Counter-hegemonic Discourse Research Articles

Commentary: In Search of Counterhegemonic Discourses of Peace

Commentary: In Search of Counterhegemonic Discourses of Peace

Comment on Hekman's "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited": Truth or Justice?

gS U SAN H E K MAN'S ARTICLE (in this issue) begins with a good summary of the current situation of feminist standpoint theories. She makes several important points that are often unrecognized in discussions of standpoint theories. First, she notes that standpoint theories come in a variety of forms. Second, she argues that these theories must be understood as a counterhegemonic discourse, that is, as centrally concerned with politics. And third, she reminds us that at least my version of standpoint theory operates with a social constructivist theory of the subject. There is much that is useful in her article, but here I want to address three areas where I think she reads standpoint theories through a kind of American pluralism that prefers to speak not about power or justice but, rather, about knowledge and epistemology. She is not alone in this.1

The Politics of Educational Policy: Urban School Reform in Unsettling Times

This article argues that in relatively stable political periods a unifying policy discourse prevails in the state-what the author calls the hegemonic policy discourse-that represents the worldview and interests of the dominant political coalition. This policy discourse may remain basically unchanged until it is challenged by a counterhegemonic discourse based on new organizing principles and associated with the rise of a new political coalition and social movement. This general conceptual framework is applied to an analysis of urban school reform over the past several decades. The article indicates that throughout this period a hegemonic conservative discourse has constructed urban school reform issues around a "basic skills" model of the curriculum and suggests how basic skills reforms have participated in the structuring of class, race, and gender inequalities. After critiquing conservative approaches to managing the urban school crisis, the article discusses some possible organizing principles for a counterhegemonic, democratic-progressive policy discourse. In this regard it examines the contributions but also the limitations of recent liberal discourse in education, especially its concerns for higher-order thinking skills, equality of opportunity, and teacher professionalism. The article concludes by discussing the relevance of notions of workplace democratization and critical literacy and pedagogy.

Victims, Liberated Glamour Girls and Dregs of the Earth: Countering the Counter-Hegemonic Discourse of `Prostitute'

Victims, Liberated Glamour Girls and Dregs of the Earth: Countering the Counter-Hegemonic Discourse of `Prostitute'

Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress (review)

Reviews397 native, modernism has never seriously challenged the hegemony of bourgeois order. "It is," he writes, "the other (of) modernity, or to put it differently, it is modernity held in abeyance" (p. 240). For modernism is nothing more (or less) than a suite of differences, deferrals, and interruptions to modernity. Its very techniques are, moreover, subject to appropriation by the dominant discourses for use in advertising, propaganda, and self-justificationsbecause, as Eysteinsson points out, modernism's debate with modernity is dialogic: it is always more or less a response to the rationality and the persuasiveness of the dominant culture. If, therefore, it now seems that the classics of modernism have themselves been absorbed into the teaching canon of institutionalized modernity (university syllabi and media kitsch), the counterhegemonic discourses of postmodernism play out a new game of pretended subversion by seeming to appropriate the pre- or nonmodernistic aspects of modernity itself. Holes in jeans can be mass produced and punk hairstyles rendered by high-fashion models. It is, finally, all very bourgeois. University of Waikato, New ZealandNorman Simms Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress, by Lubomir Dolezel; 261 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990, $33.50. Lubomir Dolezel's Occidental Poetics represents, first of all, a major achievement in the historiography of poetics. But at the same time, Dolezel's study marks a significant advance in poetics itself. Subsuming two millennia ofthinking about literature under the rubric "occidental poetics," the book in large measure produces precisely that global framework or "research tradition" of which it purports to give a (genealogical) account. One is tempted to lapse here into Heideggerianisms and declaim something to this effect: Occidental Poetics shows us how poetics, as a science or investigative framework, attains scientific status just by grounding itself in its own historicity. But Dolezel can speak, less portentously, for himself: "The concept of research tradition combined with reformed historicism provides our inquiry with a method of 'systemic reconstruction'. . . . From a systemic historical reconstruction poetics emerges as an evolving set of assumptions, concepts, and methods which progressively build up a consistent approach to literature" (p. 4). It is, furthermore, a testament to the author's sense of proportion and 398Philosophy and Literature concision—and a sign of his familiarity with the global poetics he seems, paradoxically , to "reconstruct" avant h lettre—that Occidental Poetics can uncomplacently guide us from the ancient Greeks to the Prague School in some 175 pages. The text also includes a wealth of useful notes and a comprehensive bibliography. Dolezel begins by posing a distinction between poetics, "a cognitive activity that gathers knowledge about literature and incorporates it into the broader framework of knowledge acquired by the human and social sciences," versus criticism, "an axiological, value-assigning activity that integrates and reintegrates literary works into the system of a culture" (p. vii). Occidental Poetics then naces the genesis and evolution of what Dolezel terms the fundamental "themata" of poetics—the "idea of literature as structure," "the relationship between poetic art and the world," the "problem of poetic creativity" and the "relationship between literature and language" (pp. 6—7)—in sources spanning the British, French, German-language, Russian, and Czech traditions. Indeed, the sheer range of Dolezel's investigations is extraordinary. They cover Aristotle's "universal poetics, a theory of general literary categories" (p. 17); Baumgarten's postulation ofa "logic ofsensibility," and Leibniz's subsequent "theoryoffictional possibles," together with powerful elaborations upon Ûie Leibnizian theory by two Swiss Germanists of the eighteenth century, Johann Bodmer and Johann Breitinger; Goethe's morphological model and Wilhelm von Humboldt's projection ofthat model into the domain ofpoetics; Wordsworth's and Coleridge's dispute over the nature of poetic language; the stylistics of Charles Bally and the anagrammatic researches of Bally's teacher, Saussure; the early twentiethcentury narratology of Otmar Schissel, whose analysis of E. T. A. Hoffman Dolezel compares with the Russian Formalists' slighdy later theories about narrative ; and finally, the "semiotic poetics" of Mukarovsky, Jakobson, Vodicka, Jiri Levy and other members of the Prague School, one of whose last and most significant representatives, of course, is Dolezel himself. Dolezel's masterly survey and impressive grasp of occidental poetics as a whole is what allows him...

Testimonial Literature and Conversations as Literary Discourse: Cuba and Nicaragua

Revolutionary literatures in Spanish America have flourished in recent years, almost into a veritable avalanche of output. Not only must we bear in mind the texts of countries where successful revolutions have taken place, as Cuba or Nicaragua, but also the counterhegemonic discourses which can be seen arising and evolving in exile or in guerrilla warfare, shedding new light on an emerging reality. As a corollary to this innovative context, formal literary configurations are found which not only alter, modify, and overflow existent linguistic molds, but also break genre boundaries and even give rise to new categories of discourse which, within the limits of traditional literature, could be considered suspect, unclassifiable, or simply nonexistent. The so-called testimonial literature figures predominantly in the second category and was first observed in Cuba and Nicaragua in the form of literatura de campafia' (battlefield literature), such as diaries kept by those taking part in guerrilla warfare, and secondly through the continued proliferation of collected papers and reevaluations of past events, which attempted to recapture the everyday events of the revolution from its very beginnings. Literatura de campania has highly respectable forerunners in the writings of nineteenth-century revolutionaries, among which figure the diaries of Jose Marti. In our own times we hear voices from armed and clandestine struggles in Latin America, and, as is to be expected, first-person accounts bearing witness or interpreting events predominate, with memories and analyses