Discourse Of Self Research Articles

National images and intercultural dialogue in Southeast Europe

AbstractOn the basis of the constructivist and discourse approaches, this paper views national image as a multifaceted socialpsychological construct, representing both the self-concept of nationality and the attitudes of non-members towards it. National self-image is stored in collective memory and crystallized in collective self-narratives. In Southeast Europe, these are the three major discourses of self, other and the Balkans. Strong prejudices towards neighbouring nationalities are paradoxically combined with a sense of Europeanness and Eurocentrism in the peninsula. This means that European identity does not necessarily rival national identity, but under certain circumstances may even underline and strengthen it. Finally the paper sees intercultural education and intercultural marketing as the two main goals of intercultural dialogue in the region.

Writing with photographs writing self: Using artistic methods in the investigation of identity

In this paper I discuss arts-based, autoethnographic research and introduce methods for studying identity construction and visual knowledge/understanding. Included is discussion of self as a subject of study. The paper suggests self-reflexive and artistic methods applicable to all levels of inquiry focusing on construction of cultural identity. In the final section I propose that applying self-reflexive artistic practices to multicultural art education can further develop our understanding of diversity.

White Women Writers and Their African Inventions (review)

Reviewed by: White Women Writers and Their African Inventions Lezlie Margaret Hall Lewis Simon. White Women Writers and Their African Inventions. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. vii + 263 pp. On a continent whose countries are still attempting to negotiate between fragile democracies and despotic regimes in the aftermath of postcolonialism, any scholarship that tackles the thorny and divisive history of imperialism and works to move the reader to a greater political awareness has merit. Lewis Simon's White Women Writers and Their African Inventions is well worth the read and contributes substantially to this discussion. Lewis divides his book into three sections whose titles are taken from Isak Dinesen's euphonious first line of Out of Africa (1883): "I," "Had a Farm," and "In Africa," to examine how identity is constructed and possession is understood in European and Euro-African texts written by white women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He draws on Raymond Williams's model of the city versus the country, transforming it into metropole versus colony, and addresses the pertinent question Nadine Gordimer raises in The Essential Gesture (1988), "Where do whites fit in?" to determine whether Euro-African authors subvert or support the imperialist claim to the continent—or manifest an uneasy ambivalence—and whether their texts have worked to enhance or hinder the political process toward self-rule. Much of his scholarship is dedicated to Olive Schreiner and Karen Blixen, and he begins his discussion by navigating the territory of their writings through several channels: the redefinition of self, the construction and use of masks, and the fascination with orphanhood. The first two chapters dedicated to the authors' definitions of "I" and their use of masks cover ground already explored in texts on Schreiner and Blixen by biographers and scholars such as Susan Hardy Aiken, Judith Thurman, and Susan Horton. Lewis mines that material a little deeper but uncovers no revolutionary new evidence as to how Blixen in particular and Schreiner to a lesser degree invented and reinvented versions of themselves: to justify their presence—for Blixen certainly—in an alien country, to transcend traditional female roles of the late Victorian and early-twentieth-century era, and to allow them space to write. However, the discussion of self and mask is an important one on a continent whose European colonials continually redefined its indigenous citizenry in damaging, malevolent ways. If Schreiner and Blixen's affinities often lay with the native peoples, their literary agenda was less to champion the cause of those citizens brutally subjugated on a continent that rightly belonged to them than to establish independent, speaking selves that were not subject to patriarchal mandates of silence and respectability. Those goals were important, and Schreiner and Blixen both attained [End Page 232] literary notoriety, putting "women's" writing on the map, which was a valuable achievement—but at whose expense? Blixen's lament in Out of Africa at the loss of her African Eden, her coffee farm in Kenya, and her expulsion back to Denmark, barely addresses the country's real history of land acquisition by white settlers (such as herself) through the forceful and often brutal removal or relocation of tribes like the Gikuyu to nearly uninhabitable areas. Blixen is acutely aware of the injustices inflicted upon the Gikuyu, many of whom she befriended and genuinely cared for, but they are present in her work only as servants or hired hands, as foils to her invented benevolent persona. She presents herself as their champion, placing them in an idealized pastoral, but turns them into literary myth to enhance her fantasy of Africa, a textual appropriation that casts the indigenous populations as secondary and diminishes the historical traumas to which they were subjected. Schreiner fares better, and deservedly so, although Lewis reserves well-grounded criticism for her as well. Schreiner's depiction of indigenous Africans was often racist, and her representation of the spaces of South Africa as empty is problematic. As I read her, "empty space" for Schreiner, particularly the great Karoo, became territory that could not be commandeered by Europeans and thus was a way to resist imperialism. For Lewis, however, constructing any topography as "empty space", translated by colonialists as...

Speaking the Self into Becoming?

The self is an alluring topic for debate, and Boesch’s (2003) article creates ample space for playing with ideas and positions on personhood. I have chosen specific portions of the article to lead towards discussions of self and ‘I’, the notion of an inner self, multiplicity of the self, and the cultural configuration and language of selfhood. This commentary has been sprinkled with examples of self-related experiences from Indian communities in order to demonstrate the important ways in which cultures can diverge in the organization of activity around being a person. Hopefully, these examples will help to distract readers from aspects of their own cultural and personal lives while entering into different perspectives on sociality and individual existence. I end by questioning whether, despite its attractions, the self has become somewhat overexposed to academic attention in the recent past.

A Buddhist contribution to the psychoanalytic psychology of self

The author attempts to integrate the concepts of self used in psychoanalytic theory with the understanding of the nature of self as explained within the Buddhist meditative tradition. He divides different concepts of self in psychoanalytic theory into three major levels of consciousness and abstraction: self as experience, representational self and self as system. The representational level is defined as consisting of unconscious organizing structures of interaction: the system level is a hierarchically higher organization of representations, while the experiential level consists of the moment‐to‐moment flow of consciousness. He argues that for the sake of theoretical clarity these levels should be differentiated in discussions of self. He then describes the Buddhist psychology of self and tries to show how this perspective can enrich psychoanalytic understanding of the experiential self and of narcissism, which in Buddhist language would be described as clinging to (seeking or avoiding) images of self that arise in the mind. Last, he describes a model of therapeutic development using different levels of self and the interrelationship between them, showing how psychoanalytic psychotherapy and Buddhist insight meditation emphasize different levels of self using complementary rather than mutually exclusive methods.

A Buddhist contribution to the psychoanalytic psychology of self.

The author attempts to integrate the concepts of self used in psychoanalytic theory with the understanding of the nature of self as explained within the Buddhist meditative tradition. He divides different concepts of self in psychoanalytic theory into three major levels of consciousness and abstraction: self as experience, representational self and self as system. The representational level is defined as consisting of unconscious organizing structures of interaction: the system level is a hierarchically higher organization of representations, while the experiential level consists of the moment-to-moment flow of consciousness. He argues that for the sake of theoretical clarity these levels should be differentiated in discussions of self. He then describes the Buddhist psychology of self and tries to show how this perspective can enrich psychoanalytic understanding of the experiential self and of narcissism, which in Buddhist language would be described as clinging to (seeking or avoiding) images of self that arise in the mind. Last, he describes a model of therapeutic development using different levels of self and the interrelationship between them, showing how psychoanalytic psychotherapy and Buddhist insight meditation emphasize different levels of self using complementary rather than mutually exclusive methods.

Ethical Formation and Politics of Individual Autonomy in Contemporary Egypt

WITHIN the vast literature produced on contemporary Islam, Islamist movements have often been analyzed through the lens of identity politics. The increasing emphasis on Islamic forms of behavior among Muslims in the Middle East has been commonly read as a recoding of nationalist sentiments in religious idioms, a recoding that does not so much replace Arab nationalism as recast its political sentiment in Islamic symbols. The growing interest in Islamic rituals such as donning the veil, performing collective prayers, and listening to sermons are understood to enfold existent forms of Arab nationalism into particularistic expressions of religious belonging, a development that has, if anything , narrowed the scope of nationalist politics by making the figure of the Muslim paradigmatic of the citizen-subject. This continuity between Islamism and nationalism would appear to be all the more pronounced with regard to the question of gender since both ideologies appear to cast women as the repositories of tradition and culture, their bodies made the potent symbols of collective identity. SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Fall 2003) Ethical Formation and Politics of Individual Autonomy in Contemporary Egypt* SABA MAHMOOD *I am grateful to Talal Asad, Jane Collier, Charles Hirshckind, and Charles Taylor for their engagements and provocations at various stages of this article’s gestation. Portions of this paper appeared previously as “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of Salat” in American Ethnologist 28:4 (2001): 827-853. It is published here with the permission of the American Anthropological Association. Indeed, it is not difficult to find examples of the laminated character of Islamist-nationalist discourse in Egypt today, a country that remains one of the premiere cultural centers of the Islamist movement in the Middle East. A number of Egyptian Islamists, for instance, speak about the veil as an expression of Arab-Muslim identity, while many of their secular-oriented critics view Islam as constitutive of the cultural terrain upon which the Egyptian nation has acquired its unique historical character. In contrast to these views, however, a strong current within the Islamist movement—which I will gloss here as the “piety movement ”—is highly critical of this nationalist-identitarian view of Islam and directs its organizational efforts at combating the practical effects of this interpretation. The critique put forward by this movement is not simply that the nationalist-identitarian view vitiates the religious character of Islam in rendering it a political ideology . Rather, their criticism is that such a view reduces Islamic ritual practices to the status of cultural customs, thereby radically transforming the role such practices have played historically in the realization of a pious life. However abstruse this might sound to secular ears, debates about how to interpret and enact the variety of embodied Islamic injunctions pervade Egyptian public life, and even political discussions often devolve upon questions about the proper role ascribed to the performance of these practices. In what follows I want to argue that, in order to understand the importance of these debates to public life in Egypt, we need to bring questions of ethics to bear upon politics and vice-versa, and thus complicate the separation of these realms so commonly assumed in liberal political theory. Specifically, I will show that different conceptions of ritual and bodily behavior among Egyptian Muslims presuppose radically different imaginaries of collective and individual freedom; as such, debates about ritual performance represent a key site from which one can understand contrastive visions of self, community, and authority that constitute different strands of the Islamist movement in Egypt today. Toward the end of this essay, I will show how an analytical vocabulary 838 SOCIAL RESEARCH drawn from liberal and communitarian discussions of self and community remains inadequate to the task of understanding the kind of social imaginary presupposed by certain narratives of personhood prevalent within the Islamist movement. The issues I raise in this article about the place of social authority in the constitution of the self extend recent discussions about the disciplinary character of the public sphere. Contrary to earlier Habermasian theories that stressed the communicative and deliberative aspects of the public sphere, one in which preformed rational subjects engaged in a free exchange of ideas and critique, a...

The Small Details of Life: 20 Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1990 ed. by Kathryn Carter

