Postmodern Issues Research Articles

A Discussion of Postmodern Issues Based on Dewey’s Ethics: The Example of Female Moral Education

The focus on female moral education issues allows us to reexamine the contributions of John Dewey, an American educational philosopher. Dewey’s ethics are built upon a rebellion against the universalism and rationalism that were predominant in the traditional ethics based on intrinsic manifestation and external rules. This ethical approach is primarily characterized by Dewey’s pursuit of a democratic society, as well as the emphasis he places on emotional and moral imagination. Dewey’s ethics can be seen as a means to address postmodern problems, integrating the traditional emphasis on “knowledge” with the postmodern focus on “discourse,” based on experience. However, it is worth contemplating whether this solution is effective or if it overly magnifies the power of “understanding” in its ethical system. In the dialogue with postmodern theory, perhaps what is more crucial for the myriad of postmodern issues, exemplified by female morality, is inclusion rather than understanding, as well as questioning knowledge and reconstructing its elements.

The Mechanisms of Paradox Work in the Very Short Story A Reading in the "Jalalat Abdel-Jib" Collection by Said Butajine

The “very short story” is considered as a new type of narrative literacy which clearly represents the new literacy features in the postmodern period that gives consideration to diversity, difference, disassembly, condensation and paradox; which seek to transcend reasonable perceptions and rational self-concept by adopting a diverse discourse that exceeds the knowledgeable and cultural fields and gives great importance to the reflective language of our ways of thinking and perceptions and our concepts. This language is keeping the pace of the rhythm of the era in which the creative literacy is associated with the revolution of information that is inclining to the rapid access to information and diversity in the methods of speech and presentation approachesdue to the great technological acceleration that has passed through the world and the profound changes that have taken place on many political, social and economic levels, and thus changing the form of discourse that has produced an alternative narration of the old long narration that has been replaced by a short narration that has adopted economy and density and employed new attributes to meet the needs of the recipient in the most accessible ways.
 This research is based on two parts: (i) a theoretical discussion of the problems, visions and attitudes associated with the very short story and has been opened to discuss one of the postmodern issues represented by the paradox and (ii) an applied section focusing on the paradox as a characteristic and a prominent component of the very short story by working on stories collection "His Majesty the slave of the pocket” "Jalalat Abdel-Jib" of the Algerian narrator EssaïdBoutajine.

Problematizing identities and differences: notes post-modern, “(pos)critical” and post-structuralist the school and the curriculum

This article is based on a correlation of bibliographic sources under a qualitative approach, influenced by postmodern society and poststructuralist discussions of knowledge in their descriptions and analyses. Concepts and effects of identities and differences are discussed, as well as their possible conformations in the postmodern school and in the “(post)critical” and poststructuralist curriculum. It is concluded that in post-modernity, the subject assumes different identities from different influences, and the school is an important place for the problematization and construction of this movement, including inside the power relations towards difference. A "(post)critical" curriculum is defended, which does not oppose critical pedagogies and post-critical pedagogies, nor constrain their possible approaches and potential against hegemonic, fighting against social injustices and fostering (trans)formations and/or pluralization of identities . Furthermore, in this curriculum, in addition to broadly considering postmodern issues, post-structuralist issues are also considered, especially with regard to schools and the curriculum itself as practices of meaning and representation.

Heterogeneity, Displacement, and Alienation in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

The paper aims to explore the postmodern issues such as heterogeneity, displacement, and alienation in Kiran Desai’s novel, The Inheritance of Loss with respect to its impact on the Indian lifestyle and culture. To analyze how this fiction demonstrates the impact of globalization, racial contempt, and alienation, illegal immigration, diasporic communities, hybridization, and cultural infiltration with special reference to the characters, such as Biju, who grow up within the novel, the research tool taken for the research is postmodern theoretical perspectives advocated by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard. Applying the qualitative research method, and collecting data through the close reading of the text, The Inheritance of Loss from the context of postmodernity, the paper seeks to display how Desai limns the problems of insurgency, declining moral standard, and behavior of individuals, increasing corruption in the Indian society after its independence. The chief finding of the research is that characters like Sai and Gyan lose love, Biju loses his possessions, Lola and Noni lose their dignity and privacy of their house, Jemubhai loses his Indianness. It is expected that scholars interested to study postmodernity in Desai can take the paper as a reference.

