L’épée du soleil

La précipitation conduit à une pause… révision de la stratégie :

We think most publishers and authors will choose to participate in the publisher program in order to introduce their work to countless readers around the world. But we know that not everyone agrees, and we want to do our best to respect their views too. So now, any and all copyright holders – both Google Print partners and non-partners – can tell us which books they’d prefer that we not scan if we find them in a library. To allow plenty of time to review these new options, we won’t scan any in-copyright books from now until this November.

Il semblerait que les pressions des principaux fournisseurs, les éditeurs, les ont convaincu d’adopter le principe du dialogue plutôt que la dynamique du bulldozer. Reste à voir (si la chose est connue) quelle incidence cette démarche aura sur la disponibilité et la participation des éditeurs au projet alexandriesque de Google.

(via if:book)

Une discussion a eu lieu sur la liste Humanist à propos de la tendance, en régime interdisciplinaire, à tout ramener à soi, à lire une autre discipline à partir des repères d’une discipline première. Willard McCarty entamait la réflexion à partir d’une citation de Lubomir Dolezel :

The contemporary researcher is engaged in a losing struggle with the information explosion. The struggle is especially desper-ate in interdisciplinary research, where no one can master all the published literature in all the special fields. As interdisciplinary investigations become more and more necessary, they become more and more difficult. An easy way out of this difficulty is to interpret the problems of other disciplines in terms of one’s own. This practice is typical of quite a few humanists and theorists of literature. While claiming to cultivate interdisciplinarity, they give philosophy, history, and even natural sciences a “literary” treatment; their complex and diverse problems are reduced to concepts current in contemporary literary writing, such as subject, discourse, narrative, metaphor, semantic indeterminacy, and ambiguity. The universal “literariness” of knowledge acquisition and representation is then hailed as an interdisciplinary confirmation of epistemological relativism and indeterminism, to which contemporary literati subscribe. (”Possible Worlds of Fiction and History”, NLH 29.4 (1998): 785-809)

McCarty ajoute lui-même, quelques messages plus tard, cette idée du centre, qui tend à présenter les choses dans une autre perspective :

As for the baggage, for the limitations of being centred somewhere, I think of the ancient formula, “centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam”, “centre everywhere, circumference nowhere”, or as Northrop Frye said in On Education, “It takes a good deal of maturity to see that every field of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge, and that it doesn’t matter so much what you learn when you learn it in a structure that can expand into other structures” (1988: 10).

Comment envisager ce regard sur une autre discipline ?

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