Library Lecture Research Articles

Helmholtz and the Conservation of Energy: Contexts of Creation and Reception

Helmholtz and the Conservation of Energy: Contexts of Creation and Reception

Helmholtz and the Conservation of Energy: Contexts of Creation and Reception

Helmholtz and the Conservation of Energy: Contexts of Creation and Reception

Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850

Poe's “Eureka,” Erasmus Darwin, and Discourses of Radical Science in Britain and America, 1770–1850

Spatial characterization of noise levels at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria

The study investigated the spatial variability in the distribution of noise pollution in Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta. Measurements of noise were taken from 10 locations on campus namely; the academic environment including the University library and college lecture auditoria, the residential areas comprising the Student hostels and Vice-chancellor’s lodge as well as other populated areas like the car park and student union building. The noise measurement was done in the morning and evenings of Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays over a period of 3 weeks in July 2019. The noise measurement was done with the aid of Smart Sensor Digital Sound Level meter (Model: AR824). The sampling points were geo-located using a hand-held receiver for Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Questionnaires were administered to members of the University community (staff and students) to determine their respective perception of campus noise on academic activities. Data (noise and survey) were subjected to statistical analysis. Spatial analysis of the noise levels includes surface interpolation (Krigging) to determine the spatial pattern of noise across the campus, particularly, the most tranquil and most chaotic locations. The results show noise pollution levels reaching 74.3 (db) and 73.0 (db) during weekdays at some locations on campus. The noise emission level at some locations within the University exceeded the World Health Organization and Federal Ministry of Environment of Nigeria’s permissible level of 55 db for residential areas. Generally, it was observed that the ambient noise from heavy duty generating with the student chattering put noise level above 35(db) to 55(db) recommended for educational institutions. It can be inferred from statistical analyses and spatial interpolations of recorded noise levels, that noise levels of many areas in FUNAAB exceed the recommended 40 db required for an institution of higher learning. The study however finds that staff and students have adjusted to the noise on campus. Lecturers have resorted to the use of public address systems in large classes while students go to serene locations for better assimilation when studying. The study recommends reduction of point-source noises such as replacing the diesel generators with solar power. Signage should be displayed at sensitive areas such as library to reduce unnecessary noise.

The Practice of Philosophy within its Limits

The Practice of Philosophy within its Limits Jason Read (bio) CITIZEN SUBJECT: FOUNDATIONS FOR PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY BY ETIENNE BALIBAR TRANSLATED BY STEVEN MILLER New York: Fordham University Press, 2017 In reviewing Etienne Balibar’s Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, it is important to grasp what kind of book, what kind of work, one is dealing with. The immediate answer would be a collection of essays. This superficial apprehension makes sense, especially because Balibar has written predominantly essays since he emerged on the scene with his contribution to Reading Capital. With the exception of the short studies on canonical figures, such as The Philosophy of Marx, Spinoza and Politics and Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, as well as the Welleck Library Lectures, Violence and Civility, Balibar’s publications have mainly appeared as a series of essays collected in such books as Masses, Classes, Ideas; We, The People of Europe?; and Politics of the Other Scene. Treating Citizen Subject as merely a collection of essays misses the methodological point. Not only were the essays not intended as an organized book, but their episodic character belies a fundamental methodological point. As Balibar writes in the Introduction all the essays in this volume consist of readings; they bear upon texts or traverse the interpretation of texts. These texts are always rigorously individualized not only in the sense they are authored but also in that, above all, they are each time unique. I compare these texts to one another but I do not discuss “works” in the sense that literary and university ideology gives this term, nor, even less, the “systems” or “tendencies” [End Page 152] that would be represented in each product. I propose a new reading of the Second Meditation and not of Cartesianism . . . of the Phenomenology of Spirit (or a few moments therein) and not of Hegelianism, of the section from Capital on “commodity fetishism” and not of Marxism and so forth. (2017, 9) Balibar’s attention to the specific moments of reading is framed by a theoretical interest in what it means to “write in the conjuncture,” to write within a specific historical moment, with its constitutive tensions and contradictions. As Balibar argues, “not only do philosophers write within a conjuncture, but conversely, within the conjuncture, they write” (2017, 10). Balibar’s emphasis on the conceptual pair of the conjuncture and writing suggests that the context determines but does not define writing. Text exceeds context. The specificity of the moment is short-circuited by the practice of writing, which inserts the moment in a longer signifying chain, while this chain is in turn broken, or turned into knots by the exigencies of the conjuncture. The two of these converge in aporias, tensions, everything that Althusser formerly identified through symptomatic reading, now slightly reconfigured as a symptom of the tension between thought and its historicity. Balibar does not seek some balance between text and context or situate these texts in some overall historical progression but puts them to their maximum tension, seeking the point of heresy, the moment where the conjuncture interrupts the writing of philosophy and writing of philosophy breaks open the conjuncture. Despite this attention to the moment, to the points of heresy, Balibar’s book is not without its overarching theme, its large problem. It is more than a series of interventions and readings of particular conjunctures. As the subtitle suggests, it is work in philosophical anthropology, on the intersection of citizen and subject as ways of conceptualizing and problematizing what it means to be human. These concepts and problems, philosophical anthropology, citizen and subject not only are concepts that are in some sense implicitly universal, as perhaps all concepts are, but also make an explicit claim for universality. Philosophical anthropology claims to be an understanding of humanity as such. The citizen is in some sense the political corollary of such a universal figure. If one wanted to sum up in a word why “philosophical anthropology” has fallen out of favor as a philosophical problem or why the citizen is no longer seen as the center of politics, the criticism could [End Page 153] be summed up with one word: “universal.” The problem...

