On the case

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 663-672

  Berlant, Lauren ^a,b  

^a Department of English ^*

^b UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249508523     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/521564     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. Peter Galison argues against the naïve view of the self-evidence of case-study knowledge and the comparability of all case studies with each other in his "Specific Theory," Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 379-83
2. See In Dora's Case: Freud - Hysteria - Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York, 1985)
3. and John Forrester, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (New York, 1980)
4. and The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida (Cambridge, 1990). It is worth noting that case history tends to be what physicians take, while case study is what academics and psychoanalysts write
5. Foucault critiques the disciplinary consequences of case-study forms throughout his corpus, while participating in the editing of at least two such studies - I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother ...: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek, ed. Michel Foucault (Lincoln, Nebr., 1975)
6. and Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall, ed. Foucault (New York, 1980)
7. He reads against the grain of normative closure in these legal and medical cases to show the consequences of the mobilization and suppression of their historical and conceptual contradictions. For a more direct critique of the normativity of case making, see Foucault, "Spaces and Classes" and "Signs and Cases," The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, 1989)
8. An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978)
9. and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977)
10. For an account of developments from the psychoanalytic case history to/through aesthetic genres, see, for example, Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New York, 1997)
11. For an account of the shift across religious casuistry to the shaping of historical situations in literary cases, see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998)
12. For an account of the detective story as a variant of the case history, see Todd Herzog, "Crime Stories: Criminal, Society, and the Modernist Case History," Representations, no. 80 (Fall 2002): 34-61
13. See, for example, Andrew Abbott, Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago, 2001), especially the chapter "What Do Cases Do?" pp. 129-60
14. What Is a Case?: Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry, ed. Charles C. Ragin and Howard S. Becker (Cambridge, 1992)
15. and John Gerring, "What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?" American Political Science Review 98 (May 2004): 341-54
16. See Abbott, Time Matters, p. 130
17. See Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)
18. Gerring argues, from political science, that scholars often disrespect the mediations of the case-study method with the adjective mere while nonetheless using this framework of moving from an "intensive study" of a single or singular unit with an "aim to generalize" or make "descriptive inferences" about similarity (Gerring, "What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?" pp. 342, 346, 352)
19. From sociology, this problem has been considered extensively by Stanley Lieberson. I am grateful to him for extensive conversations about how to frame the scene and issue of caseness and must confess that by the end it was apparent that sometimes interdisciplinarity is not possible - and that one way to assess what impedes it is to track fundamental disagreements about the procedures for constructing case-style exemplarity. Yet our discussion proved what Forrester argues too, that the case concept enables discussion to proceed in the absence of agreement about the object's contours; when it is not assuming something like the structure of a fetish, the case maybe a version of the Agambenian whatever of discussion itself. See Stanley Lieberson, "Small N's and Big Conclusions: An Examination of the Reasoning in Comparative Studies Based on a Small Number of Cases," in What Is a Case?, pp. 105-18
20. and "Einstein, Renoir, and Greeley: Some Thoughts about Evidence in Sociology," American Sociological Review 57, no. 1 (1992): 1-15
21. Agamben's discussion of "whatever/quodlibet" as the condition of any belonging to a set is in his The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, 1993)
22. This association of the exemplar, the Kuhnian paradigm, and the case study is also pursued by Bent Flyvbjerg's comprehensive and synthetic "Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research," Qualitative Inquiry 12, no. 2 (2006): 219-45
23. As everyone who writes on cases notes, the word case comes from the Latin casus, "fall, chance, occurrence" and cassus, "void, hollow," as though a falling out of the fabric of things produces an event that requires explanation. It befalls me to cite, for example, Jacques Derrida, "My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies," in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore, 1984), pp. 1-32
24. See Jeanne Dunning, Tom Thumb: Notes toward a Case History, www.diacenter.org/dunning/toc.html
25. See Jeffrey T. Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux, The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the New Humanities (Lanham, Md., 2003)
26. See Creswell and Gerring, "What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?"
27. for clarifying discussions of the "as opposed to what" of the choice to use case-study modes of narration, evidence, argument, and resolution. Additionally, see Ricca Edmondson, Rhetoric in Sociology (London, 1984)
28. and Gregor McLennan, "Sociological Cultural Studies: The Question of Explanation," Cultural Studies 16, no. 5 (2002): 631-49
29. See Michael Burawoy, "The Extended Case Method," Sociological Theory 16 (Mar. 1998): 4-33
30. Burawoy would also describe the extended case work of Michael Taussig in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, 1987) more than, say, in Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago, 2004), where the captioning model of contextualization is abandoned entirely to renditions of the episodic present-in-presence and the opening-out work of reading that takes place in the reader rather than in the expert. They constitute two very different Benjaminian notions of the case, but both rely on the logic of the event that appears to flash up to retemporalize experience
31. See Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, N.Y, 1999)
32. As I was writing this introduction, I ran into more evidence of frustration at the impeded destiny of these events to become what their genre dictates, transformative cases: see John Frow's acute and passionate "The Uses of Terror and the Limits of Cultural Studies," Symplok' 11, nos. 1-2 (2003): 69-76
33. Provoking debates about the terms of better (more ethical) normativity is the aim invested in case-study analysis by David Thacher, "The Normative Case Study," American Journal of Sociology 111 (May2006): 1631-76