Postmodern Perspective Research Articles

Extending the cultural-economic model of public relations through Bourdieu’s theoretical lens to inform public diplomacy efforts

Several scholars have addressed the convergence of public relations and public diplomacy theories, and many have argued that public diplomacy needs to move beyond normative theories of communication. Yet little scholarly work has been done to date. To fill this gap, this study explores how critical and postmodern theoretical approaches can inform public diplomacy practice by extending the cultural–economic model (CEM) of public relations through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Based on interviews with organizational members of Sister Cities International (SCI), this study suggests that critical–cultural and postmodern perspectives can inform SCI’s public diplomacy efforts by considering larger structural factors in tension with agency. Thus, this study contributes to both the development of robust international public relations theory and theory building in the public diplomacy field. Findings indicate that drawing on Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice (1997), social capital contributes to the notion of institutionalized relationships, such as family or resources, that individuals acquire through group memberships as found in articulations within the CEM. Additionally, although the CEM explains the connection between culture and power in creating meaning, Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital makes explicit a focus on education, which is a significant focus of many public diplomacy efforts. Therefore, the term cultural capital provides additional insight into the model to inform public diplomacy efforts. Thus, this study extends the CEM through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice by indicating the role of social capital and cultural capital in SCI’s public diplomacy efforts.

“A slumber did my spirit seal”: Wrestling with Paul Fry on His Own Wordsworthian Terrain

This essay focuses on Fry’s theory of poetry, especially as he develops it in A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (1995) and Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (2008), by examining his various discussions of Wordsworth’s lyric, “A slumber did my spirit seal.” For Wordsworth in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” meter, rather than being imbricated with meaning, is “superadded,” and for the anti-formalist Fry what distinguishes poetry from other forms of discourse is not verse but rather its relation to what he calls “insignificance.” In examining “A slumber” against Fry’s discussions of the poem, I argue both that its meaning cannot be separated from its meter, as Fry’s analysis itself paradoxically reveals (in other words, that Wordsworth’s practice is at variance from his theory), and that the poem’s meter reveals an intertextual connection that allows it to be read as having a significant moral message. Against the postmodern perspective that Fry delineates in A Defense, I conclude (somewhat quixotically) by arguing that poetry needs to be defined and defended in terms of verse.

A Dialogue between Curriculum Development and Postmodern Perspectives: A Context of Local Knowledge

This article provides insights into curriculum development from a postmodern perspective on the sustainability and usability of local or indigenous knowledge systems. This paper examines the western thoughts that potentially affect local and indigenous knowledge by analyzing interviews with scholars involved in higher education and explores how western thoughts affect the existing Nepalese school curriculum. Although western thought permeates and pervades our educational practices, the benefits go to them implicitly by subordinating us. There is an argument in the article that postmodern ideas have originated in the womb of western understanding; the ideas in this article are argued to be adaptable to our curriculum development. The rationale behind it is that our current curriculum thinking, from Tayler to Hlynka and Yeaman’s outline of key postmodern thinking, ignores the indigenous nature of knowledge systems, largely othering them as subordinate knowledge. It explores that the developed curriculum should represent unheard voices, ignored realities, and the histories and experiences of underrepresented groups. The authors conclude by suggesting that policies, plans, and programs should be adapted to reflect the underrepresented and unheard voices of the society.

A turning point for Telemann scholarship?

While scholarship on Georg Philipp Telemann has steadily gained momentum in Germany since the ‘Telemann renaissance’ of the early 1900s, Anglophone research into this most prolific of composers has, until recently, remained the purview of a small handful of scholars. Still, I was surprised to read, in the preface of Telemann studies, that the first English-language conference dedicated to the life and music of Telemann did not take place until the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death. And it was at this conference, entitled ‘Georg Philipp Telemann: Enlightenment and Postmodern Perspectives’ (hosted by Temple University, Philadelphia in 2017) that the present volume began life. Fittingly, given its important status as the first English-language essay collection on Telemann, Telemann studies goes well beyond what might be expected from a book of conference proceedings (valuable as these can be) in terms of overall polish and coherence. Its 16 chapters (contributed not only by Telemann specialists, but also by leading scholars best known for research into C. P. E. and J. S. Bach) have been grouped by editors Wolfgang Hirschmann and Steven Zohn into five parts: ‘Enlightenment Perspectives’, ‘Urban and Courtly Contexts’, ‘Nature (and) Theology in the Late Vocal Works’, ‘Bach Family Connections’ and ‘Cantata Cycles in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Beyond’.