Interview with Director David Thacker

David Thacker is a longtime director of Miller's work and directed the British Premier of The Last Yankee at the Young Vic in 1993. He decided to revive this play in 2019 at the Bolton Library Lecture Theatre. Currently the head of the BA (Hons) Theatre and Performance Degree at the University of Bolton and former Artistic Director at the Octagon Theatre, Thacker was interviewed post-performance on 13 March 2019.

Copernicus and the Astrologers (Dibner Library Lecture, December 12, 2013), written by Robert S. Westman, 2016

Copernicus and the Astrologers (Dibner Library Lecture, December 12, 2013), written by Robert S. Westman, 2016

Tingkat Kepuasan Mahasiswa Dan Proses Belajar Mengajar Di Perguruan Tinggi X

This paper is to (1) analyze the level of satisfaction of students in the learning process; (2) analyze the variables that give satisfaction to the students in the learning process, (3) analyze the relation between suitability levels with expected performance provided. This study used a technique Importance Performance Analysis (IPA). The result shows, the level of student satisfaction in general is low. Based on the sequences, the lowest suitability level is the speed and accuracy of employees in resolving student complaints, internet and intranet facilities, availability and completeness of the facilities in the library reading room and lecture hall comfort.

Robert S. Westman. Copernicus and the Astrologers: Dibner Library Lecture, December 12, 2013. Transcription of lecture (pdf). 99 pp., figs., index, notes, bibl. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Libraries, 2017. Free (ebook).

Previous articleNext article No AccessMiddle Ages & RenaissanceRobert S. Westman. Copernicus and the Astrologers: Dibner Library Lecture, December 12, 2013. Transcription of lecture (pdf). 99 pp., figs., index, notes, bibl. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Libraries, 2017. Free (ebook).Jonathan RegierJonathan Regier Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 109, Number 2June 2018 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/698162 Views: 108Total views on this site © 2018 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Design Concept and Realization of University Library’s Online Lecture System

The traditional library lectures are based on the physical space environment, which is problematic in terms of user needs analysis, time selection, and resource utilization, so that the value of the library unexploited.University library’s online lecture system adopts the three-tier architecture design pattern, which based on ASP.NET as the development platform and SQL Server as the back-end database, designing the system to solve the problems in the traditional library service.The design and implementation of the University library’s online lecture system broke the traditional library lecture mode, and further optimized the library service concept, improve the quality of service to meet the diverse needs of the user groups. Integrating online test, interactive question and answer, feedback mechanism to the system, the system has a good user experience, visual way to show the audience’s learning situation and other information, optimize the content and quality of services to make comments and suggestions.

