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

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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

As much as anyone in literary studies, Stanley Fish has taken seriously the injunction to be a public intellectual. Back in the early 1990s he debated Dinesh D’Souza in a large number of venues, on questions of education, political correctness, affirmative action, changes in the literary canon, and other subjects of controversy, in a road show where the attraction was opposing contrarians. Since then he has continued to write essays for nonacademic publication, and Save the World on Your Own Time is a distillation of such op-ed pieces and public pronouncements. Now often when we think of public intellectuals, we imagine someone who mediates between the academy and the general public, explaining academic discoveries to a lay public in terms that they can comprehend: Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, or Brian Greene. Another version is the intellectual who operates outside the academy and pronounces judiciously on a range of public issues: Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre are illustrious predecessors, but we can also think of Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, Cornell West, and perhaps Umberto Eco. But Fish has pioneered a different role—the role of public intellectual as provocateur—where the goal is not to explain work in a recondite academic specialty or to propound judiciously on questions of public moment but to provoke, to offer arguments that will irritate and prompt discussion. In this new role, it is not a matter of taking sides in an ongoing controversy—strategically, to promote the side you favor, trying to win

Writing to Provoke

Madame Bovary, which was scandalous in its own day for its focus on the adultery of a provincial woman, has had a strange, complex fate. Flaubert remade the image of the novelist, as pure artist, for whom style was all that mattered, and disrupted novelistic technique, in ways that critics and writers have found exemplary, treating this as the novel novelists cannot overlook; yet for readers Madame Bovary is not a “book about nothing” but provides a searing portrait of provincial life and of the condition of women. The vividness and complexity of the character Flaubert created here made Emma a type: a sufferer of “Bovarysme.” Flaubert’s revolutionary notion that a trivial subject was as good as a noble subject for a serious novel was taken to be connected to the democratic notion that every human subject is as worthy as another and allowed to have desires. Yet, while promoting Emma as a valid subject of literature, equal to others, Flaubert writes against the attempt to democratize art, to make it enter every life, and renders trivial the manifestations of this subject’s desires, while making her an exemplary figure.

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Flaubert’s Provocation

Stanley Fish & the Righting of the Reader@@@Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature

ment of literary studies? In his History of Literary Criticism, Rene Wellek assigns journals no significant role in the history of American literary criticism, asserting that "individual initiative rather than collective trends matters in criticism."' Can this be true, or has Wellek's notion of criticism as an individual act of judgment blinded him to the way criticism actually evolves? Certainly one could make a case for the importance of journals in the past half-century, a period marked by the decline of public, nonacademic criticism and the emergence of interpretive criticism as the major form of writing about literature. The New Criticism, for example, originated as an argument about the nature of poetry in T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood (1920), but also as a challenge to the historical scholarship in several new quarterlies, particularly The Southern Review and The Kenyon Review. Explicitly devoted to innovation, eschewing footnotes and bibliographies, thejournals adopted an anti-academic stance, though they were themselves part of the academic world. The Southern Review, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren from 1935-42, was financed, lavishly at first, by Louisiana State University, which Governor Huey Long wished to make a great university. The Kenyon Review, edited byJohn Crowe Ransom from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/469379.pdf

Jonathan Culler

Papers

Writing to Provoke

Flaubert’s Provocation

Stanley Fish & the Righting of the Reader@@@Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature

New Literary History and European Theory

In the analysis of narrative