanted industry, uh, to use a good cipher so that when it buys equipment from the, from industry, it would be getting equipment, uh, with, with a decent cipher. And so the government put out this request for proposal for a data encryption standard, a federal data encryption standard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we're going to talk about this effort in more detail later on in the course. But in 1974, a group at IBM put together a cipher that became known as DES, Data Encryption Standard, which became a federal standard for encrypting data.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The key space for DES is 2 to the 56, which is relatively small these days, but was large enough back in 1974.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Unlike rotor machines which encrypt one character at a time, the data encryption standard encrypts 64 bits at a time, namely 8 characters at a time. And we'll see the significance of this later on in the course.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because DES uses such a small key space, uh, these days it can be broken by a brute force search. Uh, and so these days DES is considered insecure and should not be used, uh, in projects. Unfortunately it is used in some legacy systems.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it definitely is on its way out and should not be, definitely should not be used.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but this is, this is all for the uh, quick historical survey. And now we can get into the more technical material.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I just see that you made an effort, and I'm gonna be better with my wife. I'm working on that. I wanna acknowledge your beauty. I never used to do that. I'm gonna do that now. Cause we're gonna be better than ever, Nikki. Just practicing. Call Tommy Dime.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ahhhh. Okay, alright. Daddy's gonna get the whisk. Can you do some whisking?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, no thanks. I already ate a big dinner. I'm stuffed. Carrie, play us some music.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Look, what a funny bunch of friends. Thanks, Mopey. All of a sudden, I feel much better about staying here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now that we know about the one-time pad, let's talk about making the one-time pad more practical using something called the stream cipher. But before we do that, let's do a quick review of where we were. So let me just remind you that a cipher is defined over a triple of sets called a key space, a message space, and a cipher text space.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And a cipher is a pair of efficient algorithms, uh, called E and D. E stands for encryption and D stands for decryption. And the only property, uh, that we need to satisfy is that, uh, decryption is the opposite of encryption. In other words, if I encrypt a message M using a particular key and I decrypt using the same key, I get back the original message.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Last time we looked at a couple of weak ciphers, like the substitution cipher and the Vigenere cipher. We showed that all of them can be easily broken, so you should never, ever, ever use those ciphers. Those were just for historical reference.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then we looked at our first example of a good cipher, namely the one-time pad. Let me just remind you how the one-time pad is defined. Basically the message space is the set of all n-bit strings. The cipher text is the set of all n-bit strings and similarly the key is the set of all n-bit strings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the way we encrypt is by a simple XOR to encrypt the message. We just XOR the message in the key. That gives us the cipher text.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then to decrypt the ciphertext we just do this XOR again and it's easy to show by properties of XOR that in fact decryption is the opposite of encryption.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, then we talked about this lemma, in fact we proved it, uh, that says that the one-time pad has perfect secrecy, which means that if you're just an eavesdropper and you just get to see a single ciphertext, you're not gonna be able to, uh, deduce any information about the encrypted plaintext.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, we also said that Shannon proved, uh, this lemma, we called it the bad news lemma, that basically says that, uhm, any cipher that has perfect secrecy must have really long keys. In other words, the key length must be at least as long


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in this lecture, we're gonna take the idea of the one-time pad and try to make it into a practical encryption scheme. So this is called, what's called a stream cipher.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the idea in a stream cipher is rather than using a totally random key, we're actually gonna use a pseudo-random key. And to explain how that works, I need to define what is a pseudo-random generator, a PRG. So a PRG really, all it is, is just a function.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'll call it G for generator that takes a seed. So I'm gonna use zero one to the S to denote all strings of length S. So this we'll call the seed space. So it takes an S bit


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we expand it into a much, much larger output string that could be gigabytes long. That's what the pseudo-random generator does. And of course the goal is that first of all, the generator is efficiently computable. So the function g, there should be some sort of an efficient algorithm that computes it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, so efficiently computable by a deterministic algorithm. It's important to understand that the function g itself has no more randomness in it. It's totally deterministic. The only thing that's random here is the random seed that's given as input to the function g.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so suppose we have such a generator, how do we use that to build a stream cipher? Well, the idea is that we're gonna use the seed as our key. So our short seed is gonna be the secret key.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] into a much, much larger, uh, random-looking sequence, or pseudo-random sequence, as it's known. So this would be g of k, and then we're gonna XOR it just like in the one-time pad, we're gonna XOR


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The pseudo-random sequence with the message and that's gonna give us the ciphertext.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just like in the one-time pad except that instead of XORing with K, we XOR with the output of the generator applied to K. So the first question to ask is, uh, why is this secure?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So basically, you know, we only have one notion of security so far, which we called perfect secrecy. And so let's just quickly ask, can a stream cipher have perfect secrecy? Remember, in a stream cipher, the key is much, much shorter than the message. And so, nevertheless, can it have perfect secrecy?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I hope everybody said the answer is no. The key is much shorter than the message and we said that in a perfectly secure cipher the key must be as long as the message and therefore it's not possible that a, that a stream cipher actually has perfect secrecy. So the question is then, well, why is it secure?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] First of all, we would need a different definition of security to argue that the stream surface is secure. And in particular, the security property is going to depend on the specific generator that we used.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What that means is essentially that there is some i such that if I give you the first i bits of the output, this notation bar one to i means look at the first i bits of the output of the function.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so I give you the first i bits of the stream. There is some sort of an algorithm. There's an efficient algorithm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so given the first i bits, you can compute the remainder of the bits. I claim that if this is the case, then the stream cipher would not be secure. So let's see why. Well, suppose an attacker actually intercepts a particular cipher text, let's call it C.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, because suppose that just, uh, by some prior knowledge, the attacker actually knows that the initial part of the message happens to be some known value. For example, you know that in, uh, in the mail protocol, uh, SMTP,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The standard send mail protocol used in the internet, you know that every, uh, message starts with a word from colon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, that would be a prefix that the adversary knows that the message must begin with, from, uh, colon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With the words from colon with the little prefix of the message that it actually knows and what that would give it is a prefix of the pseudorandom sequence and I would learn as a result of this it would learn a prefix of the pseudorandom sequence


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then we know that once it has a prefix of the pseudo-random sequence, it can predict the remainder of the pseudo-random sequence, and that would allow it to then predict the rest of the message M.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then every email encrypted using a stream cipher would be decryptable because, again, the attacker knows that, knows the prefix of the message, from which he deduces a prefix of the pad, which then allows him to compute the rest of the pad, which then allows him to recover the entire plaintext.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As it turns out, even if I could just predict one bit of the output,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even if given, you know, the first i bit, I can predict the next bit, the i plus first bit. Already this is a problem, because that would say that given, again, the first couple of letters in a message, I can predict, I can decrypt essentially and recover the next bit of the message, or the next letter of the message and so on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So this predictability property shows that, you know, our, if we use a PRG that's, that's gonna be used in a stream cipher, it had better be unpredictable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So what does it mean that a PRG is unpredictable? So let's define more precisely what it means for a PRG to be unpredictable. Well first we'll define more precisely what it means for a PRG to be predictable. So we say that G is predictable if there exists an efficient algorithm


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, let's call it, uh, A, and, uh, there is some position, there's a position I between one and, uh, N minus one, uh, such that if we look at the probability over a random key, probability that if I generate a random key,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Remember this notation means choose a random key from the set K. So this arrow with R just means choose a random key from the set K.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Basically, if I give this algorithm a prefix of the output, so I give it the first i bit of the output, the probability that it's able to predict the next bit of the output


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Epsilon. And non-negligible, for example, would be epsilon which is greater than 1 over 2 to the 30. 1 over a billion, for example, we would consider non-negligible. So these terms, uh, negligible and non-negligible, we'll come back at the end of the lecture and define them more precisely.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But for now let's just stick with intuitive notion of what non-negligible mean. And so this is what it means for an algorithm, for a generator to be predictable. Basically there's some algorithm that is able to predict the i plus first bit, even the initial prefix.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then we say that an algorithm, that a PRG is unpredictable if in fact, well, if it doesn't satisfy the property that we just defined. In other words, it is not predictable. But what does it mean more precisely for it not to be predictable? It means that in fact for all positions, for all i,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's no efficient adversary, no efficient algorithm A that can predict the I plus first bits with non-linguable probability, uh, Epsilon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, and this has to be true for all i. So no matter which prefix I give you, you're not gonna be able to predict the next bit that follows the prefix.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That if I XOR all the bits of the output, I always happen to get one. Okay, so I XOR all the bits. Bit number one, XOR bit number two, XOR bit number three.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If I X or all those bits, I happen to get one. The question is, is that a predictable generator?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And again, I hope everybody answered yes. That essentially, given the first n minus one bits of the outputs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can predict the nth bits because it would just be the bits that's needed to make the XOR of all the bits be one. In other words, if I give you all but one of the bits of the generator, uh, you can actually predict the last bit of the generator.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It has three parameters, I'll call them a, b, and p. A and b are just integers and p is a prime.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the generator is defined as follows. Essentially, I'll say R0 is the seed of the generator.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, then of course you increment i and you iterate this again and again and again. Okay, so you can see how this generator proceeds. It starts with a, with a particular seed. At every step there is this linear transformation that's being applied to the seed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Unfortunately, even though this generator has good statistical properties in the sense that, for example, the number of zeros it outputs is likely gonna be similar to the number of ones and so on, it has, you can actually argue all sorts of nice statistical properties about this. Nevertheless, it is a very easy generator to predict.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That you can see, I just wrote down the definition here. You can see that it basically outputs a few bits at every iteration and it just does this simple linear transformation at every step. Again, this is a very easy generator to predict and should never ever be used for crypto. And so kind of the lesson I want to make, just emphasize here is never ever use


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Never use, uh, the function, the built-in glibc function random, uh, for crypto because it doesn't produce, uh, cryptographic randomness in the sense that it's easy to predict. And in fact, systems like Kerberos version 4 have used random and, uh, have been bitten by that. So, uh, please don't make that mistake yourself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We'll talk about how to do secure random number generation actually in the next lecture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Before we conclude this lecture, I just wanna give a little bit more detail about these concepts of negligible and non-negligible values. So different communities in crypto actually define these concepts differently. For practitioners, basically these, the terms negligible and non-negligible