Incorporating Branded Academic Library Programming to Promote and Showcase Campus Research and Artistic Performances

Academic libraries play a crucial role in the scholarship cycle. In addition to serving as a traditional study space, a university's community depends on their libraries to acquire and provide access to resources to support the research and instruction interests of faculty and students. In these ways, academic libraries support the cyclical nature of scholarship by collecting resources that are themselves both the tools necessary for generating future scholarship, and the outputs of past scholarship. This article focuses on two successful library-sponsored programs at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. Its Library Lecture Series, which promotes faculty research and scholarship, and its Senior Showcase, which celebrates senior undergraduates’ research, have become a part of the cyclical scholarship cycle. Library-hosted programming that draws attention to the broad array of scholarship created on university campuses offers and provides opportunities for strengthening academic libraries’ relationships with their faculty, staff, student, and community users.

Violence and Civility

The Wellek Library Lectures from which these two books developed were given in 1996. The English version (2015) translates the material of the lectures that address the themes of “the conversion of violence,” in particular in the philosophies of Hobbes and Hegel, and of “inconvertible violence.” “Inconvertible violence” signals those forms and practices of violence that annihilate possibilities of resistance, that cannot be arrested by political power and transformed into civil and social exchange. The French version (2010) includes a second part made up of further essays—on Clausewitz, Marxism, Lenin and Gandhi, and Schmitt and Hobbes—in which Balibar continues to wrestle with the categories “violence” and “politics” and the complex, elusive relationships between them.

New Norcia Library Lecture: How many roads must a library walk down?*

Libraries have welcomed the opportunity offered in the twenty-first century to place content on the roads and channels that are now available through the Internet to provide access to our rich and diverse collections. Amidst the enormous amount of information available the great collections sometimes are ‘dead ends’ from a reader’s point of view and tantalise. While often the casual reader happens upon collections and the serious scholar may be able to access a wider range of material from wherever they are than in the microfilm collections of regular visits to major libraries there are major challenges for libraries to maintain digitisation, create easy digital access and market effectively. The lecture will cover the ‘roads’ we have used to create access, the messages which can and could be sent through signposts along the way, some insights into analysis of user behaviour on the Parliament of Australia’s website and comments on the benefits of moving from information martyrs to natives.

Whither Fanon?

Whither Fanon?

Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (review)

Saussy, Haun, ed. 2006. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. $60.00 he. $24.95 sc. xiii + 261 pp.Liheng ChenNational Chung Cheng University, TaiwanAs one of series of decennial reports by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization offers itself as on the state of the in 2004; but unlike previous ACLA reports it is conceived of by its editor, Haun Saussy, as a multi-vocal report in which nineteen authors present their arguments on the development of comparative literature in the contemporary era of globalization (viii). A common thread is provided by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Wellek Library lectures, published as Death of Discipline (2003), and the nineteen contributors were invited to impress, alarm, delight, and stimulate their readership by disagreeing with Saussy and each other about the significance of Spivak's text for the discipline. The collection thus offers the reader an opportunity to synthesize perspectives and develop their own points of view on the state, history, and future of comparative literature.In Death of Discipline, Spivak contends that the Euro/US-centric discipline of comparative literature must not merely transcend national borders, but also its location within disciplinary boundaries. Stressing the potential hazards of comparative literature practiced as single discipline, Spivak predicts its demise. She argues that globalization makes the project of discrete and integral discipline of comparative literature unsustainable; instead, she concludes, it must collaborate with other disciplines in order to move beyond its current limitations. The discipline must transcend borders, including those between languages, peoples, nations, and self and other, while embracing interdisciplinary studies, area studies, cultural studies, multicultural studies, and globalization studies. Each contributor echoes or confronts Spivak's notion of the death of in developing their own perspective.The book therefore consists of divergences from set theme, and it is written in variety of styles. By challenging each author to confront others' arguments, Saussy has created what the German Idealists termed a unity of difference and non-difference (i), rendering disagreement desirable. Saussy 's preface and his introductory essay, entitled Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmare: Of Memes, Hives, and Selfish Genes, surveys the development and process of comparative literary studies not merely by representing its triumph in an age of globalization (5), but also by making metaphorical comparison with modified crops (4). While Saussy acknowledges that all literature has always been comparative, watered by many streams (5) - that is, where there is literature, there is comparative literature - some genetically modified genes escape into nature, changing the makeup of wild and cultivated plants through pollenization (4). Like modified plant genes, comparative literature invades other fields, changing their new surroundings (4-5); in other words, comparative patterns of thinking seek to replicate themselves and influence every other department and discipline (5).Saussy stresses that our age of globalization makes comparative literature the actor here, and in ways that are not always so easy to register. For example, with the great increase in literacy in China, Chinese literary texts are being translated into many other languages, with more and more comparatists focusing on comparisons between Chinese literature and other Asian literatures, as well as with Western literature. Yet in Taiwan, for example, there are no comparative literature university departments or undergraduate programs, although comparative literary study takes place in many different departments and fields (such as Chinese departments, Taiwanese Literature departments, and English departments). …