Houlbrooke in the volume’s Afterword. Houlbooke surveys Renaissance attitudes and approaches toward suffering to provide a context for the contributions of these various essays toward a better understanding of grief. After drawing several tentative conclusions from this collective study, he sets out a number of questions that deserve further investiga­ tion before ending with a plea for more cross-disciplinary work between history and literature. The best essays in this volume attest to the benefit of such an approach. Brent Nelson University ofSaskatchewan Kathryn Carter, ed. The Sm all Details o f Life: 20 Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830-1990. Toronto: UTP, 2002. Fp. 486. With this collection of excerpted diaries by English speaking women in Canada before and after Confederation, Kathryn Carter makes an ambitious contribution to the ongoing project of women’s history in this country. She writes that “the best history is biography and ... reading the details from lives of individual women can do much to broaden and challenge our understanding of Canadian history” (6). Although I do not agree with Carter about the necessary connection between biography and history, which for me still carries with it associations with Georg Misch and the liberal view of history as a record of exemplary individual achievement, I do agree with Carter’s decision to present diary writing as a meeting ground of social conditions and the agency of individual women who wanted to make writing a part of their daily lives. To this end, Carter’s collection brings together selections from twenty diaries by women from the early nineteenth century to 1996, with introductions to the life and times of each diarist provided by various contributors. Carter’s decision to include diaries by women who were unknown alongside diaries by women who are public figures makes the publication of this collection important because much private writing by less-known women in Canada is unpublished and relatively inaccessible. At its strongest, The Small Details ofLife shows that “diary writing matters because it has the potential to trace threads of meaning in the Book Reviews | 283 Kathryn Carter makes an ambitious contribution to the ongoing project of women's history in this country. fragmentation that characterizes human life” (19). In its weaker moments, what Carter sees as a strength—the endless record of minutiae—threatens to overwhelm The Small Details ofLife with too many small details from too many lives. But as Carter points out in her introduction, this elliptical and laconic aspect of diary writing is part of what diary writing is about (9). Editing sections to make them more like a narrative and more “literary” in tone speaks more to the types of things readers want than to the special type of writing that is diary writing, since most diaries are not written with a readership in mind. This makes any reader of The Small Details ofLife an eavesdropper on the writing lives of other people, and so at times it is inevitable that we will be, as Carter says, alienated from the texts and the lives of these writers (9). In her clearly written introduction to the collection, Carter says that diaries are historical documents that exceed the boundaries of social his­ tory. She wisely avoids typologizing diary as a genre because that would lead her to differentiating between journal writing and diary writing, two types of private writing which she says have similar etymological roots and are difficult to classify in any case. However, Carter’s decision to stress the importance of women’s diaries for the historical record means that she leaves out important scholarship about diary writing in general and diary writing by women in particular which shows how diary writing is one of the discourses of self making (Culley 217-219). Diary writing, for instance, helps to show how private writing by women contributes to our evolving understanding of the growth of self-reflexivity in the west (Nussbaum 128-129). Diary writing by women was also part of complex developments of the public and private spheres before the Victorian period in England (Thompson 6-7), while later it was a way for nineteenth and twentieth century English women to resist social expectations...

Book Reviews

Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse. Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, and Laurel A. Sutton. eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 431 pp.

Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse (review)

