Swimming Against the Tide Personal Passions and Academic Fashions

A New Academic fashion in the disciplines of history, anthropology, and cultural criticism is to “foreground” authors in works of scholarship. But it is not in imitation of what is currently fashionable that I have chosen to make my address autobiographical. I am a historian who enjoys writing narrative history and who elsewhere has argued that the narrative remains as valuable and as legitimate in modern scholarship as theory. So here I wish to tell a story that may hold some lessons for those scholars who seek freedom from the constraints imposed both by the norms of Middle Eastern societies and by the rules of the western academy. In our post-modern, post-structural, post-colonial world, all the certitudes have been shaken, and the narrative might well be the only kind of story that we can relate to with any kind of authority

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Criticism · Literature · Narrative · Passions · Personal narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · History · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Philosophy

• The Changing Face of Medieval Near Eastern Studies

  Open Access•Josef Meri, Josef W Meri•Middle East Studies Association…•1999

  Add to list