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

This commentary reflects upon an interview with Roland Barthes from 1965 in which he discusses the structural analysis of narrative. The presentation prefigures the publication of Barthes’ well-known essay, ‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’, which appeared shortly after in Communications, No. 8, in 1966. A close reading of both interview and essay shows that the interview differs from the published essay, notably in following more explicitly the steps of Saussure’s attempts to work out the units of the linguistic system, using a criterion called commutation. Consideration is also given to the next phase of Barthes’ work on narrative in S/Z (published in 1970), raising the question of what might have transpired had Barthes chosen to remain with an exploration of the actantial and narrational levels identified in his early interview.

Analyzing Narrative: Roland Barthes’ Forgotten Interview

Barbara Johnson never complains about the impossibility of fulfi lling her assignment in the time allotted: that makes a difference between her and the rest of us. The supreme master of the twenty-minute paper, she goes strait to the heart of the issue—no fi lling in of background, no fussing around. She is fearless, not worried about establishing the authority to take on a new subject, judging that her analysis will convince or it wonʼt. In Mother Tongues, when she is arguing that Benjaminʼs messianism is the conviction that fragments must be pieced together as if they could make a whole, she writes, “At this point in my argument it was clear to me that I needed to know something about Kabbalah, the scholarly specialty of Gershom Scholem, who was Benjaminʼs close friend and correspondent” [62]. She then quotes a sentence from Scholem and goes on to interpret it as saying that in the beginning was contraction. She neither tries to sound like an expert nor cites others to support her authority. She just quotes the sentence. Simple, but nobody brings this off as she does. Some of us are old enough to remember the English Institute in New York City in 1977, when someone on a panel on psychoanalysis organized by Geoffrey Hartman fell ill, and this very young woman, an unknown graduate student, stepped in to talk about Derridaʼs reading of Lacanʼs reading of Poeʼs “Purloined Letter.” This was a stunning moment—the high point in the history of the English Institute. It was amazingly brave for a Yale graduate student to take on these two masters, especially Derrida, who was a major presence there, and especially brave to accuse Derrida of doing precisely what he accuses Lacan of, and positively foolhardy to argue that Lacan has already reached the deconstructive insights that Derrida articulates through his critique of Lacan. This essay, “The Frame of Reference,” is a formidable classic, with its compelling account of how the process of critical disagreement illustrates the transferential process of reading: exposing what the other missed exposes you in turn, as you fi nd yourself pulled into that position in the structure, repeating what you denounce. There an abyssal structure and a regularity of effects in which, she writes, “interpretive injustices, however unavoidable in general, always appear corrigible in detail. Which is why the sequence continues” [110]. She doesnʼt hesitate—another feature of her boldness—to propose a general law from what happens in this case, which lesser mortals could easily imagine to be a very special one—Derrida versus Lacan. In general, her willingness to posit as a general law what her reading of a text reveals is remarkable—more remarkable still is that she brings it off. One of her brief exemplary essays that I always teach in theory courses is the title essay of The Critical Difference (“The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac”). Here she identifi es the general law that an alleged difference between will prove to be a projection of a difference within. Her reading of Barthesʼs procedure now seems so utterly self-evident and convincing that it poses a pedagogical problem. If students read it while they are reading S/Z, they feel that they can stop reading Barthes; they know

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v034/34.1culler.pdf

The Genius of Barbara Johnson

Is There Life for Saussure after Structuralism?@@@Ferdinand de Saussure

Semiology is the science of signs, but this definition tells us very little. If anything which has meaning is a sign, then semiology might plausibly claim most of human knowledge as its province. All human artifacts, be they texts, paintings, songs, buildings, or everyday utilitarian objects, have meaning, as do all those human actions which are usually studied by sociology, psychology, history, anthropology. In treating artifacts and actions as bearers of meaning, semiology would already have immense scope, but it would not have reached its potential limits. The realm of semiology can also include natural objects, for they too function as signs: certain clouds mean rain to the meteorological eye, and a particular geological configuration may be a sign of oil, or at least tell of the region's history. If semiology studies everything which signifies, then it embraces a wide variety of disciplines with distinct objects and different methods. Not surprisingly, the first congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, which drew some seven hundred people to Milan in the summer of 1974, was something of a hotch-potch, with papers on literature, music, film, painting, architecture, advertising, animal communication, scientific languages, non-verbal communication, and psychopathology. How one can justify such imperialism (the word seems scarcely too strong)? Why should all these different things be brought together under the banner of semiology? What is the nature of semiology that it should seek to study in its terms objects which are already treated by other disciplines? For the answers to these questions one should turn first to Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, who in his seminal Course in General Linguistics (1917) first proclaimed the need for a general science of signs that would "teach us what signs consist of and what laws govern them." Though he christened the discipline "semiology", Saussure refused to speculate on its precise nature, observing only that "its place is assured in advance." His confidence doubtless came from the conviction that students of language would be compelled to think about signs: "Is it not obvious that language is above all a system of signs and that therefore we must have recourse to the science of signs?" he wrote. Studying signs of other sorts would teach the linguist what was typical and what was peculiar to language. And Saussure added: "Not only will this procedure clarify the problems of linguistics, but rituals, customs, etc. will, we believe, appear in a new light if they are studied as signs, and one will come to see that they should be included in the domain of semiology and explained by its laws."

Deciphering the Signs of the Times

For the past half-dozen years, the GRIP group has pursued problems that are increasingly recognized as central to thinking about literary studies: how questions about the nature of literature and the methods of literary criticism are tied in with questions about institutional arrangements for the teaching and studying of literature, structures of authority, and professional procedures. Instead of introducing institutional considerations only in polemical acts of debunking, GRIP has from the beginning promoted the serious, comprehensive study of the formation rules of disciplines. Theirs has been the most sustained attempt in literary studies to carry out the sort of program Michel Foucault's work has encouraged: to situate intellectual activities in a history of knowledge that is also a history of relations of power. Another novel feature of GRIP's work has been the emphasis on collective investigation. They have sought not only to experiment with the usual conditions of research and writing in the humanities but also to give a practical immediacy to their claim that knowledge depends upon shared assumptions. The essays gathered here show a grasp of varied institutional and ideological realities, from Ann Michelini's description of the conceptions of literary form that have generated and constrained debates about Euripides to Henry Schmidt's discussion of the failure of classical German humanism to oppose Nazism. An important contribution to the genealogy of criticism in the United States is Elizabeth Wilson's argument that the conceptions of literary studies in twentieth-

Jonathan Culler

Papers

Analyzing Narrative: Roland Barthes’ Forgotten Interview

The Genius of Barbara Johnson

Is There Life for Saussure after Structuralism?@@@Ferdinand de Saussure

Deciphering the Signs of the Times

GRIP's Grasp: A Comment