Do Bi/Multilingual Learners Play by the Rules of the Game? A Postmodern Approach to L1/L2 Use and Learner Investment

ABSTRACT The concomitant relationship among language, identity and power has been intimately connected to the ELT world. The bi/multilingual learner identity negotiation has been viewed as a site of struggle from a postmodernist perspective. To this end, learners’ existing capital in relation to their involvement in new capital is a significant issue in educational inquiries. In this narrative inquiry, the researchers aimed to uncover bi/multilingual learners’ beliefs of L1/L2 use in relation to learner investment. The data were collected through a biographical narrative, a life story interview, a reflection paper and a semi-structured individual interview from five preparatory school students. The findings reiterated the pervasive situation of English as a form of social, cultural and academic capital. The benefits of L2 regarding a new identity and community, better job opportunities and empowerment appear to have a negative effect on participants’ view of L1 as capital. The paper concludes that language teachers should draw on the principles of translanguaging pedagogy and call attention to the whole ecology of languages as valuable assets for meaning making.

Patient-oriented research and the shiny object syndrome.

Patient-oriented research and the shiny object syndrome.

Establishment and development of the stage dance: trends and particulars

This article is dedicated to the retrospective analysis of the constitution and development of stage dance, starting with the appearance of the first works with reference to the art of dance and ending with the best-known contemporary studies in this regard. The emphasis is put on the specific premises and trends that have generated the development of stage dance. It extensively analyzes the evolution of stage dance from the perspective of modernity and postmodernity, including in the context of the Romanian area, highlighting the external and internal factors that determined the specificity of the development of national choreographic art. The article also addresses the dichotomic aspect in the constitution and development of stage dance. At the same time, the purpose of this article is to present the analytical framework of the most valuable works in the field of choreography.

Beyond Self-Recognition: Fragmented Subjectivity in Alain Mabanckou’s Blue White Red and African Psycho

ABSTRACT: The following article examines the treatment of subjectivity in Alain Mabanckou’s Blue White Red and African Psycho from an African postmodernist perspective. My argument is that this Afrodiasporic writer from the Republic of Congo localizes in a postcolonial context the postmodernist motif of fragmented subjectivity in order to critique the psychological effects of enforced modernity on the protagonists of the two novels, namely Massala-Massala and Grégoire Nabomakoyo, respectively. In developing this argument, I show how the former’s immigrant experiences in Paris and the latter’s traumatic childhood in the fictitious Congolese city of He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot reduce their respective selves to a flux of personalities. In other words, the two protagonists display conflicting personalities and so their selfhood, indeed their self-perception, is always in a process of perpetual deferment, uncertainty, instability, and indeterminacy. As I proceed, it will become clear that their fragmented subjectivities manifest in self-contradictions and ambivalent adoption of criminal identities.

The Call from the Other Shore: Hamlet Based on Postmodern Interpretation

As a subversion of traditional drama, the preoccupation of Hamlet has been discussed universally. However, the interpretations of this work change with times as well. In order to explore the deeper meaning of Hamlet, this essay will focus on postmodernist theory, and analyze Hamlet from the perspectives of interpretation and dissemination, to demonstrate the value of Hamlet and the potential to interpret it from the postmodern perspective. This practice would promote the popularization and re-creation of classic works by virtue of postmodernist theory, which is conducive to the development of literature.

