Interdisciplinarity for the 21st century

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February 01, 1983 - February 01, 2019

An international engine of innovative scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences

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Vol. 116 No. 1
The Humanities and the Crisis of The Public University

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Vol. 115 No. 1

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Vol. 114 No. 1

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Vol. 113 No. 1

What Do Nanquan and Schrödinger Have Against Cats?

"Recently," writes Robert Sharf in our Fall 2018 issue, "I have been working on the structural relationship between the quantum measurement problem and the Buddhist problem of vikalpa or 'discriminative construction.' In brief, early Buddhist teachings hold that the phenomenal world in which we find ourselves is brought into being by our discriminative engagement with that very world. Medieval Buddhist scholiasts, like modern quantum theorists, then had to struggle to make sense of the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the mind-independent world and our consciousness of it. In the midst of my work on this project, I was invited to present a paper at a conference on the place of animals in Buddhism, a topic on which I am largely ignorant. But it occurred to me that I could use the conference as an opportunity to contemplate the deaths of two unfortunate cats, both executed to make a philosophical point. We will start with Schrödinger’s."

Sharf's essay is part of our Field Notes section, which features short commentaries and interventions on an occasional basis.

Robert H. Sharf is D. H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, as well as Chair of the Center for Buddhist Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley. He works primarily in the area of medieval Chinese Buddhism (especially Chan), but he also dabbles in Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art, Buddhist philosophy, ritual studies, and methodological issues in the study of religion.

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Vol. 145 No. 1, Winter 2019
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ISSN: 0734-6018
eISSN: 1533-855X

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Published: February, May, August, November

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"Do we have a problem with time?" ask the editors of the 2016 special issue Time Zones: Durational Art and Its Contexts. The issue explores "time-based art" across several disciplinary formations, including performance and visual media, sound, dance, and political resistance.

Read the editors' introduction to the special issue "Language-in-Use and Literary Fieldwork" by Michael Lucey and Tom McEnaney

Literary critics and theorists often shy away from talking about writers and readers as people who put language to use. Instrumentalized reason, positivism, and other watchwords warn against turning a literary artifact into mere data or information, or making it part of an exchange of language that is not exclusively aesthetic in nature. At the same time, when critics seek praxis in literature, speak about the performative attributes of a text, or discuss how to do things with words, they usually treat whatever text they are considering as a stable object. The contributors to this special issue of Representations are all interested in language-in-use as it applies to different kinds of linguistic artifacts and to text understood as the dynamic product of an interactive process. We take it that even the most literary of artifacts can be considered from this point of view. It is possible, for instance, through a kind of “literary fieldwork,” to discover the kinds of dynamic, social, indexical, and context-based negotiations of literary and cultural value that will be at stake in the essays making up this volume. Such negotiations are inevitably present in and around literary artifacts because those artifacts are made of language, and because in using them more language is frequently produced. Even in the midst of an argument for literary autonomy by someone taken to be a key spokesperson for the idea (Gustave Flaubert) we can locate the dynamic relationality of language-in-use and see how it is relevant to the texts he produced. Continue reading . . .

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Alexei Yurchak, author of "Bodies of Lenin" (Representations 129, Winter 2015). Here he is receiving Russia's prestigious Prosvetitel Prize, in November 2015, for his Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation.