Postmodern Discourse Research Articles

UNESCO: Os quatro pilares da “educação pós-moderna

This article sets out to establish a relationship between discussions on education mentioned in the report to UNESCO – Education: a treasure to discover – and Lyotard’s post-modernity discourse. It presents the proposal for education from this report, highlighting the four pillars of education: learning to know, learning to do, learning to be and live together, taking as their starting point the relationship between the process of globalization and the discourse of postmodernity and these pillars in the context of an education which has become increasingly global. In this way, the meaning of these pillars and the discourse of education based on them is questioned as is their affinity to the transformation of society in the current global ranking of capital, a stage where the discourse of post-modernity is forged.

Vixen Resistin’

In recent years, scholarship on Black womanhood has become more closely connected to postmodern discourses on identity and resistance, following in the footsteps of Audre Lorde's claim that identity and sexuality have emancipatory potential. However, in the post-hip-hop era, feminists and media critics have once again brought up the idea of who controls the image. The purpose of this study is to describe possible sites of self-definition by Black women in music videos while accounting for the cultural industries that reproduce and exploit Black women's sexuality. Using textual analysis and the perspective of a noted music video performer, Melyssa Ford, this study articulates the expanse of ambiguity that lies between the images of Black womanhood that bombard consumers of BET and MTV and the selfconceptualization of the women who play those roles.

Humanism and Cosmopolitanism after '68

I In this essay, I should like to offer some reflections on the implications of what I have called postmetaphysical humanism and situated cosmopolitanism for some of the themes highlighted in this special issue. (1) I hasten to add that any conception of humanism or of cosmopolitanism that will be politically viable at this juncture must be a critical conception. As it exhorts us to inclusiveness, to expand the circle of the 'we,' it must also have the resources to exclude those practices and social formations that thwart or undermine human flourishing. Accordingly, the conceptions of humanism and of cosmopolitanism that I develop emerge from what can be characterised as a critical-hermeneutic analysis and deployment of those ideas, an analysis and deployment offered as an explicit counter to currently influential discourses of modernity and postmodernity and, in particular, to those theoretical regimes perhaps most closely linked in our symbolic unconscious to the 'idea of '68.' Prominent among the theoretical regimes associated with the 'idea of '68' are the philosophical movements known as poststructuralism and postmodernism. Poststructuralism can be characterised as the result of a radicalisation of Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralist insight that linguistic or symbolic meaning is determined by the context or by the field of differences in which a semiotic token plays a role. Poststructuralists aver that such contexts always lack closure, that they are porous and unstable, that the relevant field of differences is never given once and for all. They thus maintain that meaning itself is indefinitely deferred, that it is never definitively given. The destabilisation of systems of difference demands the suspension of interpretive closure, of determinate interpretation. The related movement of postmodernism regards with incredulity any privileging of a context-transcendent framework from which judgments can be issued or definitive meanings ascertained. It regards with suspicion any metaphysical or transcontextual certainties, any claims to have discerned objective essences or common matrices that would guarantee neutral or objective thought. Neither self, as subject, nor world, as object, can be said to have any privileged essential being. The names of few philosophers are as resonant with the 'idea of 1968' as is Michel Foucault's. It was he who perhaps most starkly proclaimed the 'death of man' thesis, though it was Althusser who first used the term 'anti-humanism' in this context (and Althusser admits to the influence of Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism' on his antihumanism (2)). Moreover, Foucault's emphasis upon the heterogeneity and incommensurability of subjects produced by differential regimes of power/knowledge made his writing uniquely influential in providing theoretical grounding for identity politics in the US. (3) (As I shall suggest later in this essay, as I write in June 2008, the response to the candidacy of Barack Obama for the US presidency can be interpreted to be, at least in part, reflective of a self-conscious grappling with the legacy of the politics of identity among progressive actors.) If Foucault was and, to some extent, remains emblematic of the 'thinkers of '68' in the US, there were political philosophers on the French scene who were vigorously challenging his brand of anti-humanist poststructuralism by the time of his death in 1984. In their attempts to reconstruct humanism in the wake of the postmodernist critique of subjectivity, the project of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut is especially noteworthy. (4) Like Jurgen Habermas, they are committed to an internal critique of modernity, rejecting Heidegger's anti-modernism, Foucault's postmodernism and Theodor Adorno's 'negative dialectics'. (5) However, in their strongly anti-structuralist tendency to suggest that the rejection or transcendence of conventions or social codes by itself gives sufficient content to humanism, they fail to do justice to the ways in which we are always already encoded, to the extent to which that encoding is an enabling and not only a privative condition. …