Becoming physical education: the ontological shift to complexity

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present the view that an ontological shift to complexity thinking will be significant in the future of physical education (PE). Complexity thinking not only moves PE beyond long dominant modernist approaches but also offers the opportunity to integrate many of the postmodern perspectives that currently seek to frame PE. Four interconnected complexity commonalities, becoming, lived time, self-organisation and boundaries, are presented in an overarching frame to guide future PE developments in ways that are coherent, connected and emergent. PE is subsequently viewed as a complex phenomenon that is always in a non-linear, messy and never-ending process of becoming. Students, teachers and other stakeholders are also complex as their past, present and future experiences constantly merge in a lived time unity to create lifelong and life-wide PE journeys that are both personalised and holistic. Central to these personalised journeys is each stakeholder’s ability to self-organise and influence the trajectory of their pathways. Self-organisation, however, is not a relativist ‘anything goes’ phenomenon but a process that takes place within a multiplicity of boundaries. While boundaries may traditionally be viewed as divisive features, complexity thinking recognises that many boundaries are flexible and enable the creation of ‘boundary spaces’ in which ‘rich’ discussions can take place to develop more coherent, connected and emergent forms of PE. Transdisciplinary Inquiry (TDI) and Ecologically Informed Practice (EIP) are presented as perspectives that can help teachers, and others, create the ‘boundary spaces’ in which ways to plan and introduce complexity-informed forms of PE can be explored. The paper concludes by proposing that the challenge for PE in the future will be for practitioners to develop the adaptability, openness, confidence and self-organising skills that will be needed to make the most effective use of the ‘rich interactions’ that these ‘boundary spaces’ offer.

Textart, identity and the creative process: a case study with Arabic heritage language learners

ABSTRACT Informed by a postmodern perspective on language, culture and visual art education this article examines what a creative, visual art focus can bring to the experience of language-and-culture learning for secondary-age students of Arabic as a heritage language (HL). It builds on our previous research focussing on student interactions with works by renowned artist, Ali Omar Ermes, which sets text in the form of Arabic letter shapes and short poetic inscriptions against a painted background. Here we seek to gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the process involved through an in-depth study of the thoughts, feelings and emotions experienced by three intermediate-level students as they engage with works by Ermes and then creatively transform them into ‘textart’ pieces of their own. Methodologically we adopt an ethnographic case study design focussing strongly on process but also incorporating principles of arts-based research. Our findings demonstrate how the approach can extend possibilities for meaning-making and affirmation of identity by connecting with personal experience, by leveraging multiple semiotic resources rhizomically and intertextually, and by making space for affective, spiritual, aesthetic and multisensory dimensions. For heritage language learners this brings a deeper engagement with learning and a strong sense of empowerment as multicompetent speakers.

Community on conflict: social representations of the recent past among members of historical memory associations of Biscay (La comunidad en conflicto: representaciones sociales del pasado reciente en miembros de asociaciones de memoria histórica de Vizvaya)

ABSTRACT This paper aims to identify how the members of historical memory associations of Biscay (Spain) constructed their ‘community images’ through their social representations of the recent past. We analysed the discourse of 12 in-depth interviews with various members of six historical memory associations. The findings show that the interviewees conceptualize the community from a postmodern perspective, characterizing it in terms of diversity, mobility and interdependence. The identities that were constructed through the narratives were articulated according to ideological orientation and power differences. Power differences most strongly determine the distance between collectives and groups that appear in the narratives. These findings indicate the consequences of obscuring the debate of the recent past with political subjects without giving voice to the citizens themselves and open the way to future reflections on the psychosocial effects resulting from the lack of a shared narrative within communities.

后现代主义视角下《在路上》的不确定性研究

后现代主义视角下《在路上》的不确定性研究

后现代主义视角下英汉“混血”文本对翻译研究的启示

后现代主义视角下英汉“混血”文本对翻译研究的启示

“Tokyo Cancelled” A Postmodern Reading of Rana Dasgupta: A Review

Tokyo Cancelled, the debut text of the award-winning author Rana Dasgupta, who also won a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for his brilliant second novel Solo (2009), seeks to connect the contemporary techno-cultural world and the eerie world of myth, fantasy, magic, and imagination. Dasgupta chooses new ways of representing the world with his postmodernist experimentation Tokyo Cancelled as he continues to do in Solo as well. In a contemporary anonymous international airport, Dasgupta makes thirteen stranded passengers tell thirteen stories which in turn transport the reader to the realms of magic and fantasy. While rejecting the conventional mode of narration, and going away from the traditional concepts, Dasgupta creates a pastiche of postmodern events, occurrences, events, and characters. The author celebrates the elements of irony, paranoia, fragmentation, parody, dark humour, magic realism, and techno-culture which hold the very essence of a postmodern society and its habitants. This paper, thus, from a postmodern perspective, attempts to analyze the contemporizing of the fantastic elements existent in the text Tokyo Cancelled.

