Idea Of Mastery Research Articles

Difficult Women: Joyce, Burns, and the Radical Passivity of Listening

ABSTRACT Literary texts often considered difficult or challenging present formidable hindrances to literature classrooms founded on ideas of mastery and understanding. This mastery is facilitated through the visual privilege of lingering on a page of literature. Sound does not allow for this. As Walter Ong [2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge] once remarked, ‘If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing—only silence, no sound at all’ (32). Sound allows for passivity as opposed to mastery, and thus allows for what I call the radical passivity of listening. In this article, I begin with the pedagogical possibilities of audiobooks, with the 1982 RTÉ audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses at the centre. Here Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from ‘Penelope’ becomes a breathy spew of dialogue, often impeding the space necessary for interpretation, and calling for submission to her speech. I then move on to Anna Burns’ 2018 novel Milkman, and investigate the possibilities of ‘listening’ to a challenging text on paper as one would to an audiobook. In both cases, the female first-person narrators speak in response to rumours about themselves, and are struggling to be heard, while also calling upon the reader-listener, I argue, to suspend interpretive thought in favour of submissive listening. I thus advocate for a pedagogy of restraint, one which favours impressions over analysis and is founded in listening rather than interlocution.

Failing Fortunes of Applied Linguistics: Towards Surviving Mastery

Abstract The discourse of mastery is prominent in applied linguistics. The idea of mastery, however, does not remain only on the discourse level: curricula and policies are meant to be implemented, and therefore mastery and all that is associated with it (near perfection, dominance over something, etc.) is also practiced. In this paper, I argue that we might survive mastery by recuperating other ways of being, thinking, and learning. By drawing on examples from the South African higher educational context, I show glimpses of other ways of doing and thinking about language. Drawing inspiration from decolonial theory, I extend the notion of linguistic citizenship by showing that, for applied linguists, vulnerability, relationality, and failure could be points of focus as productive as mastery.

Urban resilience as critique: Problematizing infrastructure in post-Sandy New York City

Drawing on Foucaultian work on problematization, this paper explores the urban resilience paradigm which emerged in the wake of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, which dramatically disrupted New York City. Using discourse and media analysis, examination of government commissions and proposals, and site observation at panels and conferences, it argues that, rather than an ahistorical “thing,” urban resilience was the name given to techniques resulting from a three-part process of problematization drawn together by media and government in the storm's aftermath. This process, I argue, was itself political, and included the identification of new problems to govern in the form of environmental and technical risks; the critique of modern urban governance techniques based on a city/nature separation and ideas of mastery and control as impediments to responding to these problems; and finally the overcoming of impediments via creative recalibration of government by redefining the social and ecological as interconnected infrastructure. The recalibrations produced within this three-part problematization, I show, were promoted by city government and local institutions as “urban resilience,” which was presented as the unquestionable answer to Sandy's problems as they had been posed. I conclude by discussing what this problem-based case study helps us see about urban resilience, but also how it advances our understanding of the growing interest in problematization within geography, as well as implications it suggests for thinking the political in the Anthropocene.

Leadership, leadership development and all that jazz

This article critiques key elements of contemporary leadership theory and practice, notably the persistent modernist emphasis on heroic individualism in models of the leader and leadership and the highly instrumental and performative nature of the competence approach to leadership development. Against this, the article draws on the history of jazz as an improvisational art form to develop a view of leadership based on fluidity and adaptability, commitment, creativity and change, community and team enabling and the idea of mastery and wisdom. Leadership-as-practice, in this view, is “collective coherent thinking” based on a lifetime of preparation for exploring the spaces between the notes where creative interpretation meets and responds to uncertainty and unpredictability.

Blondin conquers nature and invents the circus celebrity

Blondin walked across Niagara Falls on a rope in 1859 and created a sensation. His fame made him synonymous with the high rope act. Drawing on archival and secondary sources, this article explains that Blondin’s rapid rise to international prominence, the merchandizing industry surrounding him, his large earning capacity, global travel, his special shows for journalists, and at least one complicated story of female fandom, pre-empt a modern idea of celebrity. The public perceives celebrities as ‘superhuman’. Did Blondin contribute to the invention of celebrity? Blondin’s reputation and his feats slide from the conquering of geographical space into ideas of mastery over untamed nature and even control over wild animals. Blondin’s athletic skill was undeniable but the varied costumes that framed the act also reinforced cultural notions of predatory prowess. His seemingly impossible feats could be celebrated as triumphant displays of masculinity and, more broadly, of European dominance over geography, other peoples and even species. Underlying the nineteenth century idea of celebrity arising from Blondin’s physical agility were hierarchical relations between races and cultures. As his name became a brand, his act denoted extremes of spatial inversion and gravity defying action conflated with the conquest of nature’s force.

Anaesthetic training: not better, not worse, just different

Anaesthetic training: not better, not worse, just different

The Cunning of Unreason and Nature's Revolt: Max Horkheimer and William Leiss on the Domination of Nature

Abstract The domination of nature is a concept now fraught with negative connotations; however, it was not always thus. In this article I explore the positive, neutral, and negative meanings attached to the idea of mastery and domination of nature as it was used by Max Horkheimer, director of the Institute of Social Research from 1931-1959, and by a second generation of the Frankfurt School, William Leiss. At issue are two questions. First, what were the social conditions considered by Horkheimer and Leiss that turned human interaction with and control of non-human nature into an exploitative relationship? And second, what did it mean for them to conceive of non-human nature as an active agent in its own right?