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We say that the value is non-negligible. The reason is, the reason that's so is because if you happen to use a key, for example, for uh, for encrypting a gigabyte of data, a gigabyte of data is about 2 to the 30, maybe even 2 to the 32 bytes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then an event that happens with probability 1 over 2 to the 30 will likely happen after about a gigabyte of data. So since a gigabyte of data is within reason for a particular key, this event is likely to happen. Therefore 1 over 2 to the 30 is non-angligible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On the other hand, we'll say that one over two to the eighty, which is much, much, much smaller, is an event, an event that happens with this probability is an event that's actually not gonna happen over the life of the key, and therefore, uh, we'll say that that's a negligible event.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in fact, in the more rigorous theory of cryptography, the definition of negligible and non-negligible are somewhat different.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And in fact when we talk about the probability of events we don't talk about these probabilities as scalars but rather we talk about them as functions of a security parameter. So let me explain what that means. So these functions


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, essentially are functions that map, that outputs, uh, positive real values, so, or non-negative real values that are supposedly probabilities.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But there are functions that act on non-negative integers. Okay, so what does it mean for a function to be non-negligible?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What it means is that the function is bigger than some polynomial infinitely often. In other words, for many, for infinitely many values, the function is bigger than some one over polynomial. Okay? So I wrote the exact definition here, and we'll see an example in just a minute.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so if something is bigger, is often bigger than one over a polynomial, we'll say that it's not negligible. However, if something is smaller than all polynomials, then we'll say that it's negligible. So, what this says here is basically, for any degree polynomial, for all d,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There exists some lower bound lambda D such that for all lambda bigger than this lambda D,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The function is smaller than one over the polynomial. Okay, so all this says is that the function is negligible if it's less than all polynomial fractions. In other words, it's less than one over lambda D for sufficiently large lambda.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That grows very, very, very slowly. It's barely ever moves. This function, nevertheless, this function is non-negligible because if I set D to be 10,000, then clearly this function is bigger than one over lambda to the 10,000. And so this function is bigger than some polynomial fraction.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now let's look at a confusing example, just to be tricky. What do you think? Suppose I have a function that's for odd lambda happens to be exponentially small, for even lambda happens to be polynomially small. Is this negligible or non-negligible?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, by our definition, this would be a non-negligible function. And the intuition is, if a function happens to be only polynomially small very often, that actually means that this event, you know, an event that happens with this probability is already too large to be used in a real cryptosystem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so the main points to remember here are that these terms basically correspond to less than polynomial or more than polynomial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's gonna require a new definition of security since perfect secrecy is not good enough here, uh, and we will see that in the next lecture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That smells good. Help yourself, Mike, Sally.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That smells good. Help yourself, Mike, Sally.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Checking my move. Reverse the direction of our left wing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Three o'clock. Now, let's play outside. Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Why did I do that to you these last three weeks? Why did I do that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well one reason as I said at the beginning of class, uh, at the beginning of the term is that I did not want you to be crushed after spring break. I wanted you to be crushed now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we catch whatever candy or beads they throw at us. And then we go home at the end of the day with sore feet from standing too long. It's not like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A syllabus, at least in this kind of class and with me teaching it, is an argument.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's an argument about a whole historical period.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's an argument about the evolution of an art form in a particular place and time. In order to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Preserve that quality of a syllabus. You have to read quite a bit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Reading quite a bit means that you can begin to see the lineaments


