Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations.’ The much publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject. . . . This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denega­ tions, belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law. ... In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intel­ lectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure,’ to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the tran­ scendental signified. The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial

/pdf/can-the-subaltern-speak-4xfabswzbh.pdf

Can the Subaltern Speak

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/118.pdf

Rethinking authenticity in tourism experience

Scholars have vacillated for centuries between two opposing assessments of the role of poetics in social life. A long tradition of thinking about language and society argues that verbal art provides a central dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study. This position emerges clearly in the writings of Vico, Herder, and von Humboldt; attention from Sapir, the Russian "Formalists," and members of the Prague School to the role of poetics contributed to the development of performance studies and ethnopoe­ tics in the last two decades. Nonetheless, poetics has often been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists who believe that aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon such "core" areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such anthropological fields as economy and social organization. The balance between these two views shifted in favor of poetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new emphasis on performance directed attention away from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and

Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

The effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence, called narrative medicine, is proposed as a model for humane and effective medical practice. Adopting methods such as close reading of literature and reflective writing allows narrative medicine to examine and illuminate 4 of medicine's central narrative situations: physician and patient, physician and self, physician and colleagues, and physicians and society. With narrative competence, physicians can reach and join their patients in illness, recognize their own personal journeys through medicine, acknowledge kinship with and duties toward other health care professionals, and inaugurate consequential discourse with the public about health care. By bridging the divides that separate physicians from patients, themselves, colleagues, and society, narrative medicine offers fresh opportunities for respectful, empathic, and nourishing medical care.

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Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust

completing Theory of the Lyric. What we Call liter\u0003ar\u0003y Cr\u0003itiCiSm Can be tr\u0003aCed baCk to various modes of judgment, praise or blame, of songs and their performances. Singing contests and symposia were among the contexts in ancient Greece for the exercise and articulation of critical judgment; but a properly literary criticism, the classicist Andrew Ford argues, comes into being only with the emergence of a conception of poetry as a verbal artifact, subject to grammatical and rhetorical analysis, formal classification, and technical evaluation: “Only when singers became ‘poets,’ craftsmen of words rather than performers, could a properly ‘poetic’ literary criticism emerge as the special knowledge that discerns the excellence of poetry so understood” (9). Such criticism depends on a system of genres that prescribes the correct telos, or aim, of each type of song and what is appropriate to each, making possible judgments of success. For most of its history, literary criticism was linked to generic categories based on mimesis—genres differing according to what is represented—and to the rhetorical analysis of efficacious speech: criticism is praise or blame made possible by conceptions of goals and norms. The revolution in the concept of literature, which we link to that generally revolutionary time of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, breaks with a conception of literature linked to generic norms and with what Jacques Rancière, in La parole muette, calls “the normative system of BellesLettres” (13; my trans.). Rancière summarizes the shift from a concept of literature as mimesis to a concept of literature as expression:

Introduction: Critical Paradigms

La poética estructuralista: El estructuralismo, la lingüística y el estudio de la literatura

Problems in the Theory of Fiction@@@Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse@@@The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction

Flaubert's realism is a topic that has been somewhat neglected of late-for a variety of reasons that at least deserve some reflection. First, though Madame Bovary remains the most widely read and studied of his novels, it would be fair to say, I think, that for critics of the last thirty years Bouvard et Pecuchet has become paradigmatic for Flaubert-as of course it is-and that stripped-down model of writerly activity, which centers the novel on the circulation of anonymous discourses, can lead one to neglect the extensive descriptions, analyses, and reflections that make up so much of Madame Bovary. Consider this passage.

The Realism of Madame Bovary

85 Once upon a time, the story goes, comparative literature focused on the study of sources and influence, bringing together works where there seemed a direct link of transmission that subtended and served to justify comparison. But then comparative literature liberated itself from the study of sources and influence and acceded to a broader regime of intertextual studies – broader but less well-defined. Comparative literature has been differentiated from other modes of literary study because it did not take it for granted, as did the departments of English, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, that a national literature in its historical evolution was the natural and appropriate unit of literary study. Since comparative literature could not avoid, as the national literature departments could, the question of what sorts of units were most pertinent – genres? periods? themes? – comparative literature frequently became the site of literary theory, while national literature departments often resisted, or at least remained indifferent to the sorts of theory that did not emanate from their own cultural spheres. Comparative literature was thus distinguished by its interest in addressing theoretical issues, as well as knowledgably importing and exploring ‘foreign’ theoretical discourses. It was the place where those questions about the nature and methods of literary study begged in other literature departments were taken up, argued about, even made the focus of teaching and research. If neither of these features suffices any longer to distinguish comparative literature, it is because the views that once distinguished comparativists have become widespread. Even the study of American literature, once committed to exceptionalism and totalization (Americanists had to have a theory about the nature and distinctiveness of American literature), is now in the process of reconfiguring itself as ‘comparative American literatures,’ in the plural. In this sense, comparative literature has triumphed. But of course, institutionally, comparatists do not feel at all triumphant. How far their lack of joy

/pdf/whither-comparative-literature-23f0h6dvwy.pdf

Jonathan Culler

Papers

Introduction: Critical Paradigms

La poética estructuralista: El estructuralismo, la lingüística y el estudio de la literatura

Problems in the Theory of Fiction@@@Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse@@@The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction

The Realism of Madame Bovary

Whither Comparative Literature