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.

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

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

Extending the Theory of the Lyric

The echoes of quarrels about deconstruction in literary criticism have now reached the pages of popular news weeklies, and many bemused readers must wonder what all the fuss is about. When Newsweek features arch-deconstructor Jacques Derrida in a film star’s pose, with open-necked shirt and French raincoat, and when Geoffrey Hartman, our leading interpreter of Wordsworth, devotes a book, Saving the Text, 1 to Derrida’s book Glas, this cultural phenomenon requires explanation.

Hartman and Derrida

The Vacant Mirror: A Study of Mimesis through Diderot's 'Jacques le fataliste'

A collection of essays on feminism in time promises an account of the evolution of feminist movements, as movements with a history that have responded to historical conditions while influencing them in turn. It also promises an account of how feminism today might relate to the whole historical, cultural, and political tradition, to which the concerns of present-day feminism have been marginal. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when feminism is neither a conspicuous force in national politics nor a vanguard movement in universities, I welcome the opportunity to hear from this learned and engaged group of contributors their thoughts on these matters. This set of essays does indeed deal with feminism both as a historical movement and as an approach to historical traditions. If it deals more fully with the latter than with the former, this is only fitting in a journal of literary history. Our collection has, in addition, the distinction of raising from various angles the important but neglected question of the relationship between the lyric and historical temporality. It is easy—and it has been productive—to treat novels as social and political documents that record the travails of women and perhaps, as Nancy Armstrong’s still provocative thesis about the role of domestic conduct literature has it, even ensure that “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman.”1 But lyric poetry has been less amenable to such

Jonathan Culler

Papers

Extending the Theory of the Lyric

Hartman and Derrida

The Vacant Mirror: A Study of Mimesis through Diderot's 'Jacques le fataliste'

"Feminism in Time": A Response

Deconstruction: An Assessment