Reviewed by: Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse ed. by Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, Laurel A. Sutton Noriko Watanabe Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse. Ed. by Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, and Laurel A. Sutton. (Studies in language and gender.) New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii. 431. This collection of twenty papers integrates inter-disciplinary scholarship on the subject of language, gender, and identities and examines the diversity and multiplicity of the concepts embodied in practice. The volume is prefaced by a clearly written introduction by Mary Bucholtz. The introduction (3–24) articulates the background and rationale for the new scholarship in gender and language, and it entices readers to open their eyes to the advent of a new era. The past liaisons of linguistics and feminism produced studies based on the ‘difference’ and ‘dominance’ models, but they are met with criticism from a new wave of scholars from diverse backgrounds. Recent developments in both fields have turned to discourse as a powerful source of identity construction, manifestation, and display; so linguistics is called to play a role once again. The new approach represented in this volume views language users as dynamic, multivocal agents with the power to control rather than as passive beings whose languages are mere reflections of rigid classifications of gender, ethnicity, race, and class. Part 1, ‘Identity as invention’ (27–119), explores identity construction through various discourse: in African American women’s talk studied by Marcyliena Morgan, in Lakhota by Sara Trechter, in deaf and hearing lesbian coming-out stories by Kathleen M. Wood, in Latina and Latino students’ writings by Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, and in interactions of an agoraphobic woman with family members by Lisa Capps. In Part 2, ‘Identity as ideology’ (123–217), researchers examine how ideology is manifest through women’s discourse as well as in how women are talked about: Jennifer Coats writes on teenage girls’ conversations over a three-year period, Caitlin Hines on the metaphor of ‘woman as dessert’, Laurel Sutton on on-line journals and self-published zines, Rebecca Dobkins on letters written by Native American mothers to school officials in the early twentieth century, and Keith Walters on an interview in Tunisia that reveals the participants’ complex identities and religious ideology. Group membership does not always prescribe identity nor does it permanently determine one’s linguistic behaviors. In Part 3, ‘Identity as ingenuity’ (221–305), this point is illustrated by Deborah Tannen’s work on same-sex interactions and display of identities, and by Patricia Sawin’s work on the narrative style of an elderly Appalachian woman. William Leap shows the connection between acquiring language for self-expression and creation of gay identity in adolescents. Norma Mendoza-Denton points out the complexity of understanding identity in Latina girls’ interactions. A unique piece by A. C. Liang tests the Gricean maxims with sample conversations between people who assume different sexual orientations. Part 4, ‘Identity as improvisation’ (313–409), investigates identities in understudied contexts. Rusty Barrett observes the language of African American drag queens while Anna Livia investigates pronoun systems and their implications in feminist fictions. Bucholtz’s paper examines discourse of the shopping channel, a recently created stage for identity displays both by the hosts and the consumers. Colleen Cotter’s research is on Irish-language radio and nongendered roles performed by two female speakers. Marjorie Harness Goodwin finds unconventional features of Latina girls’ interactions during hopscotch play. The collection encompasses an impressively wide variety of identities and their intersections as seen through their embodied practices. Its strength is that it effectively addresses scholars in many disciplines, including those who viewed past work on language and gender critically, and it suggests more possibilities for future research. Noriko Watanabe Grinnell College Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

Sorcery of the Self

In this article, we first examine current cognitive and social constructionist (SC) notions of self and we suggest that although `self is central to both approaches, it is not satisfactorily defined by either because the discussion of self remains at an epistemological level. The lack of genuine definition leads to difficulties specifying the properties `self possesses and to dilemmas about how to draw boundaries between public and private experience and explain that discourse is both personalized yet socially constructed. In the second part of the article, we examine phenomenological claims for an ontological position which transcends views of the self as a unit `known about' and which grounds self-knowledge in Being. Being is revealed by projects in the world and does not distinguish a priori between subject and object. Such divisions are invoked by projects such as `knowing the world' which require a temporal and spatial version of the world in order to come about. Projects are always in the process of coming about; therefore, self s defining quality is what it is about to become rather than what it is. Hence the finite self is an illusion; but a necessary one. We draw an analogy between the way the illusion of self is created and revealed through the project of `knowing the self' and the way a conjuror, through his/her lead-up, convinces an audience to see what should be there. Only because sense of self is an illusion, we speculate, can it exert such a powerful sway over our lives.

Investigating Portering Relations as a Locus for Transcultural Interaction in the Karakorum Region of Northern Pakistan

Since European contact about 1835 a specific set of coercive labor relations-porters carrying loads for foreign travel- ers-has significantly shaped local/Western interaction in the Karakorum region of Northern Pakistan. This paper offers a prelim- inary attempt to outline some theoretical and methodological issues relevant to understanding portering relations as a historical and contemporary site for structuring cross-cultural interaction in the region. It draws on the concepts of contact zone, transcul- turation, discursive formations, and public and hidden transcripts. It then sketches the rough dimensions of an unfolding empiri- cal project to trace metropolitan and indigenous transcultural discourses of self and other into, through, and out of the specific material relations of portering. Two brief examples discuss (a) the European-initiated formalized regulation of porter employ- ment in the late 19th century, and (b) indigenous practices of publicly resisting unequal labor relations through strategically-situ- ated work stoppages.

