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

/pdf/the-value-of-narrativity-in-the-representation-of-reality-33noyvckm3.pdf

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.

/pdf/narrative-medicine-a-model-for-empathy-reflection-profession-4n1xbk2y8w.pdf

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

Teaching Baudelaire, Teaching Translation

I welcome Barbara Olson's response as a contribution to a discussion of omni science that seems to me long overdue. I find I actually agree with several of her main points, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to clarify these and some others. I am struck that Professor Olson does not try to defend the claim in her book Authorial Divinity in the Twentieth Century I had criticized, namely that Heming way's "The Killers" features an omniscient narrator who just declines to tell us the many things that he knows. I had cited this as an example of how the concept of om niscience, with its focus on knowledge, can lead us astray when used in the analysis of narrative. Instead of concentrating on what we are told and its implications, we are led to speculate about what the teller knows, so indeed why not imagine that the teller knows the names and past histories of Max and Al and is just choosing not to tell us? The correct question?if analysis of the story is to be our goal?is why the author chooses not to present such information but restricts reports to what someone sitting in the caf? might have observed. It is not a question of knowledge but of au thorial construction of a narrative focus. The fact that Olson does not defend her

Knowing or Creating? A Response to Barbara Olson

The linguistic foundation

"Fiction" is a somewhat problematical notion, more heavily used, it would seem, in the publishing trade and in public libraries than in literary criticism.* It suggests that for readers and editors the most important distinction, when confronted with a piece of writing, is whether it speaks of real situations and events or imagined ones. When you inquire for a title in a bookstore, the clerk is likely to ask you whether it is fiction or non-fiction, and bestseller lists have, for reasons that remain obscure to me, chosen "fiction" and "non-fiction" as the appropriate way of dividing the multifarious corpus of publications. But when you turn from the organizing principles of bookstores, libraries, and bestseller lists to the books themselves, it is not clear how important this distinction is. If you compare books on the fiction bestseller list with those on the non-fiction bestseller list, you are likely to find that many of the latter seem much more fantastically fictional than the former: Thin Thighs in Thirty Days -a seductive fiction; No Bad Dogs-obviously about a fictional world. Certainly, there are many weeks when the non-fiction bestseller list seems more resolutely fictionalmore imaginatively devoted to fantasies designed to gratify the reading public-than the so-called fiction list. But, of course, the term "fiction" when used by publishers, booksellers, and most readers except some theoretically-inclined specialists, designates imaginative prose narratives (novels and short stories)as opposed to poetry, on the one hand, which will not be found in the fiction section, nor on the fiction bestseller list, and to non-fiction on the other. Non-fiction seems to comprise works which either are not narratives, or, if they are narratives, claim to recount historical events of some sort. This terminological situation is somewhat strange: we speak of "fiction-writers," for example, and famous books bear titles such as The Craft of Fiction and The Rhetoric of Fiction. The most general problem of the theory of fiction might therefore be, what is the relationship of the notion of fiction to the qualities of the writings discussed under this heading? What is the role of the notion of fiction in the theory of fiction? Surprisingly, most of the advances in the theory of fiction of the past twenty-five years come from the study not of fiction as a mode, nor even of the novel as a genre, but of something else. For example, Rene Girard's pioneering Deceit, Desire and the Novel studied major European novels as dramas based on the mimetic mechanisms of desire, "triangular desire," in which the subject's desire is constituted as imitation of another desire. But mimetic desire turned out to be

Problems in the theory of fiction

The image of the Devil practicing a gavage satanique, like the producers of foie gras, gives us an allegorical scenario with a highly original account of the forces behind modern poetry: the Devil working to fatten up our part infernale, which we then take pleasure in explicating to ourselves, in hyperbolic and apostrophic verse. Such an account marks not a crisis in verse, perhaps, but certainly an unorthodox characterization of what after all is often seen as the beginnings of modern poetry. T. S. Eliot, we remember, called Baudelaire “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have

Jonathan Culler

Papers

Teaching Baudelaire, Teaching Translation

Knowing or Creating? A Response to Barbara Olson

The linguistic foundation

Problems in the theory of fiction

Baudelaire's Destruction