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] of larger trends and movements in that historical period.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It allows you to amass enough evidence to build an intellectual understanding of what's going on in this period.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If I had dropped a novel, there are certain kinds of arguments I would not have been able to make.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the argument that I'm going to make for you today would not be as compelling as I hope it will be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So as in the Franny and Zoe lecture, I tried to demonstrate for you in a very self-conscious way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How literary scholars make local arguments that take into account an entire novel, its major features,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And use the evidence of detail at the level of text to support those kinds of claims.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Today, I'm going to make a much broader argument of the kind that literary scholars are often interested in making.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm going to make an argument about a major trend in this period.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And to do that, I will use evidence and I'm going to call on you to help me put together the evidence.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Four broader claims that cross novels.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] An argument of this kind has a different quality from those more local arguments about individual novels that I've made each week.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Totally counterintuitive in the way that you can sometimes take pleasure in making a reading of a local novel counterintuitive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For the big arguments, you want to be able to account for what is obvious about the period, but perhaps has not been justified as an analysis of the period.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Inevitability. That this argument you're making explains all kinds of things that people have always noticed about that period.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the same way that when I lectured on Franny and Zoe, I asked you what was obvious to you about the novel, and then my argument went around and spoke back to those things at different points.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So this general argument aims to speak to those obvious parts, but it speaks more strongly to those obvious perceptions. And so, uh, I'm launching into a different kind of argument.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I want to talk to you about today is a particular narrative form and convention and I'm calling it the Identity Plot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Certainly I am not the first scholar to think about identity as a form of narrative in this period. And it's precisely because I am not the first that I can give it this sort of name.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's so much work that's been done excavating how identity works in the novel in this period.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That it has become something we know a lot about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What hasn't been said before is that it has this particular name. And I use this name because for me, the identity plot, which I will explain in a few moments,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, or have studied or just read a lot of Jane Austen novels, uh, Dickens novels and so on. You will know what the marriage plot is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That makes novels hang on a structure of a couple and the question of whether they will get together or not.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now there are all kinds of stages in that development, the development of that narrative.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are the couples from the same social class?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are they from geographically, uh, uh, contiguous places?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There are all kinds of things that can go wrong for a couple trying to get together. And the Victorian novel was very good at generating narrative from all those kinds of complications. Then there are different kinds of outcomes that you can have in the novel governed by the marriage plot. One is the comedy. That's when you get married at the end. The couple gets married. Then there's the tragedy. They don't.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Pride and Prejudice would be an example of the former kind. Anna Karenina perhaps.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The identity plot works in much the same way. So what is the identity plot? I am going to give you a, uh, an unusual site in my class now. And that is PowerPoint.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think I'm sort of surprised and delighted by this myself. So we'll see how it works. So, if you're taking notes, which I encourage you to do,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Identity Plot. Narrative form in post-1945 fiction. Isn't that snazzy? Okay, whoops. I've already made my first technological mistake. There we go. Six elements of The Identity Plot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The character needs to be a member of a minority within a larger society.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I am not going to ask you to volunteer examples of these because it's just too obvious.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That our last three or four novels each feature one of these characteristics or all of them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The third one is absolutely crucial.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To the development of the identity plot. And that is that the character is also at odds with the minority group of which he or she is a part.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is important because without it, the identity plot gets really boring. It doesn't have a lot of complication. If all you have to do is realize as you're going about your life, wow!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's, it's a really short story actually. And it's a, it's not a good short story either. There's just not enough resistance to the evolution of the plot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it's really important the drama of the identity plot depends upon this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The character in question needs to be conflicted about his or her difference


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Absolutely, yeaah. So, in case you didn't hear Eli, uh, Woman Warrior is a great example of this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maxine, that's what I'll call her when I'm talking about the character, Maxine Hong Kingston. Maxine is, uh, feels alienated from Chinese culture because of the misogyny she perceives in that culture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Self-image, as in that story of the woman warrior, which I actually didn't ask you to read, but there are other examples in the stories that I did ask you to read, chapters that I did ask you to read, uhm, to give her that sense of, of grounding as a person. Other examples.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, there are lots of different ways of conceiving what it means to have a minority group at work in these novels. And I think Franny and Zoe definitely imagines a minority group as the Glass family. They're big enough to be a group, there are lots of children, so you get that sense that they're a clan.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're sort of a tribe of themselves. They have this peculiar quality. They're intellectual.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, sort of complexity and also their artistic gifts. Especially their, their gifts in language.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and there's a conflict between Franny and Zoe, and Zoe is really held out as the custodian of the Glass family identity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it's he who instructs Franny and brings her finally back into the fold. And that's an example of the comic ending.


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[Assistant] Other examples from other novels. Can anyone do this for Bluest Eye?


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[Assistant] How might piccola be an example of this?


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[Assistant] Up to the whore's apartment.


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[Assistant] And finds there a kind of love and acceptance from those women.


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[Assistant] That does not judge her for her ugliness.


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[Assistant] That surrounds her with a rich verbal culture as well as a culture of affection.


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[Assistant] It is a group that is, has seceded from the black community itself.


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[Assistant] But still maintains a certain tie. Remember the prostitute's admiration for the good Christian woman?


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[Assistant] So, Picola finds an ideal black community within that small apartment.


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[Assistant] But she is alienated from that positive black self-image that she sees in those women.


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[Assistant] By her desire to identify with white beauty. To have blue eyes.


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[Assistant] And so that's how she would embody this. Uhm, Frieda is also an example of this. Frieda and Claudia.


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[Assistant] So, uh, actually, if we take the example of Claudia, Claudia wants to be like, remember the girl they call Meringue Pie, the light-skinned girl?


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[Assistant] She wants to be like her, but at the same time she recognizes.


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[Assistant] With the addition of picola have as a little group that doesn't pass judgment on their own blackness.


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[Assistant] So that's, again, between Claudia, Frida, and Pakola, there's another small, idealized black community. But Claudia is somewhat conflicted, both about her membership in that little group, and her difference from


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[Assistant] The influx of white blood into that community. And white aesthetic into that community. So she echoes in a less dramatic way the same kinds of conflicts that you see in Pecola.


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[Assistant] The fourth quality of the identity plot is that authenticity and origin are always at stake in the character's quest for personal identity, even when those things are absent.


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[Assistant] The woman warrior, we have an excellent example of this. Uhm, in the beginning,


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[Assistant] The last chapter that I asked you to read, after she tells


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[Assistant] The whole story of moon orchid and brave orchid.