Deconstruction of sustainable development discourses: avoiding skepticism pitfalls with a postmodern perspective

Deconstruction of sustainable development discourses: avoiding skepticism pitfalls with a postmodern perspective

Transformation and development of digital literary criticism in China

This article analyses the digital literary criticism, which got rid of the obsession of academic Babylon in the field of literary criticism in the 1980s and revealed a more diverse field of voice, inspiring endless possibilities of variation in the transformative stage of criticism. The advent of the Internet has created a participatory field for literary criticism and a platform to weaken the distinction between identity and power. Equality disrupts the validity of authority and the structure of the knowledge circle, which is also the reason why digital literary criticism has a certain degree of carnivalesque traits. The authors believe that literary criticism in a digital context is no longer obsessed with the confusion of history and the uncertainty of time. While capturing the pulse of globalisation, it at the same time ardently embraces the value of desire endowed by consumer culture. The article points out that Chinese literary criticism in the new era is a product of the construction of multidimensional relations in a digital context, which sheds the shackles of historical context and rushes into the age of digitalisation. With the rapid flow of consumption, a very open, inclusive, and complex space of media discourse has emerged. The results of the study show that a group of numerous critics belonging to the postmodernist perspective is forming in the digital world. The authors conclude that in the confrontation between tradition and modernity, in the complex interweaving of elitist consciousness and mass consumption, in the struggle for discursive position between media and literature, digital literary criticism differs from traditional in terms of aesthetic standards, criticism style, criticism language and media platform, creating the macro future development of Chinese literary criticism with its independent attitude, revolutionary impulse and irresistible courage.

Language Use in Alobwed’epie’s The Death Certificate: A Postmodernist Analysis

This paper addresses language use in Alobwed’epie’s the Death Certificate from a postmodernist perspective. It seeks to show that the author of the selected novel, like many postcolonial African writers, attempts to assert his culture through some sort of indigenisation and intentional flouting of old canons of literature. Given that the present paper is anchored on postmodernism, the postmodernist theory the author’s is used to explain Alobwed’Epie’s perception of life and literature to assert his cultural identity through some sort of linguistic revolution. As a matter of fact, language is used in a very carefree and innovative way in order to escape the idealistic dictum of literary norms. Indigenisation is then regarded as a postmodernist technique, which aims at valorising the African identity and rejecting all the metanarratives of how a work of art should be produced. Obviously, in the present article postmodernism are both a theoretical framework and an object of study. The use of local languages and other languages like Pidgin in the novel under study has demonstrated that the then marginalised languages have moved from the margin towards the Centre and become established languages of African literature. The paper briefly discusses the emergence of postmodernism and shows how the traditional conventions have been deconstructed and substituted for new ideologies that have revolutionised the African literary landscape. It equally reviews selected previous works on language in African novels as well as on postmodernism that came up in the late 1950s as revolutionary responses to preceding movements. The paper ends with an account of the linguistic features of postmodernism used in the novel.

Legal Language as an Instrument for Describing Social Reality. Searching for Innovative Narrations

How we function in social reality is determined by various types of cognitive schemas. These concern people, social events and other phenomena. According to the concept offered by various postpositivist currents, including postmodernism, poststructuralism and critical theory, such schemata cannot be objective. The most important element of postmodern considerations is the discovery of the arbitrary nature of modernity. This means rejecting the Enlightenment belief in progress. Innovation, understood as modernity resulting from human reason, is illusory in the postmodern perspective. Innovation consists precisely in a rejection of the myth of the existence of some absolute, objective truths that constitute the social order. The world is textual, made up of many alternative narratives. Definitions, including legal definitions, are socially constructed. They arise from specific social conditions, at a particular stage of development of a particular group. The assumption made by postmodernists is that language, including professional language – such as the language of law or legal language – is neither neutral nor transparent. The innovative power of this language lies in its use of narratives that influence the functioning of social groups of varying degrees of complexity. It is therefore necessary, adopting a postmodern interpretation, to look at the text of legal language in a similar way as we look at other texts. That is, to see in the narrativity of this language structural similarities with other texts that constitute social reality.

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism