204
Paredes,
With His Pistol in His Hand
Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
Rulfe,
The Burning Plain and Other Stories
Popul-Yuh,
Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life
Burgos-Debray,
I .
. .
Rigoberto Manchu
Cisneros,
The House on Mango Street
PARTISAN REVIEW
Two odd things are striking about this list: both its unhistorical
order and its content. Freud and Marx are read before the Bible,
and Fanon's tract and paean of praise for revolutionary violence, in–
telligible in understanding the reactions to African colonialism in the
twentieth century, is read as if it had an important historical bearing
on the diffusion of cultures or the impact of Europe on early Ameri–
can civilizations. One of the great weaknesses of courses in general
education is the neglect of chronology. Ideas have histories. And
although they can and should be considered analytically, their cul–
tural impact cannot be grasped without attention to the historical
context.
Even more dubious is it to regard some minor works that may
rate a place on a collateral reading list as having the status of works
by Augustine and Marx. The rationalization for this mishmash is
that a thematic approach is being taken and that the course is a study
of the development of selves - starting with Conventions of Self–
hood, then Labor and the Social Self, Making Other Cultural
Selves, Forging Revolutionary Selves, and ending with a one-day
study of Urban Selves Today. Suddenly the course has been trans–
formed into one of social psychology! The architects of the course are
out of their depths. They began with a study of Conventions of
Selfhood, but there is no such thing. Every conventional self presup–
poses a definite culture and history. Aside from biological and psy–
chophysical phenomena like the study of afterimages, there is no
such thing as
the
self invariant at all times and all cultures. Even our
dreams reflect our cultures. Instead of using Freud's
Psychopathology
of Everyday Life
in the first rubric of the course, his
Civilization and Its
Discontents
would be far more relevant, as would selected pages from
Augustine's
City of God
rather than his
Corifessions.
This thematic ap–
proach cannot be taken seriously, if intended as such, for even a
thematic approach, in order to do justice to our own time, is best ap–
proached historically. It is a most dubious anthropological excursion
to assume that the symbolic meanings of subconscious life are cultur-