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[Assistant] Going to find Moon Orchid's Chinese husband and confronting him.


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[Assistant] With moon orchid status as the first wife.


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[Assistant] After you get this whole richly imagined story full of dialogue, the next chapter begins.


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[Assistant] What my brother actually said was, I drove mom and second aunt to Los Angeles to see aunt's husbands who got the other wife.


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[Assistant] What did she say? She said he'd better take them to lunch at least. Which wife did he sit next to? What did they eat? I didn't go. The other wife didn't either. He motioned not to tell. I would have told. If I was his wife, I would have told. I would have gone to lunch and kept my ears open. Ah, you know they don't talk when they eat. What else did mom say?


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[Assistant] I don't remember. I pretended a pedestrian broke her leg so he would come.


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[Assistant] No, I don't think she said anything. I don't remember her saying one thing. In fact,


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[Assistant] It wasn't me my brother told about going to Los Angeles. One of my sisters told me what he'd told her.


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[Assistant] The layers of inauthenticity in the origin of this story are deep.


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[Assistant] There is no sense that the story we have just been told in great detail has any basis in fact. And yet,


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[Assistant] This is a book that is patently autobi- autobiographical.


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[Assistant] It plays up the inauthenticity and the unreliability of this voice.


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[Assistant] We know that we cannot trust the details of what is given to us. And yet,


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[Assistant] The narrative tries to seduce us with them, tries to persuade us by their very dramatic quality and their detail.


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[Assistant] In Kingston, that purports to be a source of identity formation, she's going to write herself into being, is an inauthentic voice.


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[Assistant] There's a scholar of Chinese American literature named Frank Chin. He's also a novelist himself.


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[Assistant] He has accused Kingston and a few other writers in the starkest terms of being fakes.


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[Assistant] And of being against Chinese culture and of being puppets of white culture.


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[Assistant] Kingston's use of Chinese literature has come under particular attack from Chen.


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[Assistant] And this happened in one of its incarnations or one of its iterations of this feud between the two.


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[Assistant] Uhm, it actually happened at a conference face to face. And I know you must think that academic conferences are always a thrill a minute. It's, it's not really usual that they are, but I guess in this case, uh, it was.


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[Assistant] Uhm, so Frank Chen, I guess, shouted her off the stage. I don't know all the details, but it was very exciting, I'm sure.


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[Assistant] Nevertheless, the argument is serious. It's an argument about authenticity.


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[Assistant] The authenticity of Kingston's use of Chinese literature.


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[Assistant] That's essentially what Frank Chin says to Maxine Hong Kingston. It has a kind of traction.


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[Assistant] To a certain audience because the purity of an origin of that kind matters if you think that that's where authenticity of an identity resides.


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[Assistant] So if it's a cultural identity at stake, the authenticity seems to matter in a different way.


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[Assistant] Can give us a different kind of example of this.


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[Assistant] Authenticity. Is Menelaus' voice in the Menelaad really his own?


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[Assistant] Is there some being left over that's apart from that voice?


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[Assistant] Has his identity been lost in his wrestling with that changing God?


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[Assistant] The question of authenticity haunts Menelaus. It haunts Ambrose.


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[Assistant] When he is in the throes of passion and he feels alienated from himself. This is passion. I am experiencing it.


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[Assistant] That's a kind of inauthenticity. He can't be grounded in the origin of identity that we think of as the body. So, a lot of these novels make a problem out of authenticity. When it doesn't seem like a problem,


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[Assistant] A novel is making a certain kind of claim about identity right off the bat. And that's that authenticity doesn't matter.


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[Assistant] But in the context of the identity plot, you know that it's on the radar screen, even if it isn't something that is in the novel itself. It's there, uh, by its negative.


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[Assistant] So the comic version gives us characters that come to peace with their identity. My favorite example of this is actually a novel we're not reading in this course, although I could have added it. I could have done ten novels in the first seven weeks.


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[Assistant] I won't ask you to read it. It's, uh, Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven.


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[Assistant] In this novel, this is the most extreme example I know, uhm, I can't remember the full details now, but uhm,


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[Assistant] In that novel, there's a Native American woman, uh, there's a Native American child who's adopted forcibly by, in the forcible adoptions, and is adopted by a white family. I think this is how the story goes. And eventually,


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[Assistant] After the Indian family tries to get that child back, it is discovered that the adoptive mother was in fact a member of that tribe.


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[Assistant] And the, the adoptive mother marries the child's full blood grandfather. Perfect!


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[Assistant] Perfect, uh, comic ending for an identity plot novel.


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[Assistant] I would say that the bluest eye is, uh,


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[Assistant] Our tragic version of this, where Piccolo will never be at peace. She is in fact deranged by her, her conflicted relationship to identity.


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[Assistant] Between literary fiction and genre fiction. Now, I could get into lots of trouble for these claims. They're fairly broad and


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[Assistant] Ideally, I would want to give them more nuance, but I think it's useful to think about this distinction.


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[Assistant] That we think of as literary. Use those structures of narrative as something to play off of.


