Philosophy of the Humanities II
Important terms
Lists of important things
Texts
Exam: to try, find the entanglements, the links between texts. We would like you to think
about the different themes, frameworks we have looked at and connect them to your daily
life. The applicable aspect. Think, rethink it again
The downside is that you have to do diligence. So see it as a take home essay: bibliography,
overall structure: but most of all take it as a chance to put everything we’ve gone through
together. Do not feel limited to block 2, you can also use block 1 thoughts and frameworks.
In order to grade the essay we need to make sure we submitted our weekly discussion
question. Submit the questions by the time you also submit your essay (next friday)
Lecture 1.1: Interdisciplinarity and the narrative turn
Postcolonial perspective makes European Studies stand apart in the field of humanities.
Interdisciplinarity is also one of the key issues of this course.
Rumford: ‘where is European studies?’ (on the disciplinary map of humanities and social
sciences)
- A rift between EU studies (the studies of the European Union), and in branches of
humanities and social sciences.
- Rumford: European studies = Geography, Sociology, Planning Cultural studies,
History …
Often different backgrounds have to work together: experts from various fields: political,
economic, cultural, legal, historical.
And there is a common research agenda:
Rumford: ‘European studies is centrally concerned with questions of cultural identities, of
Europe’s relation to the rest of the world, of transnational communities, of cross-border
mobilities and networks, of colonial legacies, and of the heritage of a multiplicity of European
peoples.’
And there is a common methodological notion that binds these:
The ‘constructiveness of Europe’
→ this is a multidisciplinary approach
Question: which discipline frames the agenda?
His answer would be all of the above: multi-disciplined.
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,Rumford: ES also has a common object: the transformations of Europe.
Rumford: Mobilities, Hybridity, Governmentality, Risk society, Public sphere
Post-national citizenship, Europeanization, Borderlands
We can add: (European conflicting) memory, Nationalism, Minorities and postcolonialism
Diversity, Multilingualism, Etc.
Constructiveness and Transformations require an interdisciplinary perspective
But what is this interdisciplinary perspective?
The history of European Studies:
1988 (ES created) – present
From a merely Western European focus to encompassing the whole of Europe and its
adjacent zones (because Eastern European Studies were added)
From a national (languages and countries) to a transnational Perspective
But: today we have a mix of multi- or interdisciplinary. The first course consists of
multidisciplinary courses: all divided into history-legal-economics. However, within the
courses are multiple interdisciplinary parts.
What is interdisciplinarity? UNESCO 1972 definition: ‘the interactions between disciplines
[…] ranging from simple communication of ideas to the mutual integration of organizing
concepts, methodology, procedures, epistemology, terminology, data […] an interdisciplinary
group consists of persons trained in different fields of knowledge […] organized into a
common effort on a common problem’
Philosopher of science Steve Fuller: ‘Disciplines are artificial holding patterns of inquiry
whose metaphysical significance should not be overestimated […] Inquiry needs a special
space where it can roam freely’
‘Normal science’. Everybody seems to work in the same way. If everybody agrees that
interdisciplinary is a great thing we should ask ourselves what do we actually mean when we
all agree on this being a great thing?
‘when you say the word “interdisciplinary”, all the breeds… lie down, roll over, and wag their
tails.’ (Davis 2007)
Critique of interdisciplinarity:
True knowledge requires disciplinary work, mastering more than one discipline is too difficult
long on pretense, short on rigor! We should devote our whole lifetime to it to know a field for
real, it takes very long.
Disciplines are continuously redefining themselves:
Take literary studies
- A branch of history in the 19th century
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, - A branch of linguistics until the 1970s
- Today: a branch of cultural studies
Explanations: both internal (within the disciplines and external (outside the disciplines)
There have been multiple turns (=disciplines) in the humanities (and social sciences)
The linguistic turn the cultural turn the affective turn the sensory turn the reflexive turn the
digital turn the participatory turn the narrative turn the biographical turn the spatial turn the
social turn...
Are these turns real shifts of paradigm (= a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns), a
revolution (comp. Kuhn)? (Galileo, painting by Bertini)
‘the object of natural science exists independently of the existence of science itself […] in the
humanities, the condition for the existence of their subject is the existence of the people who
create this subject.’ (Kubicki) If you are studying anything in humanities, you yourself are the
object of study.
Turns = changes, transformations in the way we organize our analyses/studies of objects we
ourselves create.
These turns are not paradigm shifts, because no radical change, but rather exchange,
interchange.
This week: the narrative turn (related to this is the linguistic turn).
the nature and effect of story and storytelling, examples:
Examples of narrative:
Psychology – narrative identity thesis
Law – narrative aspects of confessions, closings
Medical – illness narratives (how to address patients, and how to listen to patients)
Management theory – ‘the story of a product or a company’, it needs to be ‘authentic’.
Why start with narrative?
Not just an object to be interpreted and analyzed but also a way of interpreting and
evaluating. Without narrative a story can not be reproduced. So when you read a text you
create meaning.
→ one of the main tools to look into the way sources are representing reality, and creating
meaning.
Short history of narrative analysis
Ancient rhetorics: attention for tropes (figures of speech) and argumentational structures.
(19th century: historicization)
→Russian Formalism (Shklovsky – here with Mayakovsky on the beach)
→Czech structuralism (Jakobson)
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, ‘Text-immanent’ analysis:
1. Сюжет, syuzhet, sujet: events as they are presented in the text, including flashbacks
and flashforwards, including shifts in perspective.
2. Fabula: the underlying chronological order.
Historicity: contextualize historic narratives using literature etc.
Example: study by Vladimir Propp, Struktura Skaz, Morphology of the Folk Tale, 1928
Each folk tale has its own synchronic arrangement
All folk tales hold common patterns – diachronic – which can be systematically studied
Bal’s analysis of Rembrandt’s Susanna and the Elders as an example of
Interdisciplinarity
> Narrative turn
(Rumford: transformations and constructiveness of Europe → here the painting as example)
Meaning is constructed, we make it while watching
The object (as well as the spectator) is transformed
(traditional) art criticism: fabula and sujet
Susanna and the Elders: how rape is averted (Book of Daniel) provides the fabula, the
painting the sujet.
- Suasanna is being threatened by 2 elderly men, luckily she escapes
- Attitude of condoning sexual violence, it was okay for the spectator to look at these
painings. The happy outcome of the story justified us watching the scene.
- Question: because Susanna is so beautiful, is it in a way her fault that this
happened?
- It is a biblical story
traditional question – voyeurism: is Susanna ‘appealing to or enticing the spectator?’
The problem of the painting is, how do these paintings function nowadays?, in nowadays
‘feminized’ society?
He tries to tackle questions like this using narratology.
Art criticism: spectatorship (you spectate what is
happening, the rape)
Narratology: adds (here internal) focalization
There are of course multiple ways you can
interpret a painting: Ball says look at the details.
There are multiple stories within a story. F.a. is
Suzanna looking at the spectator? We are
involved in an act of watching/spectating.
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