James Fernandez

21305/45300. Modern Readings in Anthropology: Explorations in Oral Narrative: The Folk Tale (= Hum 281). Class limited to thirty-five students. This course studies the role of storytelling and narrativity in society and culture: comparison of folk tale traditions; the shift from oral to literate traditions and the impact of writing; the principal schools of analysis of narrative structure and function; and the place of narrative in the disciplines law, psychoanalysis, politics, history, philosophy, and anthropology. Story per-formance and contemporary storytelling in America are considered and encouraged. J. Fernandez. Autumn 1995, Winter 1997, Spring 1998, Spring 2002, Spring 2003

334/530. Ethnographic Writing: Narrative and Experimental Ethnography (=Hist of Cult 334). PQ: Open to third- or fourth-year students with consent of instructor. This is a study of ethnogra-phy as a problem of narration and emplotment, based mainly on the study of the ethnographies written in the last fifteen years under the episte-mological and methodological pressures of phenomenology, critical theory, interpre-tivism, and particularly postmodernism. We consider the re-flective attempts by earlier anthropologists to better render the field exper-ience, the use of rhetorical devices and image evocation in ethnography, attempts at expanding emotional range in the ethnographic sensorium, the gendering of the experience of the "other," dialogic engagement with the "other," and the "politics of self/other representation." Critical comparison is made to the classical ethnographies and their commitment to "theory buil-ding" and the "archival function." J. Fernandez. Spring 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001

414. Metaphor (Trope) Theory in Anthropology. PQ: Third- or fourth-year stand-ing. A study of the "play of tropes" --metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, irony, and so on -- in social life, in the emplotment of social relations and of social action and in the construction of cultural "realities." The principle theories from classical rhetorik and poetic thru Vico, Muller, Tylor, Frazer, Boas and Radin to the work of contemporary anthropologists and cognitive linguists are analyzed. The present use of metaphor and metonym etc. in anthropological theory, in anthropological interpretation and in the pursuit of "meaningful methods" of ethnographic presentation is assessed. J. Fernandez. Autumn 1995, 1996; Spring 1998, Spring 2000, Spring 2002