Postmodern Ideas Research Articles

Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice (review)

Reviewed by: Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice Heidi Westerlund Paul G. Woodford , Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice ( Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005) Paul G. Woodford's Democracy and Music Education needs to be warmly welcomed in the field of philosophy of music education. It contributes to the discussion centering on ethics and music education—a discussion that after multiculturalism, pluralism, praxialism, and other recent "isms" still awaits its appearance in a stronger sense. Woodford writes that the aim of the book is to enhance democratic ends by inviting music educators to contribute "to wider intellectual and political conversations about the nature and significance of music in our lives and those of our children."1 Woodford borrows ideas from many thinkers creating an interesting synthesis and lines of thought throughout the book. His main resource in developing a liberalist music education is, however, along the ideas of the American pragmatist and educational philosopher, John Dewey. Woodford's choice is well thought out. Dewey deserves to be redeemed and recognized in music education, not the least because of various distorted interpretations of his views that have commonly been accepted in the profession in the past. Woodford argues that the music appreciation movement, which aimed at developing good musical taste equally in all children, has not in any particular way been a Deweyan democratic movement. Music educators have not acknowledged their role as agents in the [End Page 235] transformation of school and society. Instead, he states, they have continued to subscribe to the older aesthetic and utilitarian rationales and yet neither approach prepares students "to question and challenge authority and thereby to transform musical society."2 It is noteworthy that Woodford does not elaborate on Dewey's central concept, experience, but unexpectedly draws upon concepts such as abstract reason or the autonomous individual to reconstruct music education. Critical conversation becomes celebrated against performance-oriented music education. The book leaves open the discussion between utilitarian and aesthetic rationales and carefully avoids Dewey's notion of the aesthetic and experimentation, which could have brought new angles in understanding his notion of democracy and its relation to the social and musical.3 Woodford tries to maintain a middle ground in the North American philosophical battlefield of music education stating that music educators "should listen more closely to one another while avoiding extremes."4 His critique targets critical theorists, radical feminist writers, and modernist as well as postmodernist ideas, while Woodford himself seeks a middle way between laissez-faire and elitist or autocratic concepts of music education. As a whole, Woodford's conceptual toolkit for promoting ethical aspects in music education are less akin to Dewey's thoughts and more to the Greek philosophers and their notions of virtues. Woodford writes, "democracy depends on the existence of good faith and generosity of spirit, of character and love for one's fellow men and women."5 These virtues are "the glue that can bind us together as society."6 How is this achieved in music education? Teaching love becomes a practical problem: explaining love requires it to be modelled and experienced, Woodford writes. However, he leaves this cornerstone of his conceptual scheme to rest on the notion of intellectual conversation. Allow me to explain briefly in what way Dewey's philosophical project differs from the Greek philosophical ethos and why abstract reason and intellectual conversation are not central concepts in Dewey's pragmatism (this does not mean that they cannot be celebrated as Woodford has done). For Dewey, the virtue of love signifies devotion, interest, and courage since genuine interest challenges us to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way.7 Interest and devotion are not just attitudes or intellectual modes in the sense of mental states, but linked to doings and active transactions with and in the environment. Interest is co-extensive with action and devotion with dedication to shared projects. This devotion to shared doings and their significance is the socially inclusive ethical side that Dewey brought to the individualistic humanistic theory of self-realization and to the theory of experience. The vision of humanistic self-realization, as has been presented in...