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[Assistant] Or something to inhabit while they do a whole bunch of other things. Think of the ways that Humbert


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[Assistant] And Nabokov used the conventions of romantic language.


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[Assistant] There's something operatic about the extremity.


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[Assistant] ...of the situation we're given. The extremity of the use of those conventions in Lolita.


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[Assistant] Well, in this case, some of our identity plot novels use that plot to say something about language, about literary history, about tradition,


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[Assistant] Some of them simply give us aesthetic pleasure. Like the pleasure that we can get from watching Barth. Use words. Make them funny. Be clever with them.


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[Assistant] So they may deliver an artistic satisfaction that has nothing to do with the identity plot itself.


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[Assistant] Then there are incarnations of it that don't reflect on any of those aesthetic issues, don't reflect on the history of the literary tradition.


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[Assistant] Conventional, predictable satisfactions of the genre. And these we would call genre fiction.


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[Assistant] And if you recall, Nabokov talks a little bit about pornography as genre fiction that gives you that predictable mechanical frisson.


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[Assistant] of pleasure at the predictable place. And he describes Lolita as rejecting the convention of pornography.


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[Assistant] You can think about his description as applying also to the identity plot. That sometimes it functions, and I think the Kingsolver novel really is a good example of this. Where there are predictable pleasures of


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[Assistant] The child being enveloped by a loving family after all the complications of her identity. Finally, it can all be resolved.


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[Assistant] Or there's a kind of pleasure in that feeling that it could never be resolved, that tragic feeling.


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[Assistant] So there's genre fiction that can end that way too. So other examples of genre fiction, of course the detective novel is another.


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[Assistant] My argument today is not to say that this is the only convention that our novels are working with.


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[Assistant] Genre is present in crying of lot 49. That's something that you can think about productively.


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[Assistant] When you think about Adipa's search for knowledge and clues, there's a way that Pynchon is playing off that, uh, that convention as well.


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[Assistant] So literary fiction and genre fiction are both part of what literary scholars use to make especially these kinds of broad-scale arguments.


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[Assistant] So, it's not really enough if you want to argue about a whole period of literary history to only skim off the very most literary works.


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[Assistant] Your argument doesn't have a lot of historical purchase if you do that.


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[Assistant] If your ambition is to talk about more narrowly the evolution of an art form,


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[Assistant] That's a very legitimate move to make, to skim off just those literary examples.


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[Assistant] But if your ambitions to say something through your discussion of literature about culture, about politics, about any other set of issues, philosophical, historical questions,


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[Assistant] You want to be able to demonstrate that the things you're seeing in literary fiction have a wider purchase and have grabbed hold of the imagination of a larger set of people than the people who read high literary novels.


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[Assistant] So you can make different kinds of claims depending on what combination of these kinds of examples you use.


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[Assistant] The character seems to be a member of the majority group.


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[Assistant] This is actually, in one sense, Franny and Zoe's case, as you mentioned. Uh, it seems like they're much more in a majority. They're white.


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[Assistant] They are from an upper class section of New York. Uhm,


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[Assistant] They're distinguished by their family's intellectualism. Similarly, Ambrose could be said to be


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[Assistant] That fiction, they're members of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage. The members of Ambrose's family. But!


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[Assistant] They too are marked by their difference from the churches in town. The independence of their thinking.


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[Assistant] The, uh, skill with which they carve. They have artistic skills.


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[Assistant] The character does not seem to be conflicted about his membership in the minority group. This can happen. Where do you get the drama then?


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[Assistant] Well, sometimes you get the drama from the efforts of the majority group against that piece. Will that person betray their group or not?


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[Assistant] So that's where the narrative tension can come if you see this variation.


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[Assistant] You might think of Kingston as an example of this. Uhm, although I think you can argue it both ways. Uhm, certainly she's not going to think you can have an identity that stays still. All those self revisions.


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[Assistant] That I, even just from that little passage that I read about where her story comes from, that's a suggestion that she's committed to an identity that's changeable.


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[Assistant] As this period moves on towards the end of the 20th century, that variation is much more common. It gets more and more common.


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[Assistant] The critique of identity in theory, in the world of literary theory, think of the work of Judith Butler, for example, in the late 80s and stretching into the present, very influential on undermining the idea that you could have a stable identity at all.


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[Assistant] And that's where that term essentialism, identity essentialism comes from. That's a very negative idea. By now, by this point.


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[Assistant] But in the 1970s, and I would argue that in Morrison's work, you see still a commitment to the idea that you can really be in a peaceful way


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[Assistant] African-American and that that's a stable, grounded identity.


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[Assistant] So I think some writers earlier in the period, uhm,


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[Assistant] Persist in that idea even while most have gone to the sense that identity is not stable.


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[Assistant] There may be multiple characters whose identities are at stake in a novel.


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[Assistant] You can have a variation with fiction based on fact. We've seen that both in Richard Wright and now in Kingston.


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[Assistant] It raises the stakes of the fiction and it suggests its purchase on the real to write


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[Assistant] A fiction that is sort of autobiography based partly in fact or mostly in fact, it suggests that what's going on in the fiction is actually very close to what we live. And that's a kind of claim for fiction in and of itself.


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[Assistant] And, uh, this is an example. This last one, identity is not based on race or ethnicity. When we think about identity, we usually think of race or ethnicity.


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[Assistant] But sometimes minority status is going to be claimed or identities can be claimed on religious or philosophical grounds.


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[Assistant] Or just on the grounds of uh, personality difference.


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[Assistant] Someone who's strange. Salinger is sort of fond of this. Catcher in the Rye is an example, I think, of this. Where, uhm, Holden Caulfield is at odds with his world because he just sees things really differently.


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[Assistant] One of the kinds of claims that you have to be prepared to make, if you're making these broad period based claims, is that your claim is specific to your particular time period.


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[Assistant] Now you have to define your time period. I'm, uh, dealing with post-World War II American literature.


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[Assistant] Somewhat arbitrary, uh, cutoff for some scholars. I think there are reasons to think that it is a real cutoff, having to do mostly with, uhm, the changes in the American cultural, uhm, mass market in the years after World War II.


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[Assistant] Uhm, there are identity plots all over in the history of literature. So, uh, the, the plot of mistaken identity is a staple of Renaissance comedy. Think of Midsummer Night's Dream, for example. Secret identity.


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[Assistant] Is this a staple of gothic fiction? This happens a lot in Dickens, other kinds of Victorian fiction.


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[Assistant] Think of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's novel about the artistic formation of a person.


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[Assistant] And you could also say that Woman Warrior is an example of that version of artistic self creation.


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[Assistant] Racial Identity, there's a wonderful book called Our America by Walter Ben Michaels. Uhm, he argues very persuasively that there are whole ranges of genre fiction in the 1920s that are working out a logic of race.


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[Assistant] Of a nativist logic of race in the early 20th century. That these novels are governed by that logic.


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[Assistant] Your feature is different from other incarnations in the history of literature.


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[Assistant] My contention is that the identity plot, as I'm describing it, uhm, becomes a preoccupation of both literary and genre varieties of writing in this period. So that suggests its scope.


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[Assistant] That it's not just the concern of a few writers, it's the concern of lots of writers.


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[Assistant] It's different in the degree of its presence. So while Walter Ben Michaels argues very persuasively for the racial logic of


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[Assistant] Popular westerns, for example, or uhm, for its relevance to Willa Cather's work. It doesn't...


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[Assistant] Sit at the center of the plots of those novels in the same way. He can tease out the logic.


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[Assistant] But it's not because that logic is what the whole novel's drama hangs on.


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[Assistant] Some of the drama hangs on that, but in the novels I'm talking about in this period, it has risen to the level of formula such that you can hang the whole plot on that structure and it's recognizable, immediately recognizable.


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[Assistant] So that's what I mean when I say in the next bullet point that it achieves a kind of solidity of formulaic structure.


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[Assistant] And finally, I want to argue, as I've, uh, been doing in a, in a sort of, uhm, in passing in the last few lectures,


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[Assistant] That these novels are working very closely with things that are happening in the culture in general. So that tension between activism and personal growth in the 1960s as modes of, uhm, of social action


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[Assistant] The question about whether you can intervene in politics through culture is everywhere in the 1960s and you can see it come to a head in the 1990s.


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[Assistant] You are already committed to a cultural politics.


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[Assistant] So the end point of this is a very widespread argument in the 1990s about where politics happens. And that argument


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[Assistant] Revolves around novels that feature the identity plot.


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[Assistant] Because those are the kinds of novels that people thought of as either advancing or, uh, or resisting the hegemony


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[Assistant] of a white western tradition that was oppressive to minority people.


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[Assistant] This, by the way, this final incarnation of the identity plot is going to be very important to us when we read The Human Stain. That novel is deeply embedded in that final iteration of it. How else do you know it's a dominant convention? Well, it has an end.


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[Assistant] This is another way you can locate its historical specificity. So it has its limits. And you can see it coming to its end when you see more


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[Assistant] That writers of ambition have to push it further and further. Even writers of the genre fiction versions.


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[Assistant] Have to address an audience looking for the familiar pleasure but with just enough difference.


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[Assistant] You know, you, you, you can think of those Hollywood chase scenes.


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[Assistant] They all look so much alike, but the new ones always have to have just that little bit more interesting special effect or that much more dramatic car flying off some high parapet. Same thing with any, uh, narrative formula.


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[Assistant] And there comes a time when writers of ambition simply change the subject. And I'm going to argue that


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[Assistant] Even though Roth is still thinking in these terms, the other novelist that we're reading starting next week,


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[Assistant] Uh, and into the end of the semester are beginning to change the subject.


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[Assistant] So one subject that comes up very powerfully in those novels is the subject of history. It's not unrelated to identity, but it is distinctly different.


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[Assistant] And so in Cormac McCarthy, for example, there's a palpable engagement with history. And in Edward P. Jones,


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[Assistant] In a novel that really seems like a classic outgrowth of the identity plot novels, especially of Toni Morrison.


