The endurance of critique Fassin, Didier
Anthropological theory,
03/2017, Volume:
17, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Critique in the humanities and the social sciences has recently been under attack and even declared lifeless. Considering the report of its death to be an exaggeration but acknowledging that one ...should never let a good crisis go to waste, I propose a reflection on the challenges faced by the practice of critical thinking in anthropology based on my own research on AIDS in South Africa, trauma among Palestinians, and policing and punishment in France, while resituating the questions it raises in a broader history of the discipline. More specifically, I discuss two major strands, genealogical critique and critical theory, suggesting how they may be combined, and two opposed views, critical sociology and the sociology of critique, showing that ethnography can surmount their supposed irreconcilability. Affirming that critique, under its multiple forms, is inherent to the anthropological project, I contend that it is more than ever needed in times laden with worrying spectres.
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Breaking new ground by considering productions of popular culture from above, rather than from below, this book draws on theorists of cultural studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier and ...John Fiske to synthesize work from disparate fields and present new readings of well-known literary works.
Using the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, Mary Ellen Lamb investigates the social narratives of several social groups - an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside. She states that under the pressure of increasing economic stratification, these social fractions created cultural identities to distinguish themselves from each other - particularly from lower status groups. Focusing on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonson's Masque of Oberon, she explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn, played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period.
Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant ...statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok.
In the first-ever account of Bayes' rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years-at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information (Alan Turing's role in breaking Germany's Enigma code during World War II), and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes' rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security.
Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists,The Theory That Would Not Dieis the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest controversies of all time.
Published just after the Second World War,European Literature and the Latin Middle Agesis a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the ...classical era up to the early nineteenth century, and from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles. In what T. S. Eliot called a "magnificent" book, Ernst Robert Curtius establishes medieval Latin literature as the vital transition between the literature of antiquity and the vernacular literatures of later centuries. The result is nothing less than a masterful synthesis of European literature from Homer to Goethe.
European Literature and the Latin Middle Agesis a monumental work of literary scholarship. In a new introduction, Colin Burrow provides critical insights into Curtius's life and ideas and highlights the distinctive importance of this wonderful book.
The shapes of silence Tagore, Proma
The shapes of silence,
c2009, 20090317, 2014, 2009, 2008-11-25
eBook
Drawing from the insights of subaltern studies and postcolonial feminisms, Proma Tagore brings together the work of a diverse group of writers - Toni Morrison, Shani Mootoo, Louise Erdrich, M.K. ...Indira, Rashsundari Debi, and Mahasweta Devi. She focuses on the visceral, affective nature of their narratives and explores the way that personal and historical trauma, initially silenced, may be recorded across generations, as well as across complex national, racial, gender, and sexual lines.
This book explores the intellectual and personal relations among John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater, three figures important in the development of nineteenth-century English thought ...and culture.
This volume aims to examine the literary and socio-historical relationship between the Books of Chronicles and the priestly literature in the Pentateuch and in Ezekiel. Experts across this body of ...literature come together to examine the connections and interactions between specific texts, ideas, and socio-historical contexts of the literary works, as well as explore broader themes in the relationship between them.
After centuries of ignoring the child, some philosophy now considers the child an ideal practitioner as well as subject. This is evident especially in the Philosophy for Children, or P4C, movement. ...Offering a novel take on this phenomenon, Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner.
Since its inception in the 1970s, P4C has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work as part of its commitment to keeping philosophy fresh and relevant. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in children’s classics, especially Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature in significant ways. After examining the P4C movement, author Kenneth B. Kidd turns his critical eye to theory for beginners as exemplified in the form of the multitude of illustrated guides. If philosophy is for children and theory is for beginners, he argues, then children’s literature might also be described as a literature for minors, and perhaps even a minor literature as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari. Examining everything from the work of the rise of French Theory in the United States to the crucial pedagogies offered in children’s picture books, from Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to studies of queer childhood, Kidd deftly reveals the way in which children may learn from philosophy and vice versa.
