Wayne Clayson Booth (is one of the most consistently interesting, but also one of the most consistently underestimated, critics of the latter 20th C. A rhetor and rhetorician, a philosopher, pluralist, literary critic, editor, and English professor, his driving theme was the rhetorical resources that encourage, obstruct, or refine agreement: and, therefore, belief, knowledge, and action.
In this site we overview a range of his books, engage his issues, and seek agreement about the value of his critical pluralism, not only for understanding texts, but also for understanding each other.
vrijdag 7 maart 2008
Booth: narratives
Een site (op basis van een cursus) rond het werk van Booth.
donderdag 6 maart 2008
Literary Study and the Social Order
by Stephen L. Tanner
Literary study used to be a repertoire of often compatible approaches (formalistic, biographical, psychological, philological, archetypal, moral, etc.). These approaches shared the fundamental assumption that authors are human beings capable, within broad linguistic possibilities, of describing and interpreting in meaningful ways to others the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual range of human experience. Movements in literary theory now come congealed with exclusionary ideological and anti-metaphysical woridviews that call into question human nature, agency, and communication. Before we continue the interminable but ever necessary debate regarding the relation of literary study--as literary study--to the social order, we need to confront more deliberately the full implications of postmodern literary-intellectual opinion for the social and moral order.
Turner: culture as performance
Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance
Graham St John (ed.) New York : Berghahn (Release date, April 2008)
Upon the 25th anniversary of his passing, this collection features contributions reflecting the wide application of Victor Turner's thought to cultural performance in the early 21st Century. From anthropology, sociology and religious studies to performance, cultural and media studies, Turner has had a prodigious interdisciplinary impact. The collection of 17 essays demonstrates that, in the face of challenges from poststructuralism and postcolonial studies, Turnerian ideas remain compelling with international scholars located in a range of disciplines illustrating how these ideas have been reanimated, renovated, and repurposed in studies of contemporary cultural performance and experience.
Contributions to this collection are grouped in four thematic sections: 'Performing Culture' covering new ritual, drama, media and reflexivity; 'Rites of Passage and Popular Culture' on popular 'transition' rites and popular investment in the ideas of Turner; 'Pilgrimage and Communitas' with contributions covering contemporary manifestations; and, 'Edith Turner' on her role in the Turnerian project.
Volume contributors address themes ranging from dark communitas and techno tribalism to liminal sports and the mediatisation of social dramas, from backpacking, shopping and protest pilgrimage to what Barbara Babcock calls the "gynesis" of Victor Turner's work. Applying, critiquing and reworking Turner's cultural processualism, with attention to such diverse themes as performing "sorry business" within the context of settler and indigenous Australian reconciliation, improvised ritual-theatre within a tertiary education context, pilgrimage to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, and recognition of the critical role of Edith Turner in the development of the Turnerian perspective, this collection demonstrates the broad and evolving appeal of the Turnerian project.
dinsdag 4 maart 2008
Every story... and cinema
Andrew Field in Culture Wars
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In this world (in our world) the whole of human history, every story, every epic tragedy, every personal anecdote has been appropriated by cinema. Anything that was once truthful has been borrowed and structured and given its own manipulatively emotive soundtrack. Even the most brutal, the most astoundingly awful genocides and holocausts have been appropriated and turned into a familiar narrative arc. Anything that once might have meant something to us has been taken from us and rendered meaningless by imposing on it a story we (fundamentally) already know.
Cultural Wars
Welcome to Culture Wars
'Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it was a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secret of the universe.'
Lex Luthor, Superman
Conference Wales
The Narrative Practitioner: Developing Excellence in Research Education and Practice 23-25th June 2008
maandag 3 maart 2008
Call for Papers
Call for Papers: PHILOSOPHY AS LITERATURE
A Special Issue of “The European Legacy”
“The European Legacy,” published by Routledge, is the official journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10848770.asp
The issue will feature a conversation on the relationship philosophy-literature with This special issue is scheduled for late 2009.
CALL FOR PAPERS:
Like novelists, historians or columnists, philosophers, too, are writers. They make sophisticated use of language, and employ – whether deliberately or not – specific rhetorical and stylistic devices, as well as certain repertoires of metaphors, images and symbols. As writers, philosophers also have to adjust their writing to specific audiences, tailor it to serve specific purposes, and strategically choose one genre over another, with all its rules, protocols, and constraints. In short, it is crucial for philosophers – if they are to persuade readers – to advance their ideas following certain aesthetic rules, rhetorical procedures and strategies of persuasion. This has led some authors to speak of “the literariness of philosophical texts” (Berel Lang) as something indistinguishable from the philosophical substance and relevance of those texts.
Deadline for submissions: January 1, 2009
Length: 6000 words.
Law-Literature
European Network for Law and Literature
The European Network for Law and Literature Scholarship has been founded as a vehicle for increasing communication and cooperation between individuals working on related topics within Europe. Founded by a judge and law professor working in the Netherlands and a literary scholar in Germany, this network aims to embrace the variety of disciplines and languages its participants work in as potential sources of scholarly richness and innovation. It is our belief that work on Law and Literature in Europe can develop a profile that more clearly reflects and articulates the cultural identities and legal backgrounds of its participants.
zaterdag 1 maart 2008
Draaisma over literatuur
De hinderlijke weerstand van feiten - door Douwe Draaisma
Lezing over de rol van literatuur...
Lezing over de rol van literatuur...
"Wat bewonderd moet worden in Ian McEwan, niet alleen in zijn lezing vanmiddag, maar ook op andere plaatsen in zijn werk, is dat hij de verhouding tussen die twee werelden van feit en fictie onderzoekt op andere mogelijkheden dan die van een wederzijdse uitsluiting".