Preface: Special issue Go05

The workshop on Global Optimization 2005 was held in San Jose, Almeria Spain, 18–22 September. The organising committee consisting of Emilio Carrizosa, Tibor Csendes, Inmaculada Garcia, Eligius Hendrix and Panos Pardalos initiated the idea of the workshop at the MPS meeting in Kopenhagen. Inspired by the style of earlier workshops on GO in Sopron (1990), Szeged (1995) and Firenze (1999), the idea was to attract young researchers to be able to interact with experienced researchers in Global Optimization. The workshop was organised in single stream sessions, in order to give all participants the opportunity to enjoy each of the presentations, implying a limited number of participants. The number of accepted contributions was close to the maximum, such that the program of the workshop was filled completely. The outside and seawater temperature was tempting, but most of the time the participants spent in the local library lecture room that was provided by the municipality of Nijar. The presentations started early and ended late with a big lunch break having the possibility to do a Spanish siesta or swim to refresh the attention. The participants were invited to submit their contribution to this special issue. A wide variety of papers focussing on as well applications as theory development were submitted. The usual referee process, where three experts per paper were invited as referee, lead to the final appearance of nine papers. We are grateful to the contribution of the referees. Typical in the conference was the accent on trajectory calculation and application in physics in the application area. Traditionally, emphasis was on the possibilities of applyingmeta-heuristics and interval techniques. Several contributions were due to mathematical analysis, where the paper on octagons is a representative of.