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[Assistant] It's really much more about the terror of history than it is about the dramas of identity.


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[Assistant] So we will see how that subject gets changed.


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[Assistant] Because it does so much of what I have just described that the identity plot does.


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[Assistant] And I think The Bluest Eye and Woman Warrior are examples of those kinds of novels. Woman Warrior, and this is one of Frank Chin's, uh, corals with it,


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[Assistant] Is widely, widely taught. I always think hard about including it on my syllabus. Sometimes that's a reason to include it on a syllabus.


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[Assistant] As evidence in an ongoing unfolding argument, sometimes it isn't. In this case, I've decided pretty securely that it is. It belongs here as a piece of evidence in this unfolding argument about what's happening in the historical period. Woman Warrior is widely taught


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[Assistant] It is one of the foremost examples of this kind of identity writing.


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[Assistant] It has some literary satisfactions. Some of those stories are really compelling. She's very good at limiting a character. She's wonderful at reproducing the dialogue. She reflects on


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[Assistant] The equality of writing. She is self-conscious about the construction of her narrative.


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[Assistant] And so we can see an artist telling the story of her own coming to being as an artist in the way she tells these stories.


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[Assistant] There's all kinds of things you can close read in here. Uhm, I'm gonna run out of time. Uh, let me just show you one thing. This is at the very end of 207.


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[Assistant] This is when she's told the story about her grandmother taking the family to the opera.


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[Assistant] And how bandits tend to rob the houses that have been abandoned while families are at the opera.


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[Assistant] Instead in this case, the bandits attack the audience.


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[Assistant] The family's all broken up in the attack. By daybreak.


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[Assistant] When my grandmother and mother made their way home, the entire family was home safe, proof to my grandmother that our family was immune to harm as long as they went to plays. They went to many plays after that. The grandmother's logic is completely twisted here. It's turned upside down. It doesn't make any sense. They got attacked when they went to the play.


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[Assistant] So they go to plays in order to stay safe. Because they happen to survive that attack.


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[Assistant] And remember from the story about moon orchid, insanity in this story is defined as telling one story.


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[Assistant] Over and over again, insisting on the same story. She becomes paranoid. Essentially a paranoid schizophrenic.


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[Assistant] That means that sanity, healthiness, is


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[Assistant] So the illogic of this little moment at the very end of the book


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[Assistant] Reaches back to all those other examples of illogic and insanity that we see throughout. Classic new critical technique for building


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[Assistant] The meaning of a certain trope across the writing.


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[Assistant] The other thing also of course to think about is the fact that this takes place around plays.


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[Assistant] That it's art that's held out as being the lucky thing. It's art that's at the center.


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[Assistant] And this of course, especially the play, reaches back to Maxine's descriptions of her childhood drawings where she painted page after page after page of black.


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[Assistant] Worrying her teachers. But for the young Maxine, what she saw in a black page was the, the curtains of a theater ready to open. Endless possibility.


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[Assistant] Shared by the grandmother, repeated even in this, uh, inarticulate artistic creation of the child.


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[Assistant] That builds the sense of artistic identity as an inherited one.


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[Assistant] So, I'm not going to go on with this, but I just show you that little passage and suggest some of the ways that it's built up over the course of the book to show you that Kingston's novel


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[Assistant] Or autobiography, even though it fulfills the convention so completely that it looks like genre fiction. If you locate it in 1976 when it was first published, it's not


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[Assistant] It's not at the end of a long line of these, it's at the beginning.


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[Assistant] So it is one of the first popular books to bring together Barth's insights.


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[Assistant] With those of the identity politics beginning in the 60s. So Morrison and Kingston both are some of the first to take modernist self-consciousness about writing and combine it with this interest in identity.


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[Assistant] So that's why I think it sort of doesn't do her justice to see this as genre fiction as too predictable because it was one of the early versions of it. So next week we're gonna start reading housekeeping. Just hold on one sec.


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[Assistant] And I want you to think about whether housekeeping fits the identity plot model and if it does how it does and if it doesn't how it doesn't.


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[Assistant] Uhm, that identity plot model was very influential in its early reception, so I want you to think about how that worked. Thank you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm pitching Jesus's Son by Dennis Johnson. Uhm, I'm actually gonna start, without introducing it at all, I'm just gonna play a clip from the movie that was made of the book, and then I'm gonna talk about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and I, I think it's wonderful. It's a collection of stories, uhm, and they're all kind of about the same character, uhm, one of the characters you saw in there, and, uh, the kind of the same group of characters runs through all the different stories. Uhm, and so it's kind of novelistic in that way, kind of like, uhm, Lost in the Funhouse, the book we read. Uhm, I guess, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The, as you might or might not have been able to tell from the clip, the book kind of deals with, uh, drug addiction, and the main character is addicted to heroin. Uhm, but I really think the book kind of transcends the drug genre. Uhm, I really, uh, don't, I'm not a huge fan of drug books myself, but I think this...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I think this book is really, really beautiful and powerful and devastating and really hilarious, really funny at times. Uhm, I guess what else? It's short, like everyone else has been saying, but this book really is short.