Links

Like several sections of this site, this one is in the process of being constructed, and will grow as particular needs arise in particular courses. I welcome suggestions from students and others for links that should be on the page. The audience I have had in mind in deciding upon what to put here and how to frame what has been put here has been primarily the participants in my undergraduate cross-cultural studies seminars at the Chuo University Faculty of Policy Studies. All external links have been verified October 27, 2003. They will open in a new window.

Topics:
Pierre Bourdieu | Witter Bynner | Noam Chomsky | Critical/cultural theory | Michel Foucault | Intertextuality | Location of sources: online resources | Media studies | Miscellaneous | Postcolonial theory | Postmodernism | Post-structuralism | Reflexivity | Representation | Edward W. Said | Structuralism

Bourdieu, Pierre
The HyperBourdieu©WorldCatalogue, compiled and maintained by Ingo Mörth and Gerhard Frölich at Johannes Kepler University, is “a comprehensive, contextual and referential bibliography and mediagraphy of all works and public statements by Pierre Bourdieu,” and contains links to the full text of many items noted, mainly, of course, in French. Henry Barnard’s Bourdieu Bibliography is a useful listing of secondary materials, though includes nothing published after 1997. Despite a large number of print translations of Bourdieu—amazon.com lists 78 titles, amazon.co.uk 94—work in English either by or about Bourdieu is scarce on the Internet. What is available is nonetheless engaging. See, for example, Jeremy J. Shapiro’s translation of a 1998 Le Monde article, The Essence of Neoliberalism; the 1999 “dialogue” between Bourdieu and Günter Grass, The “Progressive” Restoration, in New Left Review; Curtis Humes’s Pierre Bourdieu: Reflexive Practice; and Brigit Fowler’s Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociological Theory of Culture in Variant. Brief English biographies of Bourdieu may be found at books and writers and in the 2002 obituaries published in The Guardian and openDemocracy. The counterpunch obituary, by Norman Madarasz, is more self-consciously ideological than others in English on the Internet. See also Patricia M. McDonough and Barbara Tobolowsky’s Sociological Research Online review of Bridget Fowler’s Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory, and the Research Unit for the Sociology of Education links to sites related to Pierre Bourdieu, some of which work.

Witter Bynner
The fullest and most attractive Bynner resource on the Internet is the new Witter Bynner site maintained by Ralph Bolton at Pomona College. The best account of Bynner’s relation with Japan is in the Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse here at themargins.net. See especially the Bynner index page and Witter Bynner and Japan, and Bynner poems in the Archive here, here, and here.

Chomsky, Noam
Noam Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of the mass media, as set forth in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988, co-authored with Edward S. Herman [see sample pages and read reviews at Amazon.com, here]) and Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (1989 [Amazon sample pages and reviews here]), has been both highly controversial and highly influential. General overviews are available at the Noam Chomsky and the Propaganda Model page at Will Greeves’s Media Feedback Review and the Noam Chomsky section of Douglas Bicket’s k.i.s.s. Dan Joseffson’s “A Quick Guide to the ‘Propaganda Model’” may be downloaded as a .pdf file by clicking here. The large Noam Chomsky Archive at ZNet contains full text of many articles by and about Chomsky, and is usefully supplemented by monkeyfist.com’s Bad News: The Noam Chomsky Archive.

Critical/cultural theory
Finding useful critical theory links for contextualization of undergraduate work undertaken in seminars at the Policy Studies Faculty at Chuo University is not as easy as I had imagined. It seems not fully to have dawned on many commentators in English that the audience for discussions of cultural theory is not limited to those concerned with its implications in departments of English literature. Nonetheless: John Lye’s Some Characteristics of Contemporary Theory is a helpful overview. Douglas Bicket’s k.i.s.s. of the panopticon is hardly the last word on critical theory, but does provide readable introductions to names and terms of importance to the subject (see the index). See also David Gauntlett’s Media Theory Site at media.org.uk, Themes in Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism at the National University of Singapore Postcolonial Web, and other links noted here under Intertextuality, Postcolonial theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, Representation, and Structuralism.

