Notion Of Unity Research Articles

Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text.

What constitutes the pervasive cultural assumptions known to us as America? Since the hemisphere actually encompasses a variety of national identities, can it make sense to speak of a unified American identity? Can a place for marginalized identities be established within the cultural mainstream? Comparative Identities maps out a dynamic terrain of New World cultural identities, questions and problems. The essays attempt to locate America as a cultural and historical site of plurality and division, a discursive space of multiple differences which becomes, paradoxically, the ground for a new notion of unity.

Composition: Diversity/unity

Abstract An esthetic exposition of the notion of unity in which music's multiplicity is stressed. The Unity/Multiplicity paradox in art is thought equivalent to the opposition of Invariance/Variance in Jacobson's linguistics. In terms of compositional form, a process is striven for that does not strangle, but lives through, multiplicity.

A Reply to Heath

Whether, in fact, the hypothetical cabal of Cavell, Danto, and Carroll has been and continues to be more instrumental than Stephen Heath in the professionalization of contemporary cinema studies is a question I leave to informed readers to answer. Heath, at least, says he regards professionalism as reactionary and responds to the epistemological objections propounded in my Address to the Heathen' by whining that he will not sink to such rank professional preoccupations. It is part of a pernicious conspiracy, Heath would have us believe, to consider epistemology to be the formal inspection and evaluation of theories. Thus, maintaining what he fancies to be his political purity, Heath never addresses the core objections of AH: that suture theory is, strictly speaking, vacuous; that his deployment of psychoanalysis is not properly constrained by consideration of countervailing cognitive-psychological hypotheses; that his analyses of the various mechanics of subject positioning are based on equivocation; that his metaphors are uselessly obscure; that his notion of unity is illicit; that his concept of the cinematic apparatus defies the pragmatic requirements of theory building. Instead, Heath raises a smokescreen in order to disguise the fact that he is not dealing with issues raised in AH and wastes a great deal of time itemizing my alleged misrepresentations of QC. But surprisingly, nearly half of his complaints such as his attack of my quotation of Hegel (AH, p. 93)are extracted from side comments made in my footnotes which are peripheral to the central, still uncontested points made by AH. Perhaps we can explain Heath's footnote fetish by postulating that he takes literally the idea of weighing arguments and that he was unable otherwise to add bulk to the slim PN. When Heath finally mounts his three sustained counterattacks concerning perspective, illusion, and interminability in only one of these, the section