Fictionalizing the Folkloric: Matt Clark's Hook Man Speaks

Matt Clark's 2001 novel Hook Man Speaks emerges from familiar, protean American of Hook Man- for Clark the rock star of (142). Identified by Jan Brunvand as archetypal example of genre and a favorite of folklore scholars Encyclopedia 200), story enacts Hook Man's terrorizing of trysting young couples parked in secluded areas. Typically, a radio broadcast announces escape of hook-armed man, criminal or sex maniac, who interrupts teenagers' lovemaking either through their belief in imminence of his assault or their conviction that he is actually invading car. Often in story couple returns to girl's home to discover a bloody hook on door of passenger side of car. Stephen King proclaims legend of The Hook to be the most basic horror story I know (19), and Clark's novel attempts both an imaginative embodiment of this vaporous figure of inveterate horror and a contemplation of Hook Man's place in American culture and history (Clark 3). In its knowing transformation of oral legend into novel, Hook Man Speaks cunningly mediates realms of folkloric and literary. Clark specifically confronts problem of possible ephemerality of contemporary legends, suspicion that Hook Man's story and its ilk are old potatoes, greasy kids' stuff (80). In raising questions about Hook Man's obsolescence, Hook Man Speaks functions not only as commentary on nature of circulation of contemporary legend but proffers literary repositioning of Hook Man as a necessary replenishment of legend itself. Folklorist Gary Alan Fine's usage of proves more useful for this analysis than more common nomenclature of urban associated with Jan Brunvand. Fine proposes that even rubric is a compromise of convenience (1) but argues that a temporal (contemporary) rather than geographic (urban) base for term ought to prevail, because These legends are not always urban, often are transmitted in suburbs and are about suburban life, and sometimes are about rural areas and small towns (1-2). Given southwest American setting of Hook Man Speaks, Fine's remarks are especially pertinent. Moreover, Fine's suggestion that contemporary legends, through their ability to borrow from and to transcend traditional and current, comprise a recognizable form of postmodern discourse (2) establishes some discursive continuum between contemporary legends and Clark's twenty-first century novel. The primary difference between two, though, resides in self -consciousness of Clark's rendering of material. Brunvand underscores how unselfconscious narration of contemporary legends is Hitchhiker xiii); similarly, Fine observes that contemporary legends tend to be relatively formless (2), Rosenberg notes how folktales have scant descriptions of inner life of their and rely heavily on active events- and repetition- for their effects (149), and King acknowledges that Hook Man story offers characterization, no theme, no particular artifice (21). Clark responds to precisely these lacunae, crafting in Hook Man Speaks a strikingly writerly novel. Hook Man Speaks begins, for example, with epigraphs from Neruda and Nabokov. Much of novel unfolds as a colloquy between Hook Man and folklore professor Dr. Brautigan, a pointed reference to Richard Brautigan, popular American novelist of 1960s. The final section of Hook Man Speaks revels, like a Nabokov novel, in its own artifice, constructing an elaborate screen of literary allusions whose meaning is unavailable to characters themselves of novel. Although novel evokes and revises an extensive body of contemporary legends and seemingly grants narrative primacy to Hook Man's first-person perspective, authorial consciousness that looms behind events of book finally predominates. …

