You'll want to understand all the component parts of this definition. "I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." Īt the bottom of page 5, top of page 6, you'll see: "I will be trying to argue that the creation of these aretfacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces but that, once created, they become 'modular', capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees ofself-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with acorrespondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations." p. ![]() "To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy." "My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. "I will argue" is a signpost-"If the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia" is not. If this were a class centrally concerned with Marxist theories of history, or on Marxist revolutions and their relationship to nationalism, it might be another matter. Why are you reading this: what is the subject of the course, the focus of the discussion? Suppose you're reading Imagined Communities to think about nationalism: Anderson's thoughts about the relationship of nationalism to Marxist theory, while not totally irrelevant, aren't directly germane either. It's often clear from the text itself when someone is making a side point or exploring an extraneous issue. When you've done it enough times, you'll know when someone's going off on a tangent or exploring issues that you don't have time to deal with. ![]() HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT TO IGNORE AND WHEN TO IGNORE IT? "The aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory explanation of the 'anomaly' of nationalism". ![]() In the first four pages, you should only really care about this sentence: Let me take you through a skim of this book, bit by bit. It's a book which is taught at the college level with increasing frequency and it offers some clear perspectives on why skimming for courses is a good idea. I'm going to use Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (Verso Press) in making my argument. A good skimmer has a systematic technique for finding the most information in the least amount of time. It's actually a disciplined activity in its own right. But skimming is not just reading in a hurry, or reading sloppily, or reading the last line and the first line. The first rule, in some ways the only rule, is skim, skim, skim. They all take a while to master, through trial and error. These aren't foolproof-they won't work for everyone. So okay, if you're not going to read everything with intense precision and in gory detail, then how are yougoing to read it? What I hope to provide in the following page is a few of the Stupid Academic Tricks about reading that I've learned over the years. Nor would I personally want to talk at my students day in and day out. But on the professiorial side of things, we feel a real obligation to cover a particular field of knowledge in the course of a semester, and we can't do it all through lectures. You might not think that's the ideal way to learn, and I would sort of agree. That calls for a certain kind of smash-and-grab approach to reading.You can't afford to dilly-dally and stop to smell the lilies. You're reading for particular reasons: to get background on important issues, to illuminate some of the central issues in a single session of one course, to raise questions for discussion. We know it, at least most of us do.You have to make strategic decisions about what to read and how to read it. Professors assign more than you can possibly read in any normal fashion. ![]() The first thing you should know about reading in college is that it bears little or no resemblance to the sort of reading you do for pleasure, or for your own edification. Staying Afloat: Some Scattered Suggestions on Reading in College
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |