preparations for 28 August session

Read these

  1. James, C. (2007). Cultural amnesia: Necessary memories from history and the arts. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Edward Said, pp. 650-657.
  2. Said, E. W. (1994). Representations of the intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures. New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 19-33
  3. The Cloud Of Human Feeling: Art, Science And Ways Of Knowing , a blog by Adam Frank
    How many ways of knowing are there? Are they all equal? Does science, with its empirically based method of interrogating nature, trump all others? Do the domains of intuition, emotion, and other, so-called embodied ways of knowing count as knowledge? What of the realms of human spirituality? What of the domains of art?

Think about these issues

  1. Was Edward Said on the mark in his critique of western cultural understanding of "the other" or was he, himself, unavoidably restricted in his understanding by the cultural milieu in which he grew up and lived?
  2. Can you agree with this statement?
    The particular problem of the intellectual, however, is that a language community in each society that is dominated by habits of expression already exists, one of whose main functions is to preserve the status quo, and to make certain that things go smoothly, unchanged, and unchallenged.
    Or do you feel that intellectuals have a "habit of expression" that is free of these constraints?
  3. Can you think of a place where this statement is appropriate today?
    ... just because you represent the sufferings that your people lived through which you yourself might have lived through also, you are not relieved of the duty of revealing that your own people now may be visiting related crimes on their victims.
  4. Thinking about globalism and the reach of the internet, does "our tribe (become) the whole planet"?

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