Taking The Heidi Chronicles to China: A Dramaturgical Reflection

Taking The Heidi Chronicles to China: A Dramaturgical Reflection Andrew Kimbrough (bio) and Zhiguang Liu (bio) Louisiana State University (LSU), like many North American universities and colleges aware of the growing importance of China on the international scene, instituted The Modern Chinese Commerce and Culture Initiative in 2005 in order “to provide LSU students with working knowledge of the current Chinese business and cultural environment.”1 At first, the initiative involved language and business courses, with some opportunities for student travel and study in China. But in the spring of 2006, Michael Tick, chair of the Department of Theatre at LSU and artistic director of Baton Rouge’s professional theatre, Swine Palace, decided to meet the initiative by instituting a theatrical exchange with China. He aimed to take a cast and crew of B.A. and M.F.A. students in a production of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles on a tour of major Chinese cities during the summer of 2007. Additional hope lay in an emergent and ongoing relationship with a Chinese university or theatre. Knowing of our history and relationship with China, Tick called us in May 2006 to ask for our assistance.2 We readily agreed to help, and by the end of the summer we were able to obtain tentative agreements for Swine Palace to perform the following June at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, a publicly run venue of Western-style theatre, and at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, which offers training in acting, directing, and musical theatre for Western-style theatre, as well as programs in design and theatre studies. As a dramatic text that probes women’s issues in the twentieth century—The Heidi Chronicles concerns Heidi Holland, a successful art historian with a growing feminist consciousness who nonetheless experiences setbacks in her personal life—the play resonated with its Chinese audience and enjoyed successful runs over a two-week period during that June of 2007. At first glance, such an undertaking might seem quite feasible, or at least not any more difficult than taking a production on tour to parts of Europe or South America. Universities and performing arts organizations in the United States and abroad regularly schedule touring groups from other countries in order to foster cross-cultural understanding and to expose patrons to various and different art forms. Departments of theatre in the United States pride themselves on taking student productions to the Edinburgh Festival and other arts festivals in Europe. Indeed, during the two-month period when Heidi played in Shanghai and Beijing, two other foreign-produced, English-language productions played in the same cities, even in one of the same venues.3 The personnel behind such exchanges meet cross-cultural obstacles and overcome them with various degrees of success, yet certainly without such dire consequences as reversing the trend of fostering exchange. But as we wish to point out here, intercultural relations between the United States and China, particularly in the arena of Western theatre practice, are fraught with specific pitfalls and challenges. By getting involved with the Heidi tour, we desired to position ourselves in such a way that we would be able to assist the Americans in avoiding unnecessary mishaps and misunderstandings so that they could accomplish their desired goals of cultural and artistic exchange. In this article, we discuss a few problems that Swine Palace’s Heidi tour faced, as well as some of the successes it experienced. But we frame our discussion by several of the issues that Claire [End Page 147] Conceison, a scholar of contemporary Chinese theatre, outlines in her book, Significant Other: Staging the American in China, and in her article, “Translating Collaboration: The Joy Luck Club and Intercultural Theatre.” For while the goals of the Heidi tour, like many intercultural ventures, were to foster ideals of commonality and cross-cultural understanding, Conceison warns that such ideals may in some cases serve to mask colonial or hegemonic beliefs that practitioners unknowingly bring to a project: As the young postmodern discourse of interculturalism is nurtured, we who participate in the scripting of its vocabulary and the shaping of its manifestations must ask ourselves not only what we are doing...

Rationality In African Philosophy: A Critical Reflection

In this essay I explore some of the ramifications that the Western discourse of postmodernism may have on the notion of rationality in African philosophy and indigenous African knowledge systems in general. I conclude by arguing that the merits of such a discourse include its acknowledgment of alternative forms of reasoning and their accompanying cultural expressions; its insistence that knowledge production is not independent of moral and political value; its grounding of rationality in social relations; and, its recognition of the role of commitment, caring and feeling in rationality – all of which speak of the true essence of indigenous African knowledge systems. Keywords:Rationality, postmodernism, African philosophy, discourse. Indilinga Vol. 6 (1) 2007 pp. 1-13

The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle

The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle Edward Barnaby (bio) It is often difficult to know precisely what one is discussing when the topic turns to realism. Some regard realism primarily from a technical perspective as a style of literary or visual representation. Others understand it in a scholarly context as a moment in the history of literature and art during the nineteenth century. Still others identify realism as an evolving critical discourse that has influenced—and continues to influence—cultural sensibilities toward the act of representation. To complicate matters further, there are critics within this latter group who credit realism with the ability to liberate the historical consciousness of its audience, while others disparage realism for naturalizing the present political order as a spectacle that strips the audience of its sense of agency. The coexistence of these contradictory claims regarding literary realism begs critical attention, not necessarily as a conflict to be resolved, but as an opportunity to broaden our understanding of the purpose and possibilities for mediating the real in fiction. The question takes on particular relevance at a time when technologies of visual representation seem bent on achieving greater and greater levels of literality. One must first distinguish between realism as a form of avant-garde consciousness versus mass-market "reality fiction" that, much like "reality television," participates in and reinforces the dynamics of consumption. To this end, I will clarify the realist project as making visible the dynamics of industrial society by bringing it into dialogue with the Situationist concept of "specta cle." [End Page 37] One must then distinguish between realism as a theoretical stance towards the world versus the various realizations of that stance in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. The failure to maintain this distinction allows more superficial categories of genre and period to fragment an otherwise coherent and evolving impulse towards literary realism in the novel. In this respect, I will consider realist consciousness in three novels by Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf and Salman Rushdie, placing into dialogue texts that are typically isolated within the discrete critical discourses of realism, modernism, and post-modernism. Woolf singles out Hardy's realism as worthy of praise in contrast to the naturalism practiced by his contemporaries, while defining her own work not as a modernist rejection of realism, but as a more authentic method for achieving it. Rushdie, who has been controversially received as an imperialist sympathizer and whose fiction has often been misleadingly exoticized as "magical" realism, is indeed a self-described realist whose essays suggest that his novels can be read in a broader context than the merely postcolonial. An uncritical use of the term "realism" has thus not only led to a misreading of specific texts and authors, but also perpetuated a muddled sense of literature's relationship to society, one that effectively dates to Plato's banishment of the poets from his Republic for trafficking in representations of representations: reality twice removed. Certain critics have looked to the realist novel as a means of exposing the false consciousness of ideology, laying bare opportunistic constructions of history and stripping them of their compelling internal coherence. Written in the late 1930s, Georg Lukàcs' study of the historical novel praises Walter Scott for providing an alternative to the epic model of heroism, which tended to mystify social forces as the workings of the individual will in a manner that lent itself to various fascist cultural projects of the period (270). According to Lukàcs, the heroes of Scott's novels function in precisely the opposite manner by serving as a "neutral ground" on which social forces in conflict "can be brought into a human relationship with one another" with the "concrete historicism of all the details" (36, 151). Lukàcs regards the "full political effect" of realism as the "literary unmasking of the pseudo-hero of Fascism," which the novel achieves through its "social-historical and not merely individual-biographical standpoint" (341). Enlarging upon this idea of realist literature's ability to "unmask" ideology, Pierre Macherey later argues in A Theory of Literary [End Page 38] Production that although the substance of the realist novel is rooted in historical reality, the text is mediated...

Tim Allender.Ruling through Education: The Politics of Schooling in the Colonial Punjab.:Ruling through Education: The Politics of Schooling in the Colonial Punjab.(Asian Studies Association of Australia, South Asian Publications Series, number 14.)