Are Freedom and Dignity Possible? (review)

Reviewed by: Are Freedom and Dignity Possible? Larry A. Hickman Are Freedom and Dignity Possible? Bernard den Ouden. Dexter, Mich.: Thompson-Shore, 2004. xvi + 124 pp. pbk 0-9749726-0-6. Bernard den Ouden is one of those philosophers who proves by example that the activities of an intellectual and the activities of a human rights activist can flourish together in one career. His professional work involves a tight interface of theory and practice in which each informs and amplifies the other. His published work constitutes a kind of overflow from his broad reading of philosophical texts and his humanitarian activities in various places around the globe. In his hands, philosophy becomes a living instrument for solving some of the worst of the world's problems, as well as a body of theory that benefits from hands-on, real-world activities. After a brief introduction, this slim volume comprises three sections and an epilogue. The introduction provides an account of how the author's concern for working with "the poorest of the poor" arose from his philosophical quest. Uncomfortable with what he describes as the mass ideology of non self-critical "Critical Theory" as well as postmodern concepts of insular communities or "locales of undecidability," he rejected both options. Instead of accepting the postmodern notion of universals as products of "evil Eurocentric Imperialism," he was drawn to engagement with the real-world universals of the United Nations Covenants and Conventions on Universal Human Rights. Den Ouden's work with these real-world universalizables has taken him to places such as Egypt, Bangladesh, and the Dominican Republic on projects as diverse as potable water management, food distribution, and women's issues. Part I, "Ideologies of Self-Knowledge and Freedom," comprises five essays, most of which were originally published in Contemporary Philosophy, on issues such as the Wisconsin welfare reform project, the ways in which publics can be motivated to prize equality of opportunity, and the possibilities of fostering grass-roots democracies by promoting small-scale economic development. Part II, "Beyond Postmodernism," continues and amplifies den Ouden's criticism of postmodernist emphases on difference and what he regards as the movement's extreme versions of cultural relativism. Revisiting the humanism of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Gottfried Herder in considerable detail, he issues a call for a global perspective that emphasizes similarities while respecting differences and that envisions the possibilities of joint projects that are oriented toward common goods. [End Page 243] This section also contains an essay that presents a solid reading of Nietzsche—solid in the sense that den Ouden avoids some of the cherished dogmas of many of Nietzsche's postmodernist interpreters. There is deep irony, he suggests, in claiming allegiance to a philosopher who wanted no disciples. And there is perhaps even deeper irony in treating difference as if it were an absolute. It is no accident, he suggests, that elements of the French Right have appealed to the core ideas of postmodernism to support their own politics of racism and exclusion. Part III, "Tragic Landscapes and Technologies of Hope," presents brief essays on deforestation and several issues associated with alternative and sustainable technologies. These issues, he reminds us, are inherently neither those of the political right or the left. They are issues that take all human beings into account, and that will require creativity, imagination, and insight for their resolution. Finally, in a brief epilogue den Ouden presents a highly personal analysis of the traditional "mind-body" problem couched in terms of his own experience of living with acute pain. More important, he demonstrates how even such debilitating experiences can prove to be effective in energizing greater empathy for those to whom he has dedicated a good portion of his professional life: the poorest of the poor. The volume is not without minor defects. Some of the essays could have benefited from additional editorial attention. Others leave the reader wishing that the author had gone into more detail in terms of the solutions he proposes. This is especially true of the chapters on alternative and sustainable technologies. Some readers may object to the deeply personal nature of den Ouden's presentation. To this reviewer, however, it is...

Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story by Adrian Wanner

MLR, IOI.2, 2oo6 617 Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to theAnti-Story. By ADRIANWANNER. (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni versity Press. 2003. Xii+2i6 pp. $79.95. ISBN o-8I0I-I955-2. Adrian Wanner had published four articles as preliminaries to the present study. The last of these was entitled 'Russian Minimalist Prose: Generic Antecedents to Daniil Kharms' "Sluchai"' (Slavic and East EuropeanyJournal, 45 (200I), 45 I-72). The final book no longer features Kharms in its title, adopting amore genre-based alternative; nevertheless Kharms, reached fully or formally only in the last of the eight chapters, seems still very much the end product, or overall goal, of this study. However, only a relatively small number of Kharms's anti-stories (ormini-stories) are discussed in any detail. The main value of the book, therefore, resides in its examination of the 'generic antecedents'-and this, in particular, in relation to the at times surprising anticipations of the Kharmsian absurdist miniature that it uncovers. The 'oxymoronic genre' of the 'prose poem', it seems, originated in France with Baudelaire (in I855). Russian literature adopted it in the person of Turgenev, with his very differently toned Stikhotvoreniia v proze, or Senilia (i 882). Its popularization by and in the wake of these two figures was to ensure it 'aprivileged position in the birth of literary minimalism' (p. 6). Senilia frequently gave way to juvenilia, while both 'subversive' (or even absurdist) and 'conservative' (and/or 'realist') models, lasting or re-emerging up to the present day, had been established by these Franco Russian founders. The link here between Turgenev and Baudelaire is described as 'circumstantial', although the exact match with the Baudelairean title of the French translation of Turgenev's work, in which he had a hand himself (Petits poemes en proses), hardly seems to be a complete coincidence (p. I9). There were also thematic reworkings, in the form of Turgenev's 'conservative recuperation of Baudelaire's subversive model' (p. 33). After a brief chapter on 'The Russian Prose Poem as a Realist Genre', mainly exemplified by Bunin, Wanner turns back a little to Symbolist prose miniatures, a category inwhich Bal'mont, Briusov, Belyi, and Annenskii all have something to of fer, along with Rozanov and the little-known Evgenii Lundberg. This is followed by substantial chapters on the 'Little Fairy Tales' (Skazochki) of Sologub and the prolific supposed 'dreams' (sny) of Remizov. Sologub's miniature dialogue 'Chto budet?' ('What Will Be?') is reminiscent of the Cretan liar conundrum, while the semantic 'disruption' (sryv), characterizing the 'genuine dream' according to Remizov, may be equated with the 'shift' (or 'semantically related sdvig') of the Futurists (p. 96). The Futurists themselves, of course, had something to contribute too in the line of prose miniatures. Khlebnikov, Livshits, and Elena Guro all figure in the discussion, as does-perhaps more surprisingly (as a prose writer)-Kandinskii, while David Burliuk can apparently even be credited with coining the term 'minimalism' (in a I929 catalogue essay on John Graham, ne Ivan Dombrovskii). The minimalist label has been, of course, primarily associated with the visual arts, and this relationship is not lost sight of for very long. Of the Kharms mini-text 'A Meeting' (or 'AnEncounter': Vstrecha), for example, it is said that '[t]he reader is left with the same frustration thatmight befall an art lover who visits amuseum or gallery in search of aesthetic illumination and encounters only piles of bricks and stacks of plywood' (p. I30). Thus does Kharms, at times at least, approach postmodernist ideas of art in general, and of American literary minimalism of the I980s. In an epilogue Wanner goes on to look briefly atmore recent Russian practitioners of the prose poem. In the 'conservative' (ex-Turgenev) tradition, Solzhenitsyn has followed his Krokhotnye rasskazy of the i960s (translated in Stories and Prose Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, I971)) with a revival of the prose miniature form (from I997); another moralistic Russian nationalist exponent, though coming from 6i8 Reviews the opposite side of the Soviet era, is lurii Bondarev. On the 'subversive' front, Wanner points to the Conceptualists and, in particular, to the 'card catalogues' of Lev Rubinshtein...

How to Talk to Christian Clients About Their Spiritual Lives: Insights From Postmodern Family Therapy