Bruner Burke
Kenneth Burke on narratives (and Burke):
Well-formed stories, [Kenneth] Burke proposed, are composed of a pentad of an Actor, an Action, a Goal, a Scene, and an Instrument?plus Trouble. Trouble consists of an imbalance between any of the five elements of the pentad: an Action toward a Goal is inappropriate in a particular Scene . . . an Actor does not fit the Scene . . . or there is a dual Scene . . . or a confusion of Goals. - /Jerome Bruner/ p. 50
zie verder op de site
Real Life
Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Is ‘The Wire’ Our Best Ethnographic Text on the U.S. Today?
Who needs real life? My boyfriend and I have been working our way through the first four seasons of the U.S. television show The Wire, and I have concluded that it may be the best ethnography we have of contemporary American society. Who needs ‘real life’ when fiction, a TV show no less, does a better job of representing US culture(s) than many social science texts?
Conference GURT
GURT2008 | Telling Stories
Telling Stories:
Telling Stories:
Building bridges among Language, Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society and Culture.
Narratives have been studied in many different disciplines: linguistics, literary theory, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, folklore, anthropology, sociology and history.
The primary focus of GURT 2008 is the linguistic study of narrative, especially as it has developed within discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.
As our theme suggests, however, studying the language of narrative can take us far afield to other concerns: the construction of self and identity; the differences among spoken, written and computer-mediated discourse; the role that small and big (e.g. life) stories play in everyday social interactions; the contribution of narrative to social status, roles and meanings within institutional settings as varied as therapeutic and medical encounters, education, politics, media, marketing and public relations.
Thus GURT 2008 will be a forum for building interconnections among language, narrative and social life.
Imaginative Literature & Social Change
I M A G I N A T I V E
LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE
LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Imaginative writing can be both literary and political simultaneously, and inevitably is, to varying degrees. In its own way, fiction can accomplish something similar to what Noam Chomsky and many other progressive workers try to accomplish through nonfiction: the creation of works that clarify and better the world socially, politically, culturally....
Fiction can be used to address what Chomsky calls "Orwell's Problem": How is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to "instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?" In other words, how is it that people are persuaded to act willingly and willfully against their own best interests and against values - regarding themselves and others - they otherwise hold dear? Fiction can debunk harmful propaganda and taboos; it can help energize, motivate, inspire and all the while maintain a vital literary quality by staying focused in part on fiction's core strengths, the plumbing of the depths of the human condition through character -- psychology, personality, motivation, mindset..
Literature and Social Studies
Keokuk's Daily Gate City Online > News
KHS adds new courses, aligns social studies with literature
By Diane Vance/Gate City Staff Writer
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008 2:44 PM CST
Keokuk High School will offer some new courses next year, is dropping a few others, and aligning literature and social studies classes to correspond better with the subject matter taught.
KHS Principal Dave Keane outlined some of the changes to the school board at the last meeting on Feb. 11.
“Next year, social studies and literature will be blocked as co-requisites,” he said.
Freshmen will take civics and Literature Composition I which covers concepts such as tolerance and age appropriate stories such as Romeo and Juliet; sophomores will study American history and Literature/Composition II; students will have world literature the same year as world geography.
“We ask students to do research projects in both literature class and social studies,” Keane said. “Sometimes, students do two mediocre projects. Now, we'll require one research project spanning the two classes and graded by both teachers. We will demand a higher level of performance.”
KHS will drop special ed classes, MDT, MDE, BD, LD and the Multi-Categorical Resource Program.
Human(ities)
Put the ‘human’ back in the humanities sp!ked review of books
Romantic individualism and political correctness have robbed university humanities departments of their ‘love of man’, that ‘amusing, tragic, contradictory creature who yearns to be the master of his fate and transform the world’.
Up on the Meaning of Life, is about the relative death of the humanities in American higher education. He investigates why humanities courses no longer aim to provide young people with insights into the meaning of life. Kronman argues that both he and his colleagues don’t think that the courses themselves have changed, nor do they think that the readings have become irrelevant in our globalised Information Age, as some might argue. He notes that professors at Yale will, in private, acknowledge that the humanities programme continues to provide young people with a perspective on the human condition, but publicly the humanities in America no longer plays its traditional role of pursuing life’s meaning. Hence, those teaching in liberal arts and humanities ‘claim not to possess any special wisdom about the meaning of life that might be communicated to their students in a disciplined way’, suggests Kronman.
Nation Narrative
National narratives in Inter Asia CS
The politics of national atonement and narrations of war
Hideko Mitsui
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1 March 2008 , pages 47 - 61
Abstract
In March 2007, Japan's 'national atonement project' for survivors of military sexual slavery was officially concluded. The atonement project that was implemented by a Japanese government-established non-governmental organization - the Asian Women's Fund - has distributed its fund to a number of survivors in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the Netherlands since its inception in 1995. Over the years, intense politicization around the project has made it extremely difficult for most observers to assess whether the project was successful or not. Several prominent scholars in Japan and South Korea have called for a more compassionate and positive assessment of the project's good intentions, while feminist activists continue to critique the project's negative interventions in the process of redress and reconciliation in Asia. This essay is an attempt to open up a space to rethink the felicitousness of the atonement project by focusing on the ways in which the project told its own story of war, violence, and gender. By juxtaposing stories told by Filipina survivors of the 'comfort women' system with one that has been told by the atonement project implemented by the Asian Women's Fund, it seeks to find a way to reassess whether the project acknowledged the survivors' claims for justice and compensation.
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