Irish Literature is Not Comparative Literature

Irish literature exists as a dual entity. It was composed in two languages. Thomas Kinsella, The Dual Tradition MY TITLE HERE IS AN HOMAGE TO E. D. BLODGETT'S 1988 essay Literature Is Published in College English, it argues that studies of Canadian literature worthy of the name need to acknowledge the comparative essence of the exercise, acknowledge not only that Canadian literature exists in many languages but is also formed by multiple cultural communities. Blodgett's essay is a pithy summary of what has become known as Canadian Although Clement Moisan lamented in 1969 that il n'existe pas encore d'etudes comparees des deux litteratures du [comparative studies of the two literatures of Canada do not yet exist] (20-21), by the 1970s and 80s, such studies had become more common. The best-known examples in French are Moisan's Poesie des frontieres: Etude comparee des poesies canadienne et quebecoise (1979) and Comparaison et raison: Essais sur l'histoire et l'institution des litteratures canadienne et quebecoise (1987); in English they are Blodgett's own 1982 book Configuration: Essays on the Canadian Literatures and Ronald Sutherland's books Second Image: Studies in Quebec/Canadian Literature (1971) and The New Hero: Essays in Quebec/Canadian Literature (1977). Blodgett's most recent book, the meta-historical Five Part Invention (published in 2004; see Esc 30:2,161-64, for Tracy Ware's review), is very much in the tradition of this body of Canadian Literature. These are some of the real high points of the Canadian literary criticism of the 70s and 80s, embodying a critical ethic that is textually engaged, culturally aware, and linguistically pluralist. And they lead to very exciting developments in Canadian intellectual life; Moisan is a distinguished literary historian and until recently headed up the Centre de recherche en litterature quebecoise at Universite Laval in Quebec City, Blodgett helped to found both the Canadian Literature Association and its journal the Canadian Review of Literature /Revue canadienne de litterature comparee (both of which remain committed to making Canadian literature part of world literature, and doing so in a way that is multi-lingual), and Sutherland was instrumental in creating and developing a graduate program in Canadian Literature at Universite de Sherbrooke. It is tempting, then, to think of this work as a potential model for Irish literature. These sorts of Comparative studies seemed to be what Declan Kiberd was calling for in his 1982 manifesto Writers in Quarantine? The Case for Irish Studies, published in The Crane Bag. He insisted there that a reasonable Irish Studies needed to be bilingual, so that its practitioners could deal with texts in both Irish and English in a way that recognized that they were basically part of the same tradition. (1) This essay shares a great deal with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's call for a Literature that integrated the best aspects of Area Studies. Writing in Death of A Discipline, the book-length version of her 2000 Wellek Library lectures, she called for a next step that would work to make the traditional linguistic sophistication of Literature supplement Area Studies (and history, anthropology, political theory and sociology) by approaching the language of the other not only as a 'field' language. [...] We must take the languages of the Southern Hemisphere as active cultural media rather than as objects of cultural study by the sanctioned ignorance of the metropolitan migrant (8). This sort of sanctioned ignorance is a recurring complaint of Irish-language activists, who often feel they are portrayed as toiling in some arcane, eccentric pursuit, whereas everyone knows that the real action is in English (even though Article 8 of the Constitution of Ireland specifically identifies Irish as the first language of the Republic). …

On the Potential of Failure

Postcolonial Melancholia. By Paul Gilroy. Wellek Library Lectures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 192 pages. $24.50 (cloth). Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. By Michelle Ann Stephens. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 384 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paperback). In Death of a Discipline Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raises what she calls the toughest question in the diaspora: How many are we?1 It is a cryptic question that compels us to consider our concept of what is human and why the human is in a state of permanent emergency. The question is doubly difficult and complex because it is also addressed to those of us who profess the humanities in general, and the postcolonial in particular. Indeed the query is important because it implies a sense that the field of postcolonial studies is no longer adequate to the needs of the changing world historical conditions. According to Spivak, not only do we fail because our way of pursuing the interrelated discipline we know as postcolonial studies has proved insufficient, but we also fail because the discipline—conceived as it is—can no longer cope with current historical exigencies. The crisis of postcolonial studies has taken on the force of common sense, and when the obsolescence of the field becomes commonsensical, this condition of banality risks making us all irrelevant. Paul Gilroy's Postcolonial Melancholia and Michelle Ann Stephens's Black Empire are two of the most recent interventions that have emerged from this moment of crisis. On the one hand, Gilroy and Stephens's work grapples with the predicament that Spivak has sounded in her book and thus shares the marks of disciplinary crisis. On the other hand, both Gilroy and Stephens hope to address the same disciplinary inadequacy and, for this reason, both books are timely interventions. These books tackle complementary issues. Gilroy's recent publication was originally conceived and delivered in 2001 as part of the Wellek Library Lectures, a series of events that the Critical Theory Institute holds annually at the [End Page 255] University of California, Irvine. Gilroy's work therefore has all the weight of institutional sponsorship. If Gilroy represents the vantage point of self-reflexive institutionalization, which is a gift and a burden, Stephens's work emerges from a different form of institutional necessity. Her book was originally written as a doctoral dissertation in American studies at Yale University. In a sense, both works are privileged; but they are also works with a felt sense of engagement and challenge. Part of this stems from the authors' relationships with the question of race. Both authors have a personal and political commitment to the transatlantic movement of black peoples and the idea of a transnational Caribbean, respectively. The ambivalence in Gilroy and Stephens's work—the sense of institutional privilege and the desire to look reflexively at the institution itself—is also rooted in the rethinking of postcolonial studies and race on the one hand, and the transnational turn in American studies and the actuality of globalization, on the other. Accordingly, the work of both authors' is a kind of work in progress in which they grapple with the crisis and formulate creative ways of exceeding its limits. Spivak speaks of the fatal exhaustion of postcolonial theory that, according to her, is caught in mere nationalism over colonialism. (Death of a Discipline was also written for the Wellek Library Lectures and presented a year earlier than Gilroy's.) She argues that while cultural studies is generally invested in what she calls the "new immigrant" community, postcolonial studies is stuck with India and "Sartrian Fanon." To break away from this old postcolonial model, Spivak proposes the reinvention of comparative literature into something planetary—a direct response to globalization that puts into effect a unitary system everywhere.2 Indeed Spivak's declaration of a disciplinary crisis is important for two reasons: the statement first calls attention to the inadequacy of the discipline and, second, makes...