Responding to literature calling for the integration of Christian spirituality and postmodern thinking, this article presents a more specific discussion of how postmodern family therapy approaches can be used to open therapy to the spiritual lives of Christian clients. In this article, postmodern family therapy approaches are described and the compatibility of postmodern family therapies and Christian thinking are examined. Finally, we see how a clinical practice based upon postmodern ideas can provide pastoral counselors with useful tools for talking with Christian clients about their spiritual lives.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism Steven Connor, Editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. After the millennium, popped up like wild spring flowers, and caught many of us by surprise. Had times really ended? If so, when and why? Was this a fad, a trend, or a movement? Would it infect and affect popular culture? Was it merely a new name for the electronic technology -or much more? The term is confusing and controversial. It was used as early as the 1870s by Britain's John Watkins Chapman, and later first claims move up through the 1960s. The choice depends on the different ideals and programs spotlighted. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a short, clear definition: Subsequent to, or later than, what is This raises another question: What, then, is modern? Steven Connor's book sets out to answer these questions and offer us a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism, and then to relate post-modernism to modernity, stressing its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, architecture, philosophy, and religion. Modernity is often taken as the term referring to the social, economic, and scientific institutions flowering in the West during the eighteenth century (some place it earlier), and having worldwide influence in the twentieth. There is no general agreement about just what modern and postmodern mean. The names most frequently associated with postmodernism are Ihab Hasten, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, and Juergen Habermas. Clearly, the center of concern has been Europe, although there are a number of American disciples; most have been philosophers and literary critics. One area in which it has had limited impact, here or abroad, is popular culture. Some attention has been paid to the extension of postmodern ideas into fields of advertising, popular music, MTV, and architecture. How has all of this affected scholars who write about popular culture? What about textbooks? I asked some committed postmodern friends for definitions, finding that there are as many definitions as there are advocates. The ingredients seemed to fit the old cliche: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. If there is a common thought, it is this: We have moved beyond the old modernity. Remember the McLuhan truism: If it works, it's obsolete. Postmodernists express a desperate need to meet the volatile and unstable elements of the new century head-on. …

Don DeLillo (review)

Reviewed by: Don DeLillo Chris Porter Harold Bloom , ed. Don DeLillo. Bloom's Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 182 pp. The "Postmodern" label clings to Don DeLillo because he describes our society so tellingly, whether it be a chemical spill that endangers a town, an assassination plot, or the most famous home run in baseball history. Harold Bloom's collection of previously published essays incorporated in this installment of Bloom's Modern Critical Views, Don DeLillo (2003), evaluates DeLillo in the light of postmodernism, and finds DeLillo more complex than just a "postmodern author." These essays serve to remind us that although the world that DeLillo witnesses is postmodern, this does not mean that the author has to treat it in a postmodern way. Harold Bloom sets the tone for this collection with the proclamations found in his short, concise Introduction. Bloom claims for DeLillo a spot in the list of great writers of our time, specifically citing Underworld as his masterpiece. Additionally, Bloom asserts that DeLillo, contrary to popular opinion, is not a postmodern author but a High Romantic, owing more to Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman than to that quintessential postmodern, Thomas Pynchon. This tension provides a theme observable in the essays. Robert Nadeau's opens the collection with "Don DeLillo's Search for Walden Pond," focusing on the game quality evident in DeLillo's novel about football, End Zone. Despite the cleverness of game systems used as metaphors [End Page 366] for life, DeLillo recognizes that they ultimately fail to enclose the complexity that is reality; someone is always stepping outside the game. Bruce Bawer, examining White Noise in "Don DeLillo's America," sees DeLillo as a jargon juggler not interested in the human. "His characters are little more than authorial mouthpieces, all but interchangeable with one another" (27). Bawer's will not be the only article critical of DeLillo. Gregory Salyer, conversely, finds White Noise "the best articulation of the American mythos in the late twentieth century" (34). In "The Romantic Metaphysics of Don DeLillo," Paul Maltby defines DeLillo as a Romantic because of an acknowledgement of a spiritual tone to life. Concentrating on the "visionary moments" in The Names, White Noise, and Libra, Maltby celebrates the anti-postmodern wonder and mystery that DeLillo foregrounds. These moments act in DeLillo as an "affirmation that the near-global culture of late capitalism cannot exhaust the possibilities of human experience" (65). David Cowart helps the reader remember why DeLillo has been labeled "postmodern": he works with postmodern moments, much like Pynchon. "More than any other contemporary writer, DeLillo understands the extent to which images . . . determine what passes for reality in the American mind" (72). For all of the emphasis on language and communication as themes in DeLillo's fiction, Christian Moraru confirms that reading is also a "master motif" (90). Reading is linked to consumption, and Moraru examines several works to remind us that DeLillo's characters often lack the skill at interpreting required reading. Lou Caton and Dana Phillips continue the theme of the Romantic in the postmodern world. Caton uses three episodes in White Noise to highlight the "romantic collisions" with our world, the elevation of the human above the role of "isolated, socially constructed, economic units" (112). Phillips reads White Noise as a postmodern pastoral, with the traditional pastoral conflicts replaced, re-interpreted. Processed food can represent nature, with the supermarket becoming the new site for Arcadia, ultimately changing our view of "the wilderness." Tony Tanner's outlook on Underworld asserts DeLillo's achievement in helping to shape the way we think. DeLillo has said that "the news" is the new narrative of our world, replacing novels or interpersonal discourse, and news is what molds Underworld. Finally, Jeoffrey Bull uses Mao II to examine the postmodern idea of the political novel, finding DeLillo's rewriting an affirmation for this type of novel. The essays in this text are grouped well and represent a wide range of scholarship. Scholars find in DeLillo a wealth of material with which to interpret his work while at the same time differing on how that work might be read. Faced with these evaluations of DeLillo, one finds it...

