Coming from a strong gender critical and post-colonial theoretical stance, Runions takes up important questions of the reading process that arise from literary, ideological critical and cultural studies approaches to the Bible. She examines readers' negotiations with the ambiguous configurations of gender, nation and future vision in the book of Micah, using the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha with Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek-all key figures in cultural studies. Her book confronts the problem of the determined subject reading an indeterminate text and suggests that (liminal) identifications with the ambiguitiesof the book of Micah might reconfigure the readers' own ideological positions.
Theoretical accounts of modern American poetry often regard literary texts as the expression of a subjectivity irremediably fractured by the dividing practices of power. In Changing Subjects, Srikanth Reddy seeks to redress our critical bias toward a fatalistic poetics of rupture and fragmentation by foregrounding a fluent tradition of writers from Walt Whitman to John Ashbery who explore digression, rather than disjunction, as a rhetorical strategy for the making of modern poetry.Mapping the ramifying topography of literary digression, Changing Subjects offers a wide-ranging anatomy of "the excursus" within twentieth-century American poetics. Moving from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to figures of identity, Reddy considers various spheres in which American writers revisit and revise our models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in modern literature. In new readings of authors such as Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Frank O'Hara, and Lyn Hejinian, this study proposes that "changing the subject" offers a digressive method for negotiating the vexing complexities of art, knowledge, history, and subjectivity under the curious conditions of modernity. The book concludes with a survey of "Elliptical" strategies employed by a new generation of poets, writing in the wake of John Ashbery's aleatory craft, who seek to extend the digressive project of American poetry into the twenty-first century.
In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.
This book draws together two domains of psychological theory, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory of cognition and narrative theories of identity, to offer a way of rethinking the human subject as embodied, relational and temporal. A dialogue between these two ostensibly disparate and contested theoretical trajectories provides a new vantage point from which to explore questions of personal and political change. In a world of deepening inequalities and increasing economic precarity, the demand for free, decolonised quality education as articulated by the South African Student Movement and in many other contexts around the world, is disrupting established institutional practices and reinvigorating possibilities for change. This context provokes new lines of hopeful thought and critical reflection on (dis)continuities across historical time, theories of (social and psychological) developmental processes and the practices of intergenerational life, particularly in the domain of education, for the making of emancipatory futures. This is essential reading for academics and students interested in Vygotskian and narrative theory and critical psychology, as well as those interested in the politics and praxis of higher education.
The process of curriculum development is highly practical, as Goodson shows in this enlarged anniversary third edition of his seminal work. The position of subjects and their development within the curriculum is illustrated by looking at how school subjects, in particular, geography and biology, gained academic and intellectual respectability within the whole curriculum during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He highlights how subjects owe their formation and accreditation to competing status and their power to compete in the provision of 'worthwhile' knowledge and considers subjects as continually changing sub-groups of information. Such subjects from the framework of the society in which individuals live and over which they have influence. This volume questions the basis on which subject disciplines are developed and formulates new possibilities for curriculum development and reform in a post-modrnist age.
In Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change Kari J. Winter compares the ways in which two marginalized genres of women's writing - female Gothic novels and slave narratives - represent the oppression of women and their resistance to oppression. Analyzing the historical contexts in which Gothic novels and slave narratives were written, Winter shows that both types of writing expose the sexual politics at the heart of patriarchal culture and both represent the terrifying aspects of life for women. Female Gothic novelists such as Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley uncover the terror of the familiar - the routine brutality and injustice of the patriarchal family and of conventional religion, as well as the intersecting oppressions of gender and class. They represent the world as, in Mary Wollstonecraft's words, "a vast prison" in which women are "born slaves." Writing during the same period, Harriet Jacobs, Nancy Prince, and other former slaves in the United States expose the "all-pervading corruption" of southern slavery. Their narratives combine strident attacks on the patriarchal order with criticism of white women's own racism and classism. These texts challenge white women to repudiate their complicity in a racist culture and to join their black sisters in a war against the "peculiar institution." Winter explores as well the ways that Gothic heroines and slave women resisted subjugation. Moments of escape from the horrors of patriarchal domination provide the protagonists with essential periods of respite from pain. Because this escape is never more than temporary, however, both types of narrative conclude tensely. The novelists refuse to affirm either hope or despair, thereby calling into question conventional endings of marriage or death. And although slave narratives were typically framed by white-authored texts, containment of the black voice did not diminish the inherent revolutionary conclusion of antislavery writing. According to Winter, both Gothic novels and slave narratives suggest that although women are victims and mediators of the dominant order they also can become agents of historical change.
These twenty autobiographical essays by eminent feminist literary critics explore the process by which women scholars became feminist scholars, articulating the connections between the personal and political in their lives and work. From these diverse histories a collective history emerges of the development of feminism. Offering a spectrum of experiences and critical positions that engage with current debates in feminism, it will be valuable to teachers and students of feminist theory, women's studies, and the history of the women's movement.
The success of school reform measures greatly depends on thesupport and commitment of teachers. This book examines therealities of educational change from the frontline perspective ofreform-minded teachers. It charts the perceptions and experiencesof twenty-nine teachers in grades 7 and 8 from four schooldistricts--showing how they grappled with such initiatives asintegrated curriculum, common learning standards, and alternativemodes of assessment. This book moves beyond the bandwagons of rhetorical change andexamines how these changes work in practice for better and forworse. Authors Andy Hargreaves and Lorna Earl focus on how reformproposals have brought new complexities to teaching practice andwhy major investments of time and support are required if teachinginnovations are to become lasting and effective. Most importantly,they highlight the intense emotional demands that school changeimposes on teachers, and they outline practical strategies forhelping teachers through the difficult transition process--thusensuring that worthwhile reforms flourish and endure.
The Target Oriented Curriculum (TOC) is arguably the most comprehensive, fundamental and controversial attempt to promote systemic curriculum reform in Hong Kong. It aimed at a radical change in the nature of knowledge, pedagogy and assessment in schools. After an initial phase of confusion and criticism, this ambitious reform was revamped and vigorously promoted, but within a few years, it totally lost momentum as other educational issues attracted the attention of policy-makers. This book traces the career of TOC and studies the impact of the reform on the education system, subjects, schools and teachers. Drawing on a four-year multi-level research project, the chapters provide a deep understanding of the complex nature of educational reform and how a new curriculum is interpreted, developed and implemented. Besides providing a fascinating portrayal of the experiences of the TOC reform, this book offers lessons for future curriculum change in Hong Kong and elsewhere. 'This', writes Ivor Goodson in the Foreword, 'is curriculum research at its best.'
Rising Subjects explores the change of the public sphere in Russian Poland during the 1905 Revolution. The 1905 Revolution was one of the few bottom-up political transformations and general democratizations in Polish history. It was a popular rebellion fostering political participation of the working class. The infringement of previously carefully guarded limits of the public sphere triggered a powerful conservative reaction among the commercial and landed elites, and frightened the intelligentsia. Polish nationalists promised to eliminate the revolutionary “anarchy” and gave meaning to the sense of disappointment after the revolution. This study considers the 1905 Revolution as a tipping point for the ongoing developments of the public sphere. It addresses the question of Polish socialism, nationalism, and antisemitism. It demonstrates the difficulties in using the class cleavage for democratic politics in a conflict-ridden, multiethnic polity striving for an irredentist self-assertion against the imperial power.
