The Order of Things (jirei kenkyû I and II), 2005

Tama Campus, Thursday, 4:35 ~ 7:40, 11454

With graduation theses due at the end of the term the seminar has turned into a workshop, with student writing at the center. Accordingly, this page will not be updated except to post special announcements if required.

September 29: We agreed in the September 22 seminar that even though our work for this semester primarily will be primarily grounded in the individual projects that are leading to the presentation of graduation theses, we might still benefit from weekly readings and discussions about them, to serve as an overarching theoretical base for the individual projects. Wisely or unwisely students elected (again) to turn to Foucault, and I promised to select something by today to get us started on that. Ok, decision made.

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September 22: Organizing week for the second term. Welcome back.

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July 14: End-of-term presentations. Students are reminded that we shall meet July 21 even though classes have officially ended, from 5:00-7:00, to wrap up the end-of-term presentations and address any necessary matters before the summer break.

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July 7: End-of-term presentations.

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June 30: Modeling and discussion of electronic databases, including OCLC WorldCat, Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Ingenta.

Homework: Continued preparation for 30-minute presentations on thesis topics to be given in the July 7 and 14 seminar meetings.

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June 23: Continued work on thesis topics and development. Some students are considerably further along than others, but I continue to hope for successful 30-minute presentations on July 7 and 14. In the June 30 seminar I shall model several full-text electronic databases, including Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Ingenta, without reference to which (and not to put too fine a point on it) research projects of the sort being prepared in this seminar are bound to be superficial.

I have not forgotten Foucault, by the way, but it has continued to seem that we all need a break. We’ll return to The Order of Things with bells on early next term, if not before.

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June 16: Satisfactory discussion of thesis topics, to which we’ll return in the June 23 seminar, along with, finally, discussion of chapter 7 of The Order of Things.

Homework: Prepare and provide to me an electronic copy of your thesis abstract as it now stands, this for posting on this page. 200 words or so will suffice. You may either email the text before the June 23 seminar meeting or bring it to the seminar on any standard storage device (preference for CD or USB). The final three seminar meetings of the term, June 30, July 7, and July 14, will be given over to formal 30-minute student presentations on the thesis topics. I’ll expect these to be fully prepared, with any handouts that might help provided to the audience, and, of course, with full and accurate documentation in the form of a bibliography, copy to all audience members. You may think of this as the first full draft of your graduation thesis, although of course we are all aware that first drafts continue to change and to be refined.

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June 9: My apologies for missing the seminar a second week in a row. I’m told that the long discussion of thesis projects by the three students present was excellent, and carried on until past 9:00. Good.

In addition to that, there was this:

A .pdf version of may be downloaded by clicking here (warning: 828 kb).

In the June 16 seminar I shall be present once again. We’ll finally discuss chapter 7 of the Foucault if enough people have read it (it has been available in 11454 for some time) or, if not, carry on with thesis presentations for the full three hours instead of the last hour and a half.

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June 2: Thanks to students for conducting the seminar in my absence. I have received the two presentation summaries left on the seminar table and shall have written comments prepared for the June 9 meeting.

I don’t know yet if the reading (Foucault chapter 7) was prepared and distributed. If so, we’ll discuss it next week, if not, the following week.

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May 26: Thanks again to Luis Salamanca for bringing us nearly up-to-date with Foucault. This was followed by further discussion of thesis proposals. Beginning in the June 2 seminar, we’ll shift the focus of the second half of seminar meetings to weekly student presentations on thesis topics.

Homework: Keep reading Foucault. Chapter 7 “The Limits of Representation” (the first chapter of Part II, finally bringing us fully to the modern “episteme”), will be made available at the June 2 meeting. We’ll discuss it June 9.

Also, prepare a formal presentation of 10 minutes on your thesis topic. This should be accompanied by (at least) a summary and a full and scrupulously-accurate bibliography of all sources that have contributed to the presentation, in proper manuscript form.

I am sorry to say that I shall not be able to attend the seminar meeting of June 2 because of an unexpected conflict in my schedule. I hope students will continue as usual in my absence. My understanding is that Luis will wrap up his presentation on Part I of The Order of Things, and that this will be followed by the thesis presentations. Please leave for me on the table the English summaries and bibliographies related to the presentations.

Homework for the June 9 seminar will be chapter 7 of Foucault and the preparation of a second 10-minute presentation, which I hope will benefit from discussions and comments following the first presentations on June 2.