Death of a Discipline

Reviewed by: Death of a Discipline Roland Greene Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Pp. 136. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's book belongs to a short but dense tradition of retrospectives, proposals, and jeremiads on the topic of Comparative Literature, a discipline always in search of itself. Delivered in 2000 in the Wellek Library lecture series at Irvine, Death of a Discipline is one of the obligatory books of this decade for comparatists. While I cannot imagine anyone endorsing it in large, many readers will find much to agree with in little, including brilliant observations and suggestions that are scattered throughout the book's one hundred pages. The utopian aspect of Spivak's critique of Comparative Literature does not diminish its urgency or its impact. The premise of Spivak's argument is that, as of 2000, most academic programs in Comparative Literature in the United States centered their attention on "Europe and the extracurricular Orient" (6), in an unprincipled denial of the discipline's claim of worldwide scope. At the same time, programs in area studies—usually interdepartmental committees in Asian Studies, African Studies, Latin American Studies, and so on—found themselves in search of a renewed mission, having prospered with the Cold War and declined in its wake. Accordingly, Spivak first proposes an alliance between Comparative Literature and area studies, with the goal of making these enterprises resemble each other. Comparative Literature would gain from the linguistic and political coverage, institutional alliances, and rigor of area studies, while area studies would learn to think conceptually about things that are better understood through close reading of all kinds of texts than through empirical observation—for instance, in what ways cultures come to be imagined as others (the imagination is "the great inbuilt instrument of othering" [13]). Area studies, she believes, should learn to approach "the language of the other not only as a 'field' language" (9). Comparative Literature (represented for her in large part by the report prepared by the late Charles Bernheimer's committee for the American Comparative Literature Association and published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1994), committed to a national and territorial model of the world, must, in turn, attend to the new demographic frontiers of the postcolonial and globalized era. The disciplines would find common ground in language—comparatists because they would learn languages outside the conventional ambit, area scholars because they would be exposed to languages "with literary depth rather than only social scientific fluency" (106). [End Page 154] Spivak's second chapter makes a provocative case that "collect-ivities"—the question of "who are 'we'?"—mark one of the most difficult issues for comparatists. Haun Saussy's recent report to the ACLA, soon to be published by Johns Hopkins, begins with a brief consideration of this question from an institutional standpoint: Who are comparatists? Spivak, however, raises the more elusive question of who constitutes "the 'human' of 'humanism'" (23), the cultural collectivity of and for whom Comparative Literature speaks. Perhaps in the continuing conversation taking place in the field, the question of collectivity has been pushed aside by an insistent focus on the objects of Comparative Literature; perhaps the matter of collectivities has seemed both too obvious and too difficult. Spivak's approach in this chapter is complex, with several extensive digressions, but the core of her argument here can be summarized in two points. The first is that comparatists should take account of what Jacques Derrida calls teleiopoeisis. Defined here as "to affect the distant in a poeisis—an imaginative making—without guarantees" (31), the term refers to acts of the imagination that cross time and space with uncertain outcomes and that are essential to the making of discontinuous collectivities.1 Spivak proposes that teleiopoeisis will be one of the decisive literary and critical modes of the globalized world, that a "copying (rather than cutting) and pasting" (34) across cultural zones is fashioning the works and readers of the present. It is hard to disagree, and one supposes that a sustained project on teleiopoeisis and Comparative Literature, both historical and contemporary, is overdue. Spivak's forays into the concept are uneven but illuminating: the most successful...

Lament for a Notion

Lament for a Notion Stephen Slemon E nglish Studies in Ca na d a have not always played nicely in the institutional schoolyard.1We have run in the usual races for decreasing Arts Faculty resources; we have skipped alongside other programs while obedient administrative prefects turned maniacally at the ropes and made us trip. But at the same time, reports have been filed which document a sustained proclivity within us towards bullying: marble-stealing in the allocations pool, fighting with the language programs, and ganging up on the little guys, especially on that newcomer to the school whose name implicitly speaks “foreignness” to the object-driven identitarian programs by virtue of its toponomic binocularity. Comparative Literature in Canada is the kid who wears glasses. He sits between grades and is accepted by neither of them. He brings in toys with funny names, like alterity, and intertextuality, and differance—everyone steals them. He blames us for his constantly bloody nose. This pattern of behaviour should trouble participants in both programs, but higher education in Canada is in a post-Darwinian free market, not a l In this review essay, I shall discuss the following book only: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death ofa Discipline. (The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory.) Cloth. Pp. 128. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. u.s. $22.50. ESC 29.1-2 (March/June 2003): 207-218 St ep h en Slem o n teaches postcolonial literatures and theory in the Department of English, University of Alberta. zero tolerance zone for institutional violence, and the Western university has always sought to know more about aggressor cultures than about the aggrieved. Punch in “why kids bully” on a Google search, and the first hit takes you to a Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, page that produces several key insights into the skewed sociability of English Studies in Canada. Kids bully, says the website, because "someone else ... is picking on them." They bully because “they think the world revolves around them.” Above all they bully because “they have no true friends and feel lonely”2 Affective incommen­ surability is the old story of institutionalized English Studies. Secular heirs to John Henry Newman’s idea of the university, we imagine ourselves at the centre of the academia’s domestic life, but in actual practice we find our­ selves banished to the red room during university moments of important decision-making and thus liminally positioned between identities: are we Jane Eyre, or are we John Reed? Our disciplinary cousin, Comparative Lit­ erature, reports us to have said: “you have no business to take our books.” Punch in “why kids get bullied” on Google, however, and the computer will tell you that “your search did not match any documents.” One under­ stands in an instant why it is that English Studies in Canada have arrived at a disciplinary moment of hulking self-interest, arrested development, and line-management violence, while Comparative Literature Studies cower self-protectively in profound institutional crisis. English Studies have a future within the institution, though it bids fair to be a deeply undistin­ guished one. Comparative Literature Studies may soon be stricken from the academic rolls. Or so it is at my University. The Department of Comparative Litera­ ture was once one of academia’s great success stories at the University of Alberta. From within it, Stephen Arnold in the 1970s framed the project of comparative Anglophone/Francophone West African literary studies. A decade later E. D. Blodgett penned a discipline-shaking proposal for a comparative Canadian literary studies, en route to his winning a Governor General’s Prize for poetry. A decade after that, Nasrin Rahimieh developed an iconoclastic and far-reaching challenge to the methodological orthodox­ ies of Middle Eastern Studies—the result is her 2001 monograph Missing Persians.3 In the late 1980s the Department of Comparative Literature was named a University centre of excellence. Its graduate program was consis­ tently top-ranked. But Comparative Literature is no longer a Department 2 http://www.rnccornerbrook.nf.ca/new_page_12.htm 3 Nasrin Rahimieh: Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural His­ tory. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001. 208 ! Slemon at the University of Alberta. It amalgamated with Film Studies in 1992...