Foucault, Michel
Ben Attias’s Foucault Pages at California State University Northridge are among the best English-language points of departure on the Internet. They include “A Genealogy [read bibliography] of Foucault,” links to Foucault discussion lists (Foucault and the Construction of the Self, Feminism and Foucault, among others), a generous “Foucault Links” section, and a section of “Online Essays by, about, or influenced by Foucault,” which includes also links to online interviews with Foucault. Among several other excellent sites see also John Protevi’s Coursework Materials for his course on Foucault at Louisiana State University, the Foucault pages at David Gauntlett’s Media Theory Site, and Clare O’Farrell’s Michel Foucault Resources maintained at the Queensland University of Technology.

Intertextuality
Daniel Chandler’s Intertextuality, a part of his Semiotics for Beginners site, is a readable introduction to the concept, particularly as it has been discussed in self-consciously structuralist and post-structuralist texts.

Location of sources: online resources
In addition to CHOIS (the Chuo Online Information System), students in all classes should be familiar with the NACSIS Webcat and the Library of Congress Online Catalogue. These are the largest public bibliographical databases of Japanese and English texts, and may be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet.

The richest bibliographical database in the world, the OCLC WorldCat, catalogues nearly 50 million discrete items (with a new item added on average every fifteen seconds) and is available to patrons of more than 43,500 libraries in 83 countries. Unfortunately, the Chuo University Library is not among those that provide off-campus access to students, but at public terminals in the library WorldCat may be accessed via the First Search link on the Outside online databases page, which also provides links to other electronic databases available to Chuo University students and staff.

Students in my seminars who require access to WorldCat or to premium online databases not offered at the Chuo Libraries may make an appointment for a supervised search in my office, where they are available. Full-text databases include Academic Search Premier, Access UN, Columbia International Affairs Online, Contemporary Women’s Issues, Education Full Text, Ingenta, JSTOR, Project Muse, and others. In addition to WorldCat, available indices, bibliographies, and abstracts include Anthropological Index, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, ATLA Religion Index, Bibliography of Asian Studies, Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management, Historical Abstracts, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, International Index to the Performing Arts, International Political Science Abstracts, Periodicals Contents Index, and others.

Media studies
Mick Underwood’s Communication, Cultural and Media Studies contains a wealth of information if you’re willing to click through the A-Z list of subjects. Wide-ranging sets of links may be found at MediaStudies.com and the Media Studies page at Alan Liu’s marvelousVoice of the Shuttle. See also Daniel Chandler’s Media Semiotics, Will Greeves’s Feedback Media Review, and links in the Noam Chomsky section above.

Miscellaneous sites called to attention by students
Shiho Takaso has called to the attention of the 2003 Discovering Others II seminar the photography and writing of Hirokawa Ryûichi and Morizumi Takashi.

Ekklesia, webmaster Luis Salamanca,

was created originally with the . . . idea of  being a group of  “Colombianistas” interested in studying the country and in feeding their love for Colombia and the will of working for her. [Therefore] . . . Colombia constitutes the point of reference for the global action of the group. Nonetheless, the increased participation of people of other nationalities calls for a more open orientation. Therefore, this page should become the introduction to a global network of culture, a freeway to knowledge and fraternity.

Postcolonial theory
I have not done a systematic search, but a decent starting point is the Postcolonial Web maintained at the National University of Singapore.

Postmodernism
Martin Ryder’s Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought, as the name suggests, focuses on postmodern theory, and offers in addition hundreds of reliable links to material related to critical and cultural theory and particular names that recur in that field.