Phosphor in Dreamland de Rikki Ducornet ou la poétique du détour

Phosphor in Dreamland epitomizes Rikki Ducornet 's conception of plot as a “bright web. ” To the postmodern idea of fiction as an infinite process of mind, she adds fascination with engendering which she explores on different levels. We propose to show to what extent the novel, with its countless ramifications and organic efflorescence of style, may be construed as a Baroque performance.

Interacting with history: reflections on philosophy and the pedagogy of dance history

Dance history is studied at all levels of the curriculum, whether as a named course or part of other domains of enquiry. Debates drawn from the philosophy of history and historiographic practice can impact on the teaching and learning of dance history in order to produce a more imaginative and personal engagement with the field. These debates are identified as: (i) the contestation of the traditional categorisation of sources; (ii) postmodern ideas about the instability of historical knowledge; (iii) the synchronic approach to study; (iv) fiction as history; and (v) the dance as source. These conceptual and critical perspectives, embedded in strategies for the teaching of dance history, can contribute to helping the student learner acquire a sense of their own identity and own place in the dance community. This, it is argued, is the key rationale for its place on the curriculum.

Student Therapists Grapple with Modern and Postmodern Ideas: One Program?s Approach to Training

Postmodern ideas have significantly challenged and expanded the marriage and family therapy field. Students in many training programs must grapple with models and training experiences influenced by both postmodern and modern orientations. The authors describe a particular program’s training process and focus on the ways past students reflect on their professional development guided by the postmodernist-based perspective of Narrative Therapy and the modernist-based perspective of Bowen Family Systems Theory, two of the models emphasized by this program. The authors propose that these divergent philosophical orientations can interact together to support meaningful development in trainees’ experiences.

