Some final remarks

[Ron Kuzar]

Dear colleagues,
  I think that the world is starting to go back to normal functioning,
even if things are not the same now. I believe that this email list will
also go back to its usual routine. The two mailings I have forwarded to
you come in the context of the exchange between Chilton and myself. They
demonstrate, in my opinion, the political wisdom of their authors and
their understanding that both points, a condemnation of terrorism and an
analysis of the aggressive policies of US/Israel, have to be
incorporated in one statement.
  A final note re Chilton's reply:
   I have no doubt that Paul Chilton and I might find ourselves on the
same side on many political and ethical issues. It should be clear that
when I said that "Chilton’s text in fact supplies an academic umbrella,
under which these acts can go on uncriticized" I was referring to the
text, not to the person. After all, we do distinguish between the real author
and the authorial voice (or whatever terms you use for this distinction).
   Related to this are the issues of text-types an intertextuality. When
we write scholarly papers from an academic perspective we most naturally
concentrate on one point. Such a paper cannot be subject to criticism
that it does not give the full picture. The full picture inheres
intertextually, in other writings of the same author and in the
intellectual tradition the scholar is working in. But this was not the
case with Chilton's mailing. It appeared one day after the event, it started
with a statement of sympathy to our American friends, and it explained
the rationale of writing it on political grounds. All these properties
make it a stand-alone statement, which cannot be easily read
intertextually. As such, I felt that it was politically deficient, in
that it contained no value judgement of the acts themselves. Furthermore,
I felt that this omission is not accidental but built into the tenets of
Critical Discourse Analysis, and this observation is relevant to the
threads of discussion on this list.
   I an sorry I have cluttered you mailboxes with statements that are
not directly related to the line of this list. I will not forward any
more materials on the actual topics. People who are interested in them
can surely find the appropriate channels to get them.
Ron Kuzar
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                 Dr. Ron Kuzar
Address:   Department of English Language and Literature
                 University of Haifa
                 IL-31905 Haifa, Israel
Office:       +972-4-824-9826, fax: +972-4-824-9711
Home:       +972-2-6414780, Cellular: +972-5-481-9676
Email:        kuzar at research.haifa.ac.il
Site:ý          http://research.haifa.ac.il/~kuzar  
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