Post-structuralism
A good starting point for a basic introduction is John Lye’s “working document,” Some Post-Structural Assumptions. Harold K. Bush’s Poststructuralism as Theory and Practice in the English Classroom, as the title suggests, frames poststructuralist theory in terms of (U.S.) university English departments, but nonetheless is useful as a general overview. Timothy R. Quigley’s Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Background Summary and Analysis focuses on the emergence of structuralist and post-structuralist thought in linguistic theory, from “Kantian Background[s]” via Saussure to Derrida and Heidegger, and concludes with brief consideration of “alternatives we can imagine as a challenge to the poststructuralist position.” See also Structuralism.

Reflexivity
Among the definitions of “reflexivity” in the 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is this: “Social Sciences. Applied to that which turns back upon, or takes account of, itself . . . esp. methods that take into consideration the effect of the personality or presence of the researcher on the investigation.” Among the example-sentences OED provides are these: “A Reflexive Sociology means that we sociologists must . . . acquire the ingrained habit of viewing our own beliefs as we now view those held by others” (A. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, 1970); and “[T]he person producing the theory is included within the subject matter he attempts to understand. The usual term for this kind of approach is ‘reflexive’, a word which has begun to appear in the human sciences . . .  but which has long been implicit in social theory” (R. Holland, Self and Social Context, 1977).

Holland’s understanding of 1977 has proven increasingly true. Reflexivity, “long implicit in social theory,” has in the years since 1977 become central to methodological understanding both in the social sciences and the humanities, and increasingly seems to me (and to many others) to be of central importance to cultural theory, research, and practice.

These emerging and inter-related understandings of reflexivity exist only in disconnected traces on the Internet. The richest single location is perhaps Subjectivity and Reflexivity in Qualitative Research, vol. 3.3 (Sept. 2002) of the multilingual peer-reviewed Forum: Qualitative Social Research. Douglas Chandler’s Modes of Reflexivity at his excellent Media Semiotics course site is a brief and readable overview. Ann L. Cunliffe and Jong S. Jun’s Reflexivity as Intellectual and Social Practice, presented at the 2002 conference of the Public Administration Theory Network, includes reference to a wealth of earlier research. The home page of Tim Wood’s redundantly-title “Self-Reflexivity in the age of Virtuality” may be ignored, but the site includes a useful Bibliography of Theoretical Works in the Humanities. See also Reflexivity, Social Transformation, and Counter Culture at IrelandOn-Line, Ronit Lentin’s “I’ll be a Post-Feminist in Post-Patriarchy”: Reflexivity is a Feminist Issue, and Gerard W. Bloucher’s The Necessity of Including the Researcher in Research. Finally, a rather unlikely manifestation of the concept (or so it seemed to me) is the text of a speech George Soros delivered in 1994 at the MIT Department of Economics, The Theory of Reflexivity, in which Soros applies reflexivity theory to the behavior of financial markets.

Representation
Daniel Chandler’s Modality and Representation, a part of his Semiotics for Beginners site, represents a decent point of departure in the context of structuralist and post-structuralist theory. See also Chandler’s Media Representation at Media Semiotics.

Said, Edward W.
The fullest on-line bibliography of Edward Said’s work available on-line is here at themargins.net. Other useful resources are The Edward Said Archive, Edward Said (1935-2003) at Al-Ahram, and the Said Archives at the ZNET Middle East Watch. The fullest electronic bibliography of Said’s work through 2000 is Eddie Yeghiayan’s Edward W. Said: A Bibliography, which includes as well links to citations for reviews of Said’s work and related material. See also the Said pages at the Postcolonial Web maintained at the National University of Singapore.

Structuralism
John Lye’s “collection of ideas from various authors,” Some Elements of Structuralism and its Application to Literary Theory, is the best brief overview I have found, and has application well beyond the study of literary texts. Daniel Chandler’s Signs, a part of his larger Semiotics for Beginners site, provides a well-conceived overview of the insights that led to structuralism, and some of their implications in fields beyond the confines of structuralist theory. See also the brief overview of structuralism at k.i.s.s., and links noted in the post-structuralism section above.