P. P. S. OBVERSION: IS A REAL HUMAN BEING WRITTEN?

This article considers the state of human beings in a post-postmodern conditions and focuses on obversion as one version of posthuman reality in polyversion, which is lusciousness. Obversion is regarded as a logical and at the same time dynamic figure of dis-identity and non-presence. Trying to find out if a real human being is written leads one to consider the relationship of real and written reality and the possibility of posthuman writing. Posthuman writing becomes apparent in tracks, traces, scars and vestiges such an @ as a signifier of becoming t@iled. The vestiges of a human being are being investigated through the appeal to an actual post-postmodern conceptions such as speculative realism, speculative posthumanism, dark ecology, etc. In the post-postmodern context concepts such as tru(s)t/h, faith and kindness as a counterweight to the excessive postmodern quotation and theorization are being examined. Thus, a human being as a post-postscript is becoming a preface at the same time. This article explores such crucial postmodern issues as iterability, signature and others in a contingent context, in which an immanence of living itself becomes a writing in the postdigitality, post-Internet and post-media extent in relation to the realization of the disaster of technical or even mechanical as human. This research realizes on a showcase of post-postmodern architecture as an immanent spatiotemporal contingency, en-vironment of a human being. It shows how a minimalistic style in post-postmodern ethics and aesthetics correlates with obversive rocking in contrast to binary opposition logic. Thus, it realizes a movement from human to posthuman as scriptor, writing a postscript, and beyond to post-posthuman as postscriptor, writing a post-postscript as a human being, writing itself in its contingent immanence.

Self-Reliance in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is a famous American novelist. In Ragtime, Doctorow describes the lives of two females, Sarah and Evelyn Nesbit, who are very weak to the extent that they can not control their lives on a patriarchal society. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance theory will be applied to the novel. It incites man to be self-reliant and think of his personal development. This will be achieved when he believes that he can be a successful 'nonconformist,' one who rejects 'conformity,' individual. He must trust new ideas and make an intellectual revolution. In order to be a great self-reliant man, one must revolt against the world. As a result, he will be one of the world 'kings' that enjoy 'magnetism.' In Ragtime, both Nesbit and Sarah decide to follow Emerson's self-reliance. Both plan to be 'kings:' Nesbit plans to be a 'great proprietor;' Sarah plans to be 'noble.' Both plan to revolt against 'society' and become 'nonconformists.' Both face hard obstacles; 'a man is to carry himself in the presence of all oppositions.' The oppositions that Nesbit faces force her to undergo to class distinction and sexual violence; she could overcome both. The oppositions that Sarah faces force her to undergo to racial discrimination and gender oppression; she fail to overcome both. Nesbit victimized her self in order to take money from men; Sarah presents her life in her defense of her man: 'women kill themselves.' Feminism and postmodern issues appear in Ragtime. These issues show the American society's contradicted opposing nature

Searching for Postmodernism in Martin Crimp's Attempts on Her Life

Martin Crimp is regarded as one of the significant playwright in Britain in the last decade of twenty first century. He has written on the changing structures of family, the issue of woman, consumerism and similar topics. Although he wrote most of his initial plays in absurd tradition, he then began to write about the social issues of his time with the beginnings of nineteen nineties. It is certain that this brought a certain change in his topics and style. However, he wrote his masterpieces following his decision on writing postmodern issues. Attempts on Her Life is one of his late plays debuted in 1997 and regarded as his masterpiece. The play subjects a woman who meets the audience in different roles such as mother, lover, killer and child throughout the play. Crimp tries to evoke the audience to feel the temporariness and some other features of postmodernism in this play. For this reason, this study will investigate the traces of postmodernism in Crimp's Attempts on Her Life.

Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography by Robert T. Tally Jr. (review)

Reviewed by: Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography by Robert T. Tally Jr. Rachel McCoppin Tally Jr., Robert T. Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography. London: Continuum, 2011. 185 pp. $81.00. How does one place Kurt Vonnegut in the American literary canon? Is he an acclaimed postmodern revolutionary author or a marginal science-fiction dark humorist? Robert T. Tally Jr. addresses this question that continues to arise in considerations of Vonnegut’s works. Tally contends that scholars are not sure where to place Vonnegut’s literary achievements; some, like Jerome Klinkowitz and Todd Davis, place him firmly within Postmodernism, while others have trouble taking his work seriously and continue to label him as marginal. Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography asserts that Vonnegut is neither a postmodern author nor a marginal one; instead, Tally argues that Vonnegut is a modern author tackling postmodern issues, in search of creating the “great American novel.” Tally contends, though, that Vonnegut fails at achieving this elusive goal. His works portray [End Page 315] postmodern American culture and its concepts of idealism, political, economic, and social superiority, and personal identity and responsibility. Yet they purposefully fail to capture the totality of American culture in its present moment because, as Tally argues, Vonnegut serves the role of iconographer and iconoclast; he is a critic of postmodern America, never achieving the “great American novel” because he places postmodern America within a modern context. Vonnegut’s iconoclasm allows his works to hold critical literary merit, not because they capture postmodern American culture, but because in their portrayal and criticism of it, they help readers better understand themselves. Tally analyzes Vonnegut’s fourteen novels to show Vonnegut as an untimely modernist in a postmodern America. He proceeds in chronological order of publication, stating that Vonnegut’s first novels, Player Piano and Sirens of Titan, are among his most frustrated and pessimistic. Tally discusses Vonnegut’s embrace of “misanthropic humanism” as a dominant theme in all of his works. In these initial novels, Vonnegut points out postmodern America as politically, socially, and psychologically flawed. Vonnegut’s “misanthropic humanism” reveals that these problems will not go away because they are intrinsically tied to human nature. Though Vonnegut presents his America in postmodern terms, his message is modern: “Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism offers a model for understanding this [postmodern] condition, while also forcing the writer and the reader to look for other avenues leading to one’s sense of purpose in the world” (xvi). Tally moves to an exploration of Vonnegut’s Mother Night, which, he states, addresses the impossibility of living a modern “authentic” life in postmodern America. According to Tally, Mother Night questions the purpose of human existence; it calls for evaluation of self in a fractured and meaningless world, and its message continues into Vonnegut’s next novels, Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. In these novels, Tally finds a more secured stance of optimism through personal ethical responsibility, which ultimately becomes part of all of Vonnegut’s works and is achieved only through personal separation and examination of one’s place in the world. Tally continues with a discussion of Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, asserting that though these novels perhaps appear the most postmodern in format and content, they again reveal a modern message of morality. Both novels embrace the fated nihilistic components of postmodern culture, while at the same time maintaining a modern love of the ridiculousness of postmodernism and a belief in the good qualities of humankind that continue even among absurdity. Vonnegut’s Slapstick and Jailbird continue to show elements from his earlier novels, but focus largely on the human desire for false security within corrupt communities. Both novels look towards the social and political failures of postmodern America in order to ask readers to abandon hope through institutions. Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard are, according to Tally, imperative to Vonnegut’s repertoire because they detail an alternative to the postmodern condition: these novels reveal Vonnegut’s means towards maintaining a modern sense of meaning in his own life and provide characters that persevere—through the “abstract idealism” (114...

Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights - Introduction

This book presents a unique collection of the most relevant perspectives in contemporary human rights philosophy. Different intellectual traditions are brought together to explore some of the core postmodern issues challenging standard justifications. Widely accessible also to non experts, contributions aim at opening new perspectives on the state of the art of the philosophy of human rights. This makes this book particularly suitable to human rights experts as well as master and doctoral students. Further, while conceived in a uniform and homogeneous way, the book is internally organized around three central themes: an introduction to theories of rights and their relation to values; a set of contributions presenting some of the most influential contemporary strategies; and finally a number of articles evaluating those empirical challenges springing from the implementation of human rights. This specific set-up of the book provides readers with a stimulating presentation of a growing and interconnecting number of problems that post-natural law theories face today. While most of the contributions are new and specifically conceived for the present occasion, the volume includes also some recently published influential essays on rights, democracy and their political implementation.