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May 19: We set aside Foucault and spent the three hours in discussion of these and related issues.

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May 12: Continued discussion of Foucault’s The Order of Things, with my lecture notes heavily influenced by those of John Protevi at Louisiana State University, online here (Part I) and here (Part II). Protevi’s other Foucault materials are worth a look, as well. The index is here.

This was followed in the second half of the three hours with continued discussion of thesis projects. I mentioned that students should be trying key terms in the major Japanese- and English-language union catalogues, the NACSIS WebCat and the OCLC WorldCat. Chuo University in the past provided access to OCLC only at terminals in the Main Library (i.e., not to students off campus), but this seems to have changed. WorldCat and various other databases seem to be available on the Internet via the First Search link off the Chuo University Library web site.

Students should be aware that the NACSIS WebCat and the OCLC WorldCat are mainly useful for finding books, not individual periodical articles, which are accessible through other online and print resources. In the second half of the seminar meeting of May 26 or soon thereafter I’ll do an overview of the major periodical indices and databases in English—all of which are available via the computers in my office—and Go Murakami will provide an overview of the Japanese-language indices most likely to be of use in the projects of the seminar.

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April 28: Three-hour session despite our plan to alternate one-and-a-half and three-hour sessions. The discussion of Foucault’s The Order of Things in the first ninety minutes was aided immensely by Luis Salamanca’s superb overview of the Preface and chapter 2, “The Prose of the World.” Following Golden Week we’ll continue the discussion by turning to chapters 3 and 4, “Representing” and “Speaking.”

The second ninety minutes focused on the one-sentence thesis proposals and the data sets they predict. Both that were discussed are promising. I’ve suggested that students resolve to write a thousand words a week. If, as would be a good idea, the seminar would like to establish a “writing group” for the sharing and discussion of early drafts, I would be pleased to provide 11454 as a meeting place.

Homework: Foucault, chapter 4, “Speaking”; continued preparation of thesis proposals; those who have presented proposals: write.

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April 21: Good discussion of chapter 1 of The Order of Things in the first 90 minutes, followed by introductory discussion of the nature of the individual projects.

Homework: Foucault chapters 2 and 3, “The Prose of the World” and “Representing,” pp. 17-77. Formally prepared (i.e., typed, proper manuscript form) one-sentence project proposal beginning with “I want to explain that . . .” or “I want to discover whether . . .”. This should be followed by notes about the data set predicted by the one-sentence proposal, i.e., what must you collect and digest to explain what you want to explain or to discover what you want to discover?

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April 14: In the first week of the term the students in the graduation seminars jirei kenkyû I and jirei kenkyû II agreed to meet together as a single seminar, from 4:35 to 7:40 in the upcoming week (April 21), from 4:35 to 6:05 the following week (April 28), and thereafter to alternate three-hour and one-and-a half-hour weekly meetings. When presented with options about the texts we might read together students selected Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970, translated by Alan Sheridan from Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, 1966). This is an ambitious choice that is going to challenge all of us considerably, but I welcome the opportunity to read such a seminal work with the seminar, and in honor of the choice of texts have decided to call the seminar, as you see above, “The Order of Things.”

The procedure will be as follows: each week from 4:35 to 6:05 we shall discuss the Foucault text, trying to come to terms with its intricacies and to relate Foucault’s understandings with our own; in the weeks that we meet for three hours, we shall follow the first ninety minutes with presentation, supervision, and discussion of individual student-selected projects, which in theory will in time become graduation theses.

Homework: In order to get through the Foucault text in a term, we must read between 30 and 40 pages a week, and so accordingly the homework assignment for April 21 is to read Foucault’s Forward to the English Edition, Preface, and chapters 1 and 2, “Las Meninas,” and “The Prose of the World,” pp. ix ~ 45, copies of which are available in 11454. Please note that “Las Meninas” is the name of a painting by the Spanish painter Diego Velàsquez (1599 ~1660), reproduced in Foucault’s text after the title page, and it is this painting that he is discussing in chapter 1. If you click the small reproduction of the painting above a larger version, from the La Prospective éducative web site, will open in a new window.

Students interested in notes about Foucault on the Internet might want to have a look at the Foucault links here at themargins.net.

Since we’ll meet for three hours April 21 students should also be prepared do discuss further their ideas for the seminar project.