Reading Notes & Questions

Karatani

• Simon vs. Oe, Simon representative of the “West” aestheticizing Japan. “Respect” Japan's culture and art but does not want to view Japan as Western equivalent (modern, daily lives), Japan as other
• Kant's aesthetic theory, contradictory sets of true/false, ethical, taste
• Interest-economic value vs. art for art's sake
• Sublime & modern science. Science mentioned quite a bit -how does this relationship work?
• Brackets- Karatani doesn't seem to explicitly define this
• Art is the subjective act of bracketing other concerns
• Art exists not as object but in the consideration of object as art, disinteredness
• Pleasure not from object but bracketing reactions to object
• Aestheticism
• Praises object uncomfortable and shunned in daily life, sublime
• What is his definition of aesthete?
• Aesthetic vs. industrial (“real”)
• Unbracketing
• Unbracketing Othello-what are consequences of unbracketing art? If we unbracket race, are we judging Othello based on its racial treatments? (Achebe reading of Conrad) “Valid” way to read literature?
• “Okakura's act demonstrates that the disinterestedness that allows us to acknowledge artistic beauty can be achieved only by the same sort of change of stance (bracketing) that takes place in the natural sciences.” - What does this mean, what is the relationship he draws between arts and sciences?
• Aestheticicentrism forgets to unbracket, art should be process of bracketing and unbracketing?

Hall

• Idea of “the West” not only bounded by geography, historical construct. West = modern, an idea
• Dichotomies, “binary oppositions fundamental to all linguistic and symbolic systems and to the production of meaning itself”
• “the West” is different from “the Rest”, “the Rest” from “the West” though they can all be internally different as well
• Discourse: “Particular way of representing the West and the Rest, group of statements which provide a language for talking about a particular kind of knowledge about a topic
• Production of knowledge through language
• Produced by practice
• Innocent discourse (ideologically innocent)? Outside of power
• West/Rest discourse cannot be innocent because of unequal power structures
• Gendered  

Spivak

• “Europe as an Other”
• Archive and literature (which is privileged?) “Colonizer constructs himself as he constructs the colony”
• Dominick LaCapra: “experimental criticism remains on level of delicate miniatures”-What does this mean?
• Establish intimate relationship between literary and colonial
• “Worldling of a world”
• References to Victorian literature-why?
• What kind of critical work is Spivak's “History” chapter?