Editorial

Ten years ago, in the inaugural issue of Nursing Inquiry, Editor Judith Parker introduced a journal that would offer Australian nursing scholarship to the world and, in turn, invite scholarship from around the world. She promised a journal that would be a forum for nurses actively to engage the postmodern ideas and critical methodologies that were then increasingly shaping scholarship across the academic and practice disciplines. In the pages of Nursing Inquiry, nurses would use these ideas and methods to re-examine taken-for-granted practices in nursing. She conceived the journal as a venue for complex ideas that would be made accessible to readers and would be demonstrably relevant to nursing practice. Looking back over the last decade, Nursing Inquiry has more than lived up to its promise, becoming the premier journal in nursing for the advancement of truly critical inquiry. I hope I will be forgiven for national stereotyping, but I have often said to colleagues and students that nobody in nursing does critical inquiry better than Australians and nothing embodies this talent better than Nursing Inquiry. The very first issue contains one of my favourite papers, namely, Kim Walker's article on nursing, science, and representation, a masterful discursive treatment of nursing identity and the quest for legitimacy. This paper and others by him and outstanding scholars such as Jocalyn Lawler, Trudy Rudge and Gavin Andrews is why I have saved every copy of this journal. Nursing Inquiry has provided a venue for the best in critical inquiry, taking on such diverse entities as evidence-based practice, research methodology, technological innovation, and clinical practices (such as wound care) by engaging their politics, poetics, and polemics. Although I have, at times, thought some authors went to unwarrantable extremes in advancing an agenda, I have always been intellectually challenged and aroused. This is no small feat given the numbers of journals available today and the too frequent recycling of the same old and tired ideas. And I do appreciate that, sometimes, going to extremes is required simply to move people anywhere from where they have been. This anniversary issue shows why the journal promises to remain the best in critical scholarship. Several papers in this issue offer new insights into nursing practice and ideas about nursing. Judith Parker uses psychoanalytic theories to address the confinement and containment functions of nurses. Sioban Nelson and Mary-Ellen Purkis trouble competency as it is conceived in Canadian nursing. Davina Allen showcases the contradiction between the idea of nursing as unmediated caring and the reality of nursing practice as an intermediary. And Elizabeth Peter and Joan Lischenko illuminate the moral ambiguities in the professed location of nursing vis-à-vis patients. The other papers in this issue offer a Foucauldian-inspired ethnographic treatment of men's sexual identity in a genitourinary clinic (Anthony Pryce), a Foucauldian-inspired analysis of post-World War II and contemporary posters advertising smoking (Annette Street), and a consideration of the promise of postcolonial feminist scholarship to promote health (Joan Anderson). All of these entries are characterized by vibrant critique and innovative treatment of subject matters of importance in nursing and health-care. They set a course and standard for nursing scholarship. So, Happy Birthday Nursing Inquiry! I wish you many more decades of success. You have done nursing scholarship proud.

The Reference Librarian as Non-Expert: A Postmodern Approach to Expertise

SUMMARY This article explores the postmodern psychotherapeutic view of the therapist as a non-expert. The author seeks to draw an analogy between the professional expertise and knowledge of the reference librarian and the expertise of the psychotherapist, with special reference to the postmodern idea of the posture of non-expertise. Reference librarians will provide a higher degree of user satisfaction to patrons when the reference interview is approached as a collaborative and dialogic process that is grounded in the attitude of non-expertise. The stance of the reference librarian as non-expert will move the profession of librarian-ship away from the technocrat/expert model and back towards its earlier mission of service and human-centered values.

Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative

Postmodern ideas have led to increased interest in narrative in the domains of both theology and psychotherapy. Narrative theology allows the concept of an intrinsic human telos, a divinely created purpose which constitutes the perfection of a human life. Socially constructed understandings of the institution of therapy, however, and postmodern ideological commitments regarding the nature of metanarratives, make it difficult for narrative therapists to consider this theological possibility. This paper will examine the concept of agency in narrative psychology and therapy, and the moral questions that exist at the boundaries of these disciplines, exploring the possible clinical significance of including a teleological assumption in their theoretical core.

Effective Leadership in Postmodern Science/Technology Libraries

SUMMARY Postmodern ideas, practices, and perspectives are being integrated into the organizational cultures of science/technology libraries. Librarians are increasingly likely to be working with other librarians as well as faculty who are more comfortable with ambiguity, integration, collaboration, deconstruction, uncertainty, chaos, and fluid systems. These postmodern professionals are integrators and synthesizers, focused on learning, and uncomfortable with control and rigid or inflexible boundaries. Leadership in science/technology libraries needs this infusion of postmodern influences to be responsive to the dynamic information needs of all customers. This article focuses on the importance and implications of these postmodern influences.

From Translation to Transfer

This article examines transfer as a mechanism which applies to translation and other phenomena. The foundations for a theory of transfer were laid down by Roman Jakobson, whose ideas were further developed by Itamar Even-Zohar. Even-Zohar defined transfer as the re-creation in cultural system A of a text or a model originating in system B, whether in the same macro-system or not. Aside from translation in the narrow sense, transfer includes the remaking of films, adaptation of literary works for a new audience (e.g., children), rewriting them in nonverbal semiotic symbols, etc. All these forms of transfer can be described and explained with the help of theoretical concepts and assumptions used in translation research. This article aims to map the forms of transfer implied by Even-Zohar's definition and illustrate them, using examples from Israeli and other cultures. This article ends by the discussion of the question of the relation between the transfer theory applied and post-modern ideas.

Reading Cusanus: Metaphor and Dialectic in a Conjectural Universe (review)

In an age where the idea of postmodernity gains more and more ground, the period of postmodern thinking has turned into a major challenge to the human mind. Whereas the project of modernity revokes itself through the contradictions it has generated, the need to find new perspectives makes us wonder what happened in the 15th century when the Renaissance paved the way to modernity and still contained seeds of alternative developments which for one reason or another did not get a chance to germinate. This is an invitation to concentrate on the work of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) as one of the major Renaissance thinkers.

My Ambivalent Relationship with Pomo

While “trying to be helpful,” therapists and therapists in training often struggle with competing claims for what constitutes “being helpful.” When embracing postmodern ideas and postmodern therapeutic practices, therapists often feel encouraged and supported in their efforts to be helpful in ways that are more meaningful to the clients than to a particular psychological theory or discourse. Postmodern theory and postmodern therapeutic practices specifically support this interest. As with any discourse, however, the theory also makes its own demands. In a culture described as “modern” and influenced by “modernism,” this article humorously considers the struggle of therapists to hold postmodern ideas passionately in a “postmodern way” while struggling with and against and embracing “modernist” influences in a decidedly “postmodern way.”

Inverting History in Octavia Butler's Postmodern Slave Narrative

Beyond of the historical slave narrative, Octavia Butler's 1988 may also be deemed a contemporary science fiction novel, though the author herself claims that is fantasy.... There is no science Kindred (Kenan 495). (1) Butler's vision the novel is certainly not utopic. Whatever its narrative context, Butler's novel looks to the antebellum slave narrative form as a background for exploring issues of literacy opposition to the reality of possession, oppression, and violence. Content and form intersect the novel as the veiling of temporal boundaries blurs the notion of slavery transcended. By zigzagging the time frame of the novel from past to present, points to ways which past and present become interchangeable. She also writes of plausible historical actions and relationships, filling in possible gaps that may be evident classic slave narratives. assumes a non-Western conceptualization of history--one which history is cyclical, not linear--in order to demonstrate ways which certain forms of race and gender oppression continue late into the twentieth century and beyond. She incorporates postmodern fiction literary techniques to critique the notion that historical and psychological slavery can be overcome. Unlike other contemporary revisions of the traditional slave narrative--most famously, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved--Butler's neo-slave narrative, at least part, takes place the relative present. As such, it more clearly blurs history and the present (though the neo-slavery novel by convention imposes the past onto the present). The novel liberally borrows from very modern and postmodern ideas concerning time and continuity. Like John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor or E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, attempts a contemporary re-write of an historical or plausibly historical event. Thus, she reclaims control over text and ideas, significant postmodern concepts. This drive to contain and to define one's personal or communal history can be seen many contemporary novels. Ultimately, Butler's novel remains part contemporary postmodern text, part historical slave narrative. One might label a sort of inverse slave narrative. Born into freedom herself 1950, its protagonist Dana becomes enslaved on her twenty-sixth birthday 1976, the bicentennial year of US independence, and, as many actual slave rebels reported, she must prepare for a dangerous, consequential escape. Dana's escape, with its trials, pitfalls, and obstacles--including capture by her white owner-ancestor Rufus and his slave overseer Weylin--parallels numerous slave narrators' accounts of flight from bondage. It is not simply Butler's account of Dana's enslavement and escape that resemble antebellum slavery narratives', but also her novel's concentration on rhetorical strategies of subterfuge, its record of resistance and oppression, and its concentration on the separation of families. Underscoring the novel's slave narrative conventions, Sandra Y. Govan claims that Butler treats the recurring themes of casual brutality, forcible separation of families, the quest for knowledge, the desire to escape, the tremendous work loads expected of slaves as efficiently as any of the narrators or documentary histories discussing the slavery experience (Homage 91). (2) By assuming the form of the slave narrative and by shifting its focus from past to present to past, Butler's novel stresses the ways which present-day African Americans might suffer from the markings of the past. Adapting genres is, of course, a very postmodern concept. Both John Barth and Thomas Pynchon have taken the form of the 18th-century novel to write contemporary updates of their own. Butler's agenda, however, is much less playful than theirs--and much more political. Of course, to be reminiscent of a slave narrative, must present a world of intense and implacable oppression, possession, and violence. …