“TODOS OS MEDOS O MEDO”: AL BERTO E AS INQUIETAÇÕES DA PÓSMODERNIDADE

This article aims to verify how the intimacy effects help to create a hypersensitive persona experiencing the feeling of fear in the work of Al Berto. It also tries to examine how this persona expresses an attempt of self-affirmation of subjectivity and resistance to the trivializing process of experience. By analyzing the themes of intimacy and fear, we assume that his poetry revaluates the narcissism concept, which overcomes merely a confessional voice and gains greater implications to the post-modern issues.

Radical Motherhood: Narcissism and Empathy in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document

This article discusses constructions and representations of motherhood in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document. It argues that the theme of motherhood has a long, if often overlooked, presence in American literature, and that the two novelists use the figure of the mother in order to engage with the themes of empathy and community. The novels participate in familiar postmodernist practices, such as multiple, fragmented viewpoints and narratives, unreliable narrators, non-chronological storytelling and the mingling of fact and fiction. However, they do not wholeheartedly embrace two key postmodern issues: irony and loss of affect. Instead, they seek to move away from some of the postmodern novel's more excessive decathecting tendencies, and they achieve that through their representations of mothers who, in not acquiescing to society's norms, challenge gender roles and cultural assumptions. The two fictional mothers under discussion share a past as Weather Underground activists, and in giving voice to them and refusing to demonize them as “bad” mothers, their creators also seek to expose other American narratives that reinforce dominant ideology and suppress the margins.

Mutazioni del lavoro, comunità e pensiero meridiano: Antonio Pascale e Fabrizia Ramondino

This article compares two novels, Pascale’s Passa la bellezza (2005) and Ramondino’s La Via (2008), on the issues of Southern identity in relation to work, community, development, sustainability and care (of people and place). Both novels are examples of a recent trend in Italian narrative to provide political, sociological, and anthropological analyses of contemporary Italy. I test the usefulness of Franco Cassano’s ‘Meridian’ philosophy as an interpretative tool for these two novels on the grounds that they underscore the cultural specificity of the Southern Italian area in which they are set. In particular, I engage with ‘slowness’ (thus with time and by implication space) and ‘measure’, two of Cassano’s traditional Mediterranean values which, having been suppressed, must be reconstructed, to counter the capitalist values of excessive production and accumulation of wealth. Cassano’s philosophy enables me to bring to light the texts’ engagement with postmodern issues of travel, migration, uprooting, precarious or lost identities, threat of loss or absence of community, danger of disconnection or a de facto disconnection between people and place. While they do not offer explicit solutions to the problems of work in postindustrial societies and do not propose alternative models of life, both authors appear to suggest that any politics of work must necessarily keep these issues in mind and be guided by the will to care for people, place, environment and tradition, in the hope of repairing the damages brought about by modernity and the attempts to ‘modernize’ the South.

La profesión y los valores militares en España

This paper analyses the perception that the Spanish officers have today about their profession, as well as specific values which pervade it. In order to achieve this it starts with civilinizational process described by Morris Janowitz. Next, it uses the slant popularized by Charles Moskos, because it allows one to distinguish between the institutional model from the occupational one, and from some hybrid types among them both. And finally, it raises some questions about the postmodern issues. It is deduced from the sources employed that Spanish Armed Forces look forward to advancing from the institutional to some other mixed form, which includes occupational values and postmodern trends. Not meaning a definite resignation of the features that suppose the traditional ethos of the Armed Forces.

The Play of German Histories: Protocolling the Debate

This quotation fits the conference only if we agree that “still” connotes sitting, not silence. The “Challenges in Theory, Practice, Technique” were voiced with only hints of controversy. All who might have disagreed were outside the room, though not necessarily excluded from the debate. Participants seemed to agree that old “fixities” had to be re-evaluated in the light of postmodern challenges. “Past and future” met in the guise of Young Turks and older veterans. Sessions of redefining and rethinking, as these were, hardly “ascend” to action, but neither were they content with “arrest” or “decline.” Eliot, the modernist, speaks to postmodern issues.