Undergraduate Course Pages > Introductory Seminar: Discovering Others I

January 7: Student reports on essays noted in the Bibliography of Edward Said Online. This was the final official meeting of the seminar, but we shall meet at the usual time and place next week, January 14, for final considerations.

December 17: Successful student reports on Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, the history of the Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation, and Palestinian writers other than Edward Said. In January we’ll return to student presentations on the articles from the Said online bibliography and wrap up the course.

December 15 Note: The summary of the “Post-Said” discussion in the graduate Cultural Studies seminar, to which reference was made in this seminar, is finally up, here.

December 10: Discussion of the relation of Edward Said’s Dreams and Delusions and Low Point of Powerlessness with the themes we have addressed in the seminar. The summary presentations on the essays were good, but my sense is that students do not have a sufficient grounding in history to engage such work as I would like it to be engaged. Accordingly, particular students were asked to prepare for the December 17 seminar ten-minute presentations on Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, the history of the Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation, and Palestinian writers other than Edward Said.

December 3: Admirable presentations on sections of A&A by Hiroshi Usui and Keisuke Ishige, followed by our final discussion of Ashcroft and Ahluwalia’s Said. The December 10 seminar will begin a series of student presentations on essays from the Bibliography of Edward Said Online.

November 26: Overview of the lecture, “Post-Said,” that took place in the graduate Cultural Studies seminar on November 22. By the afternoon of November 29 a summary of that lecture will be up, here.

We’ll finish the discussion of Orientalism in the December 3 seminar. Homework for the December 10 seminar meeting: each student should read one article linked from the Bibliography of Edward Said Online and be prepared to summarize the major points and themes.

November 19: The discussion of Orientalism continued, and was aided in part by the banned Warner Brother’s video Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips and the photographs in Edwin Arnold’s Seas and Lands. We’ll complete the Orientalism chapter of A&A on November 26.

November 12: Students responsible for particular parts of A&A chapters 2 and 3 led useful discussions about 1) the nature and importance of Said’s understanding of literal and metaphorical exile and 2) the constructed nature of the discourse of Orientalism.

November 5: I presumed to distinguish at length between two views of history, a Hegelian dialectical model and a Nietzschean genealogical model, in the hope that the distinction would help contextualize the material we’re addressing in the seminar.

Any such distinction drawn in one ninety-minute lecture is bound to be cursory, but my hope is that students will understand nonetheless the Hegelian bias that pertains in the dominant discourses of many centers of power (including Tokyo), and the genealogical disruptions of it that pertain in work by writers such as Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and others to whom we shall turn in the future.

We’ll return to A&A, to wrap up chapter 2 and move forward to chapter 3, in the November 19 seminar. No homework is due for this meeting since I already have your summaries of both chapters.

October 22: We moved more or less smoothly through the straightforward concepts of “secular criticism,” the “worldliness” of the critic, and “amateurism” as a critical practice, and began discussion of the idea of “speaking truth to power.” This is central to Said’s critical enterprise, and so we shall return to it. The concept may become clear, or more clear, as it is discussed in conjunction with the ideas of “exile,” “hegemony,” and, particularly, the idea of a “discourse,” which we shall get to in A&A chapter 3, “Orientalism.” Students are reminded that our next seminar meeting will be November 5. The homework is to read the “Orientalism” chapter and to prepare the usual reaction paper.

October 15: Much of the seminar was spent trying to de-mystify the tenets of structuralist and post-structuralist thought, an aim aided by Yuta Kuronuma, Tomoyoshi Kirimura, and Mitsugu Maekawa in their informal presentations. We arrived at this much: structuralism separates language (and representation and discourse and texts) from the world by showing that meaning comes from difference rather than from direct apprehension of the world, and proposes to analyze the structures (read: categories) by which we make sense of the world. Post-structuralism adds to this the understanding that relations between the signifiers we use to represent the world and the things-in-the-world signified by them are unstable, that signifiers lead only to other signifiers and not to the world itself, that we may not find a central position from which once and for all to arrive at a non-contingent analysis either of the world itself or of the structures by which we understand it. Meaning, in other words, is always and inevitably conditional.

We discussed the ways in which Edward Said’s work both emerges from and diverges from such standard structuralist and post-structuralist positions. Certainly Said’s work shares with structuralist understanding the concept that “representation is not transparent,” as a common way of putting the matter has it, and with post-structuralist understanding the idea of the instability of categories of knowledge and of meaning. Much of Said’s engagement with contemporary theory, however, has involved bringing the world back in, so to speak. As Ashcroft and Ahluwalia put it in the summary note at the end of “Worldliness: The Text”:

Said shows how the worldliness of the text is embedded in it as a function of its very being. It has a material presence, a social and cultural history, a political and even an economic being as well as a range of implicit connections to other texts. We do not need to dispense with textuality, nor with the centrality of language [in the ways that we apprehend the world] to show that the embedding of the text in its world, and the network of its affiliations [and filiations] with that world, are crucial to its meaning and its significance. . . (p. 27).

The reading for the October 22 seminar is chapter 2 of Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, “Worldliness: The Critic.” Particular students were assigned to prepare informal presentations on particular parts of the text, and as always all student are expected to prepare a short reaction paper.

October 8: The seminar began well with a good overview of Ashcroft and Ahluwalia chapter 1, “Why Said,” by Yasumasa Toda and Hiroshi Usui, but then became somewhat bogged down in chapter 2, “Worldliness: The Text.” The problem was determined to be A & A’s emphasis on structuralism and post-structuralism. I tried to help and probably confused seminar participants more than they were so already.

Accordingly, the October 15 seminar will begin with a ten-minute presentation by Yuta Kuronuma on Structuralism, and another by Tomoyoshi Kirimura and Mitsugu Maekawa on Post-structuralism. Perhaps sections on Structuralism and Post-structuralism on the links page here will help.

After the presentations we’ll work again on an understanding of the worldliness of texts, I hope with a better understanding of what Said is drawing upon and reacting against in his formulation of the concept.

October 1: Background lecture on Edward Said, public reaction to his death last week, and the concept of the “worldliness” of texts, which I have begun the course by suggesting is the central concept required to understand Said’s work. Students who would like to address the primary formulation of the idea are referred to Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic (Harvard UP, 1983), particularly chapter 1, pp. 31~53, which is available in my office.

Homework: read the first two chapters of Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia’s Edward Said (Routledge, 1999). Yasumasa Toda and Hiroshi Usui will begin the October 8 seminar with a 10-minute presentation on the first chapter, “Why Said,” and all students should prepare a 250-300-word reaction paper (typed, standard manuscript form) to the second chapter, “Worldliness: The Text.”

Also, questions for your consideration in preparing for the October 8 seminar: What are the implications of the worldliness of texts? Why is the idea important? Why does it frighten or threaten some people? What does it do for our understanding of education? What does it do for our understanding of meaning?

Finally, students are also encouraged to look around in the new (and in progress) Truth to Power: A Bibliography of Edward Said On-line at this site.

September 24: Orientation for students who may enroll in the course.