Rethinking Domination and Resistance: Challenging Postmodernism

The emergence of postmodern ideas in the educational literature has complicated the field’s understandings of oppression and resistance. While important, this postmodern influence has been problematic in its tendency to stress the relatively nurturing forms of “pastoral” control generally experienced by the privileged. Such a focus can direct attention away from the often brutal discipline experienced by those who are more marginalized. The article examines contexts where pastoral or disciplinary forms of control predominate, noting the limited forms of resistance (if any) generated by each. It then looks to more sophisticated visions of resistance developed by scholars and activists. The article concludes by exploring the limitations inherent in any single approach to understanding or resisting domination.

Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. By Gay McAuley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000; pp. 320. $19.95 paper.

In the current scholarly discussion, many disciplines usurp the word “performance” to represent the postmodern idea of discursive creation through repetition (iteration). In an attempt to demarcate the boundaries of theatre studies, to reclaim performance as a “theatrical act,” many theatre scholars argue that a theatrical frame designates theatrical performance. This idea of frame may often be distilled into a spatial relationship between actor(s) and audience. To further this theory, many have written metaphorically about theatrical space; however, in her important new book, Gay McAuley addresses the idea of a theatrical space directly, discussing architecture, spatial structure, actor space, and audience space. She argues that theatre requires not only “liveness” and the presence of both performer and spectator but also the space where those presences meet. That “lived space” must be added to the first two aspects and examined as a basic element of the theatrical act. Thus McAuley seeks “to explore the multiple functions of this spatial reality in the construction and communication of theatrical meaning” (4).

Aesthetic Suggestiveness in Chinese Thought: A Symphony of Metaphysics and Aesthetics

Suggestiveness is a major theoretical category in Chinese aesthetic thought. Within the broader context of Chinese tradition, it is a product of the interpenetration of and exchanges between philosophical and artistic discourses. Despite its prevalence in Chinese aesthetic thought, suggestiveness has never been examined as an aesthetic category in its own right, nor have its implications been explored in relation to contemporary theories. This essay reexamines suggestiveness and its seminal ideas as an aesthetic category in Chinese tradition, exploring their relation to philosophical thought and reconceptualizing their implications in terms of the postmodern idea of literary openness. As a preliminary attempt to pioneer an approach to Chinese aesthetic theory that may emancipate it from intellectual stagnation and at the same time preserve its characteristic features, this essay also intends to inquire whether insights of Chinese aesthetics, often characterized as gems of "Oriental mysticism," can be understood in terms of reflective analysis and have a meaningful dialogue with contemporary Western literary thought.