The discourse of self in dementia

The preservation of self-identity in dementia is dependent upon internal (cognitive) and external (social) conditions. This study investigates the integrity of self (internal) and personae (external) in dementia as indexed by the verbal and nonverbal behaviours of dementia residents and their caregivers in a special care unit. Videotaped observations of spontaneous nursing staff-resident interactions were collected over a three-day period. The recordings were transcribed and subjected to detailed discourse analysis. Our analyses focused on several indexicals of self and personae including personal pronouns, proper nouns, interpersonal conflicts, and discursive positioning. The findings revealed that both self and personae are susceptible to decline in dementia. However, the results also provide evidence that even in severe dementia self and personae can be indexed in a variety of ways. We discuss the important role that caregivers can have in reinforcing self and personae in dementia.

Autobiography and Postmodernism (review)

Reviews Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, Gerald Peters, eds. Autobiography and Postmodernism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994.318 pp. $50.00 he, ISBN 0-87023-899-X; $16.95 pb, ISBN 087023 -900-7. While the question of agency has progressively emerged as the Achilles heel of postmodernism's radical decentering of the subject, autobiographical theories and practices have, surprisingly, come up with creative strategies and remedies. If groups and constituencies previously marginalized by dint of race, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality stand as potential beneficiaries of a general dissolution of the ego's sovereignty, it is only on condition that they accede to new sources of identity. The key to agency in the postmodern world is the production of cultural identities, and this impressive collection of essays sets out to demonstrate how autobiography has latterly proved to be a powerhouse in that very area of production. For Leigh Gilmore, who introduces the volume, "the mark of autobiography . . . signifies agency in self-representation" (14). However, both in the introduction and in her own essay, "Policing Truth: Confession, Gender, and Autobiographical Authority," Gilmore argues emphatically that autobiography's potential as a source of agency is rooted not in its new-found generic respectability, but rather in its resistance to genre. Indeed, the point of fostering links between autobiography and postmodernism is to discourage the tendency to define and codify, on the grounds that such attempts misguidedly domesticate autobiography's "characteristic weirdness" (71). This is well said, but it points to some worrying ambiguities in Gilmore's argument. When she suggests that "the destablizations effected in the theory of genre" by several contributors "move us a long way toward reexamining autobiography as discourses of self and representation rather than as a genre defined in its post-Augustinian image" (10), and goes on to cite the discussion of Cindy Sherman's photographs, or the naming practices of Plains Indians, as instances of "something decidedly multiple and extra-textual," one may be disappointed to find that "characteristic weirdness" has been located not as a central feature of autobiography, but as a fringe benefit, something at its extremities. This critical move seems regrettable and unnecessary. It is one thing to lament a critical trend to smooth autobiography into coherence and canonicity. But it is another to imply that the texts of Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Newman, or Leiris do not in themselves manifest that "specific weirdness" Gilmore Reviews 473 rightly cherishes. Surely they do, and postmodernism, as well as deriving from autobiography "a text and a discourse from which to theorize human agency" (8), can provide it with an alternative critical framework, attuned to its own potential hybridity, rooted in its mixing of fact and fantasy, reference and fictionaHty, the pubUc and the private. Autobiography tends to destabilize all these oppositions. Yet, clearly, autobiography's deconstructive bent, its capacity to offer itself as a space for multiple subject positions and plurality rather than fixed identity, has often been too much for the autobiographer. Very often in the history of self-representation, a particular ideology of selfhood has been imposed on the autobiographical work, limiting the dangerous freedom it allows. In her essay, Gilmore deploys Foucault's notions of policing and authority to indicate how the confessional status of autobiography has been used in this way. The confessional model tethers the autobiographical subject to externally sanctioned criteria of truth vested in the addressee. These criteria may shift historically, notably from a religious to a psychoanalytical paradigm, but the discursive structure, resting on what Gilmore calls autobiography 's "authorization complex" remains the same (71). The structure constrains what can and what cannot be articulated within it. The experiences of female mystics, like JuHan of Norwich, cannot be named within the authority-structure of confession, while Mary McCarthy's autobiography shows the persistence of a framework which, in effect, denies agency by placing the autobiographer in thrall to Another who embodies Truth. For Gilmore, the tenacity of the confessional model is a sign of autobiography's flaw, the disposition to "an authorization complex" which finds its counterpart in the straightjacket of genre imposed by those other authorizers—the generic codifiers of autobiography. There are two problems with this diagnosis. First...

