Methodological Tendencies Research Articles

Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes as Memory Schemata

In his article, "Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes as Memory Schemata," Bart Keunen proposes a new reading of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope. Bakhtin is widely taken to be a pioneer of genological thinking, but one of his key concepts -- the chronotope -- is still subject to highly divergent interpretations. Moreover, the epistemological implications of his genology have not yet been fully realized. In this article, a methodological grounding in schema theory is proposed. Bakhtin's concept can be used to study the way in which literary communication functions through what the psychologist Frederic Bartlett first called memory schemata. These schemata can be seen to operate on two levels: The level of textual motifs (the thematological dimension of texts) and that of fictional world models (the genological dimension). The development of Bakhtin's writings shows that genre distinctions are to be considered a fundamental instrument for literary communication and that this instrument is to be understood as working implicitly by means of mnemonic associations made by text producers and readers. The distinction between the thematological and genological aspects of the construction of fictional worlds can be clarified by linking them respectively to the concept of action schemata and to that of textual superstructures. Such an adaptation of the chronotope concept can be further linked to methodological tendencies within current interpretation theory, genology, and literary historiography.

Power, Meaning and Identity: critical sociology of education in the United States

Abstract The sociology of education in the US is extremely varied in its theoretical and methodological tendencies, its visions of what research is for, and its political sensibilities. This article describes a number of the most interesting recent developments within critically‐oriented sociology of education in the US. It pays particular attention to work on the politics of meaning. It discusses representative examples within the sociology of curriculum. It then takes up ‘critical’ and ‘postmodern/poststructural’ work on critical discourse analysis, identity politics, political economy and the labor process, and racial formation. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the continuing tensions between the critical and postmodern/poststructural communities methodologically, conceptually, and politically.

The Social Science Research Council's 1940s restudy of Robert Angell's cases fromThe Family Encounters the Depression

At the beginning of the 1940s the Social Science Research Council's Committee on the Appraisal of Research, then chaired by Ernest Burgess, commissioned a restudy of the cases and methods used by Robert Angell in his well-known book The Family Encounters the Depression.1 The restudy involved prominent sociologists. Burgess provided a draft report, but no final report appeared. The interest in and subsequent disappearance of the final report invites investigation. This paper summarizes the history and content of the draft report, and examines its meaning in the context of the methodology of the period. The nature and fate of the report reflect conflicting methodological tendencies at the time.

Software Engineering Education in Medical Informatics

Requirements and approaches of Software Engineering education in the field of Medical Informatics are described with respect to the impact of (1) experiences characterizing the "software misery", (2) status and tendencies in software methodology, and (3) educational status and needs in computer science education influenced by the controversy "theoretical versus practical education". Special attention is directed toward the growing importance of analysis, design methods, and techniques in the professional spectrum of Medical Informatics, the relevance of general principles of systems engineering in health care, the potential of non-procedural programming paradigms, and the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and education. Realizations of and experiences with programs in the field of Software Engineering are reported with respect to special requirements in Medical Informatics.

Theorizing Cultural Difference: A Critique of the "Ethnicity School"

Moments of intense political, social and cultural ferment sometimes give rise to liberating new paradigms for discussing and assessing literary practice. During and after those moments, the terrain of what constitutes literature, and the related matter of what constitutes appropriate critical tools, become nothing less than battlegrounds that bear complex relations to conflicts elsewhere in the society. Moreover, contestations of critical practice also involve the promotion and reflection of creative practice in fiction, poetry, drama, and in new and hybrid forms. While these creative practices most often ratify the associated critical tenets, they may outdistance those tenets as well. One such fertile moment, the Great Depression of the 1930s, helped to overthrow previously dominant critical tendencies such as the New Humanism; it also helped to drive forward at least two paradigms that in turn have shaped our perception of cultural practice in the U.S. ever since. The first of these, the Marxist socio-cultural approach, extended in theoretical and creative writing the terrain of literature to that of the workplace; immigrant life (especially Jewish, Irish and Italian); plebian and poor rural existence; issues of gender and of gender and race;1 and, in some exceptional moments as in the work of Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright to folk and Afro-American culture. The other approach was that of the formalist school, later known as the New Critics, which responded to the social crisis by redoubling efforts to promote a cultural theory favoring elite Modernist poetry's structural dynamism and technical features.2 I point to this example from the 1930s to call attention to the burden of this essay, which is to make a sharp distinction between two alternative tendencies in critical methodology that came into being thirty years later at another moment of historico-cultural crisis. For it was under the impact of the socio-cultural crisis of the 1960s and 1970s that the Ethnicity School, on the one hand, and what I call the proponents of

Radical Individualism vs. Institutionalism, I The Division of Institutionalists into ‘Humanists’ and ‘Behaviorists’

Abstract. David Seckler has filled an important gap in the methodological literature of economics by providing a “radical individualist” critique of American institutionalism (1). Seckler argues that institutionalists have been unable to develop a coherent methodology because of their ambivalence on the issue of “free will versus determinism.” Thorstein Veblen, he says, entertained both “humanistic” and “behavioristic” hypotheses in his explanations of human behavior and, consequently, descended into obscurantism. The institutionalist literature in general reflects these contradictory methodological tendencies; for example, John R. Commons was a “humanist”, whereas Clarence Ayres was a “behaviorist.” Seckler's critique is not, however, persuasive. He fails to recognize the difficulties inherent in the philosophical dualisms posited by “radical individualism,” and he employs them credulously in his critique of institutionalism. Equally damaging to his argument is his failure to give adequate consideration to the meaning and significance of the “institutional dichotomy” in institutional analysis.

Consciousness of the Individual and the Universal among the Japanese

ANY ADEQUATE DISCUSSION of the status of the individual and of the relationship between the individual and the universal in Japanese thought and culture, in terms of methodological tendencies, requires an examination of two major aspects of the problem-the philological or linguistic and logical,* that is, the tendency toward an absence of theoretical or systematic thinking, along with an emphasis upon an aesthetic and intuitive and concrete, rather than a strictly logical, orientation. The status of the individual tends to be determined for the Japanese mind by both of these somewhat unique tendencies of thought.