Self as Other: Amar Singh's Diary as Reflexive ‘Native’ Ethnography

Amar Singh at twenty began writing on a daily basis. His diary extends over 44 years, from 1898 to 1942. Its last entry is dated 1 November 1942. He died that night. These days, the 89 quarto-size bound volumes averaging 800 manuscript pages can be found at Kanota Fort, ten miles east of Jaipur off the Agra road, where Mohan Singh, his nephew and heir, keeps them in glass-fronted Victorian cabinets in one of the several rooms Amar Singh called his library. In the essay that follows1 I try to show why and how Amar Singh, a diarist writing reflexively about himself, constructed a ‘self as other’ethnography of turn-of-the-century princely and British India. Through the medium of his diary he becomes a participant, an observer, an informant, a narrator, and an author. I set the stage for Amar Singhʼns self-as-other ethnography by examining the separation and alienation in anthropological discourse of self and other. Common to ethnography since Malinowskiʼns invented participant-observer field work, the separation was questioned, then challenged by postcolonial Indian and by postmodern Western anthropologists. I then show how Amar Singh, a self-conscious and critical ‘native’ self, constitutes the other in constituting himself. It is a story about how a native came to represent, speak for, and know himself.

Review: The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry., by E. Warwick Slinn

Book Review| June 01 1992 Review The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry.E. Warwick Slinn James F. Loucks James F. Loucks Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (1992) 47 (1): 113–116. https://doi.org/10.2307/2933771 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James F. Loucks; Review. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 June 1992; 47 (1): 113–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2933771 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1992 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

: The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry. . E. Warwick Slinn.

: The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry. . E. Warwick Slinn.

The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (review)

178Philosophy and Literature pecially Fackenheim who, after Adorno, would radically challenge such a conservative manoeuvre. A third might concern his curious relation to mentors (both alive and deceased) whose projects he gets wrong in ways that ironically enact the very issues they describe. If this be the stuff of which Seeskin's dreams are made, it behooves him to say so more forthrightly. If not, then it behooves him to identify the batdes he is waging and discard the pretense. In any event, it would probably be advantageous for him in the future to read somewhat more carefully and "gratefully" the architects ofthe positions he borrows and worry less about interesting nonJews in "Jewish philosophy" (p. 7) or promoting Judaism the way one would a new flavor of soft ice cream. Cornell UniversitySandor Goodhart The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry, by E. Warwick Slinn; ix & 213 pp. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991, $35.00. In this carefully written and tightly reasoned study Professor Slinn offers essentially deconstructive readings of three long Victorian poems, arguing that in these works the poets develop "the problematics of selfhood, pursuing a post-Romantic displacement of the self as an originary guarantor of meaning and truth" (p. 1). Slinn devotes his first two chapters to establishing a continuity between what he labels Hegelian "objective idealism" and Derridean textualism, his object being to show "how anti-dualist thinking and post-structuralist ideas are already present in the nineteenth century" (p. 38). Once he has established that Hegel undermines epistemological distinctions between subject and object and posits the concept of self as constituted by difference, Slinn turns to works of Tennyson, Clough, and Browning to demonstrate that similar problems of the relation between self and world play through Victorian poetry. In Maud, the speaker yearns for unmediated self-presence but finds himself defined by absence and lack (chap. 3); in Amours de voyage, Claude vacillates between solipsistic idealism and brute empiricism but finally emerges as a displaced self in a world of unstable oppositions (chap. 4); and in TL· Ring and tL· Book, textual sources of the narrative and its multiple perspectives reveal the irreducibly discursive nature of truth and the illusory nature of the self-present subject (chaps. 5 and 6). On the whole, Slinn's readings of individual texts are original and insightful. The troubling questions raised by Slinn's argument, however, are less issues of Reviews179 critical analysis per se than problems in literary and intellectual history. That one can fashion a Derridean Hegel or trace logocentrism's self-contradictions in Browning is not surprising. As Derrida has repeatedly demonstrated, no text is so righdy woven that it cannot be made to unravel itself. But whether Hegel and Browning are Derrideans avant la lettre is another matter. One of Slinn's key moves is to establish a Hegelian precedent for Victorian challenges to the Cartesian subject, but he does so by relying heavily on a revisionist reading of Hegel that poses considerable difficulties as a work of intellectual history. Slinn's principal guide to Hegel is Robert C. Solomon, whose In tL· Spirit of Hegel offers to "re-do Hegel ... to re-create, in our terms, the spirit of his philosophy" (p. 1) by separating the PL·nomenology from Hegel's later works and by differentiating between a totalizing Hegel of the Absolute and an antimetaphysical , anti-epistemological Hegel of non-teleological process. Solomon admits that fidelity to the letter of Hegel's text is not his primary aim, but one wonders at several points whether even the spirit of the text that Solomon uncovers is Hegelian or simply a modern appropriation of nineteenth-century thought. Similarly, when Slinn praises TL· Ring and the Book as "the triumph of dialectical thinking" (p. 1 19) in which "the self, like the world, is textualised, written into and through the structures of language" (p. 149), one must ask whether it is Browning or Slinn who has created this masterpiece oftextualism. Slinn's textual version of the relativist reading of the poem and his challenge of Pompilia as ethical center of the work, however capably these arguments may be mounted, finally are not persuasive enough to...

Edna Manley's “The Diaries”: Cultural Politics and the Discourse of Self

A critic of imperialism, race and class privilege, sculptor Edna Manley contributed to the ascendancy of a West Indian cultural aesthetic. Her productivity in the creative arts and her promotion of indigenous cultural organizations were vital to the growth of a post-colonial identity expressing Jamaican national unity and cultural plurality. The wife of Premier Norman W. Manley and the mother of Michael Manley, Jamaica's former Prime Minister, she drew strength from her cross-cultural heritage as a British-trained artist seeking to express the collective unconsciousness of her people. Her creative work finds its symbols in the subaltern currents of Caribbean life in the ongoing processes of community-making that forge a national identity out of peoples displaced from many lands. Her art is integrative: Afro-Caribbean and European themes merge in a symbolic universe suggesting “wholeness.” Her self-reflections, in diary form, also illustrate her determination to link opposing metaphors of the self into a central, organizing image.

Foucault and the Freshman Writer: Considering the Self in Discourse

During an interview five months before his death, Michel Foucault used the term of describe the various forms of knowledge. About these games he made the following observation, which expresses what might well be the central theme of his entire career: There is always a possibility, in a given of truth, discover something else and more or less change such and such a rule and sometimes even the totality of the game (Ethic 17). Through his analogy games Foucault underscores the nature of knowledge-of philosophy, for example, or biology-as an activity rather than a body of information. He suggests, however, that the activities we call knowledge involve more than compliance with rules or conventions. To play a of truth we must also devise strategies for problematization, for changing the rules as we go along (Use 11-13; Flynn 533). Although we might ordinarily imagine the history of any discourse or discipline be a continuum, each truth succeeding the next predictably, even automatically, Foucault characterizes the formation of knowledge as a series of discontinuities or redirections. Players in a of truth-as opposed powerless spectators-participate by learning differently, repeatedly seeking an outside the existing confines of the (Use 7-8; Thought 21-26; Deleuze 86-87). But if knowledge is neither a body of information nor a system of unchanging rules, what should teachers of writing teach? By what method can students learn think differently? Foucault himself may provide at least part of the answer when he refers his and apprehension in completing The Use of Pleasure, a project which required him to attempt and be mistaken, go back and rework everything from top bottom, and still find reason hesitate from one step the next. Instead of associating uncertainty with the miscarriage of