Tim Allender's focus on British educational policy in Punjab is a shift from nationalist historiography on the Raj, and also from postmodern discourse on non-elite, subaltern resistance movements. At first glance, the author seems to evoke nostalgia for imperialist history through the use of colonial spellings for Indian terms, and in a reference to British subjugation of Ranjit Singh's “lawless successors” in “two bloody wars” before annexation in 1849 (p. 7). Yet, Allender's work is informed by nationalist and liberal Western scholarship, and it criticizes the Raj for not facilitating a dialogue between rulers and subjects, and for its failed educational policies. Allender calls his work a revision of subaltern history, which he dismisses summarily for having taken the focus away from critical studies of imperialism. The author reiterates that the initial British autocrats valued Punjab's rich farmlands so highly that they subsidized this province to make it an imperial showcase, thus ensuring Sikh loyalty during the 1857 Revolt. Punjab's privileged position was ensured by other devices such as lower revenue demands for the imperial exchequer until 1870, and the racial rhetoric contrasting Sikh military “masculinity” favorably to Bengal's “effeminacy.” This was unusual, since Bengal was the capital, and provided a greater percentage of its revenues to the imperial budget (p. 224).

TOWARD AN INCLUSIVE SCIENCE OF NURSING EDUCATION: An Examination of Five Approaches to Nursing Education Research

Abstract This article illuminates how a new science of nursing education, one that is inclusive of not only traditional empiric-analytic research, but also alternative research approaches reflecting phenomenology, critical social theory, feminist theory, and postmodern discourse, is developing. Each of these research paradigms is reviewed and research questions are explicated in the context of research on the national licensure examination (NCLEX-RN)®. The author contends that research to develop the science of nursing education must be multimethod, multiparadigmatic, and multi-pedagogical. Implications for developing an inclusive science of nursing education toward curricular reform are discussed.

TOWARD AN INCLUSIVE SCIENCE OF NURSING EDUCATION: An Examination of Five Approaches to Nursing Education Research

This article illuminates how a new science of nursing education, one that is inclusive of not only traditional empiric-analytic research, but also alternative research approaches reflecting phenomenology, critical social theory, feminist theory, and postmodern discourse, is developing. Each of these research paradigms is reviewed and research questions are explicated in the context of research on the national licensure examination (NCLEX-RN). The author contends that research to develop the science of nursing education must be multimethod, multiparadigmatic, and multipedagogical. Implications for developing an inclusive science of nursing education toward curricular reform are discussed.

Dominant Migrants in Taiwan

Taiwan has a remarkable history of immigration. Most of the people in Taiwan today can be regarded as descendants of migrants who arrived in a number of major migration waves. In the course of the cultural studies project, migration of newcomers is often dealt with in terms of marginalization and vulnerability of migrants. The case of Taiwan, however, differs from that matrix since it had always been the migrant groups who after an exceptionally short time obtained a dominant position on the island. It is a truism that the heritage of migration continues to influence the society's self-awareness. Additionally, Taiwan as a de facto independent entity is a “new nation”—like Singapore or Israel—and it faces severe problems in determining its national identity at the borderline of external and internal challenges. The article analyzes the Taiwanese identity debate under the framework of migration issues and its strategic use of the postmodern discourse of marginalization. Both contribute to some features in the Taiwanese quest for identity. These features consist of the very specific mixture of political, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural aspects, the borders of inclusion and exclusion in the construction of a Taiwanese “we,” and the intransigence of the debate. The specific migrant heritage of Taiwan and an evolving perception of “suffering” ( ) will be employed to explain these traits.

Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism by Youru Wang (review)

Book Reviews 203 Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism YOURU WANG. London, New York: Routledge/Curzon, 2003. xi, 251 pages. ISBN 978-0415297837. US$150.00, £85.00, hardcover. Anybody who has any cursory knowledge of the Zhuangzi 莊子 and some Chan Buddhist gong’an (公案, Japanese: kōan) cannot help but be struck by the interesting, puzzling, sometimes bizarre or even outrageous, use of language in them. Scholars of the Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism have come up with various interpretative devices to appreciate the burst of linguistic creativity in these texts. Curiously, however, there has not been any systematic treatment of the linguistic strategies in the two traditions. Youru Wang’s book, Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism: The Other Way of Speaking, fills such an important gap in methodologically and seamlessly weaving together snippets of insights achieved in previous studies of the two traditions while breaking important new ground in advancing the study of linguistic strategies. Wang situates his book squarely within the postmodern discourse. His point of departure is the perceived logocentrism of classical Daoism and Chan Buddhism in the minds of several prominent modern interpreters of the two traditions. In addressing such an issue, Wang attempts to use the postmodern discourse as the broad interpretative strategy to recontextualize and reinterpret the Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism while using the study of these two traditions to reflect on that very postmodern discourse. In other words, the postmodern discourse does not merely serve as a methodological lens and an intellectual context to approach the Zhuangzi and Chan, but also as an opportunity to reflect on itself through its engagement with the Zhuangzi and Chan which, in Wang’s view, can generate new perspectives on its self-understanding and self-critique. According to Wang, the study of linguistic strategies in the Zhuangzi and Chan by using theories developed in the postmodern discourse has the advantage of bringing the former into the contemporary intellectual dialogue, while this engagement also exposes a lack of soteriological concerns by the latter. Indeed, throughout this book Wang repeatedly brings up the soteriological orientation of the Zhuangzi and Chan as he interprets their linguistic strategies. Wang conducts his systematic study of the linguistic strategies in the two traditions through three categories: deconstructive strategy, liminology of language, and indirect communication. The main body of this book is therefore conveniently organized into three parts, dealing with each category respectively. Each part follows a similar structure: the definition of a particular category and its relevance in the study of the Zhuangzi and Chan. Methodologically, what is especially valuable is that Wang does not simply adopt a readymade category and apply it to the study of the Zhuangzi and Chan. Instead he skillfully refines or redefines those categories so that they can better fit the subject at hand while pushing the limits in their original formulations. Part One addresses the deconstructive strategy in the Zhuangzi and Chan. Here Wang highlights the soteriological considerations of the Zhuangzi and Chan that are not shared by the Derridean deconstruction, which, according to Wang, is limited to textual spheres. 204 Journal of Chinese Religions However, interpreters of Derrida would dispute Wang’s characterization of the Derridean deconstruction as limited to texts in the narrow sense of the term. Rather, the Derridean deconstruction deals with the practical aspects of the world extensively, using textuality as a way to approach the world since there is no “outside-the-text.” Wang is at his best when he conducts the analysis of Zhuangzi’s philosophy of change (infinite transformation of things, things transforming of themselves, and the dynamic interrelationship of things), emphasizing its soteriological motif (the training of the mind to adapt to such changes), while demonstrating its shrewd employment of the deconstructive strategy (the deconstruction of the self) to serve such a soteriological objective. Wang’s contextualization of Chan Buddhist appropriation of the Buddha nature doctrine exhibits good historical sensitivity towards Chan’s immediate intellectual ambiance. He shows that Chan Buddhism, instead of reifying the Buddha nature or the pure mind as some have charged, is actually successful in deconstructing the notion of the Buddha nature. Part Two looks at the Zhuangzi and Chan through...

The Discourse of Postmodernism and Education

The Discourse of Postmodernism and Education

At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (review)

Reviewed by: At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy Jaclyn Cohen At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy, ed. Stephen J. Milner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. 283 pages. Stephen J. Milner compiles various articles focusing on identity formation in premodern Italy in this very comprehensive volume. At the Margins aims to show that there is no clear-cut boundary between margin and center. The authors attempt to marginalize the Renaissance era by concentrating on the periphery and on its social groups. The collection consists of four parts, with the first providing very informative and thorough theoretical discussions on identity formation. Derek Duncan explains how the terms "margins" and "center" are merely metaphorical in nature. These words refer to geographical locations as well as to hierarchical ones. The margin always carries associations of resistance, while the center represents constraint. This article leads into "Decentering the Italian Renaissance," with its discussion of Postmodernism and the geographic, thematic and social decentering of the Renaissance. Geographically, historians are taking a less "Florentinocentric" (46) view, while thematically, there has been a greater focus on material culture and broad ranges of literature. Recent studies in this field emphasize the collaboration of small groups, representing the social decentering of the early modern period. The articles constituting parts II through IV focus on specific marginalized groups, ranging from sodomites, Jews, and nuns, to women, slaves, and the elderly. Michael Rocke's discussion of sodomy provides an insightful introduction to the second part by bringing to light new statistics on homosexual practices in early modern Venice and Florence. The most deeply feared sexual practice at the time was sodomy and many sodomites were publicly shamed for their sins. In spite of this, in Florence margins were blurred. The acknowledgement that not all sodomites were the same became the opinion of the majority and it followed that individuals from this group should only be punished according to their crimes. Receptive sexual roles (those where the person involved was not the penetrator) among men over eighteen years of age were always punished severely. By specifically discussing these laws and actions, Rocke demonstrates that sodomites, who were always thought of as being at the margins of society, were actually extremely present at the center. The rest of the articles in part II further develop this theme, focusing on Jews, nuns, and foundlings. The third part of the volume begins with a look at women's literacy in fifteenth-century Florence, showing that more women were literate than was previously acknowledged. Women mainly read liturgical books such as the Book of Hours, and were expected to instill strong religious beliefs in their children and other members of their family. Despite this fact, there was constant fear among ecclesiastical members of the Church that females would stray from designated literature. Judith Bryce highlights two female writers, Dada degli Adimari and Margherita di Tommaso Soderini, by delving into their extraordinary backgrounds and literary influences. She also shows that [End Page 207] women during the early modern period could find confirmation of their centrality through the figure of the Virgin Mary and through their equality before God. The article centers the female figure and attempts to rescue her from the margins. Stephen J. Milner contributes to this section with his discussion of the previously ignored exclusionary aspect of exile, and Anabel Thomas closes with a look at the printing press in fifteenth-century Florence and the marginal groups associated with its success. Part IV focuses on groups rather than individuals and highlights the positive contributions that certain minorities have made in Italy. Slaves bring about a diverse ethnic population, mountain communities are buffers against invading armies, and the elderly provide knowledge and wisdom to those of younger years. These groups are all considered to be at the margins, yet their importance in Italy's economy and future is unremarkable. One simply cannot disregard the centrality of the various communities mentioned in this volume as a whole. This collection is a valuable resource to those history scholars wishing to supplement their research on minorities and processes of identity. It provides new methods for looking at the Renaissance and analyzing the time period as...

Doug McCabe's Response to Esther de Bruijn's Essay

Doug McCabe’s Response to Esther de Bruijn’s Essay Douglas McCabe My essay on New Age spirituality in The Famished Road derives from my doctoral dissertation, "'Born-To-Die': The History and Politics of Abiku and Ogbanje in Nigerian Literature," where it appears as one of two chapters focused on the novel. The other chapter explores additional discourses of spirituality that Okri's text is shaped by and in dialogue with, from social Darwinist accounts of abiku offered by colonial anthropologists, to present-day spiritual beliefs and practices pertaining to abiku in Nigeria, in London, and on the World Wide Web. The two chapters together try to demonstrate that Okri's representation of abiku (decisively shaped, I argue, by New Age spirituality) is not only in conflict with the postcolonial and postmodern discourses that clearly also influence his text, but also in tension with alternate representations of abiku (shaped by forms of spirituality at variance with Okri's New Age views) circulating before and during The Famished Road's composition. My essay on Okri is therefore part of the larger, historicist argument of my doctoral dissertation, namely, that representations of abiku are historically embedded, shaped by and in dialogue with multiple, competing discourses circulating at the particular place and time of their composition. Such representations are therefore polyvocal and often internally contradictory, embodying heterogeneous discursive forces jockeying for position at different historical moments. Given the larger context from which my essay on Okri derives, readers will quickly recognize that de Bruijn's critique erroneously and misleadingly characterizes it. On the whole, she is right to attack the positions she attacks—but those positions are not mine. De Bruijn incorrectly asserts, for example, that for me New Ageism is the only ideology promulgated in The Famished Road, and that the novel is to my eyes univocally anti-postmodern and anti-postcolonial. In actual fact, I repeatedly assert that Okri's text is polyvocal, and that Okri's New Ageism sits in [End Page 227] tension with the postmodern and postcolonial influences also influencing his text. Astonishingly, de Bruijn speculates that my hidden agenda is to attack African writers who deviate from traditional depictions of abiku, whereas in fact the aim in all of my work has been to caution critics (not writers) to historicize representations of abiku. Not only is De Bruijn's distortion of my positions itself unscholarly, but the language of her critique is unscholarly as well. She often employs extreme, martial diction, mocks my ideas with inflammatory rhetoric, and explicitly questions my intellectual competence. Where she does address my actual claims, de Bruijn's provides some invigorating critique, and her proffering of cosmopolitanism as an alternative source for many of the qualities I call "New Age" is interesting and fruitful, but the straw man "McCabe" taken to task in her essay is stuffed with many ideas not my own. The irony of all this is that I am sympathetic to many of the concerns animating de Bruijn's argument, particularly her interest is reclaiming a degree of local agency in discursive reproduction. I would serve her better as an ally than as a straw man. Although I am, I think understandably, concerned about de Bruijn's erroneous attributions and otherwise unscholarly representation of my ideas, I would not want these unfortunate qualities to blind anyone to the merits of her paper. I am in a general sense delighted to see someone provide critical analysis and new ideas to the discussion of the spiritual discourses underpinning Okri's representation of abiku. I find her suggestion that the spirituality informing The Famished Road may be more "cosmopolitan" than "Western" insightful and interesting. Of course, this claim is perfectly compatible with saying that the novel is also deeply influenced by New Age spirituality. Indeed, by developing this angle through a closer reading of Okri's novel, and other texts, de Bruijn would not only contribute to scholarship on The Famished Road, but also to the body of scholarship on New Age spirituality, where an account of New Ageism as "cosmopolitan" rather than "Western" would be a valuable contribution. In short, I would like to have seen de Bruijn spend less...

La publicidad y sus complejas relaciones con el discurso científico

Este artículo se aproxima desde un punto de vista teórico a la compleja relación que se establece a menudo entre publicidad y ciencia. Se denuncia la utilización de una idea estereotipada sobre el conocimiento científico como sinónimo de verdad absoluta. Esta concepción de la ciencia propia del positivismo y, por tanto, completamente superada por la teoría científica, se convierte en una fuente de argumentos sugerentes para una cierta radicalización del discurso postmoderno.

Tom Ze's Fabrication Defect and the “Esthetics of Plagiarism”: A Postmodern/Postcolonial “Cannibalist Manifesto”

On his 1998 album Fabrication Defect the Brazilian composer‐performer Tom Zé articulates the discourses of postmodernity and postcoloniality. More than simply touching on various aspects of “post‐ness,” Zé forges from them an updated manifesto premised on Oswald de Andrade's 1928 “Cannibalist Manifesto.” The former Tropicália musician proposes an “Esthetics of Plagiarism” as a way to appropriate and then reformulate the products of Western techno‐capitalism. In this discussion, I will argue that the composer reconfigures the modernist and colonial tropes of primitivism and cannibalism in a subversively technophilic postmodern and postcolonial fashion—an oppositionality embodied in the album's “defective android” figure.

Discourses on Myth

ABSTRACT This paper consists of an exploration of three basic discourses on myth: premodern, modern and postmodern. Premodern discourse does not speak about myth but from myth as a living reality. Modern discourse introduces logos as basis for speaking critically about muthos. Postmodern discourse explores the variety of ways in which myth functions, emphasising the important role played by the socio-political context in which myths are used. In conclusion, the function of myth is linked to culture and ideology and the question is raised as to whether, and in what ways, meaning – and also the meaning of myth – operates in the service of power.

Explication: working to discover and share new knowledge from prior experience

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop the sustained argument that explication can contribute to the emergence and development of the philosopher‐manager who is appropriately sceptical of generalisations, and confident in their own abilities to develop local, valid and meaningful theories based on their wisdom and personal experience.Design/methodology/approachThe idea and practice of explication as a source of (new) meaning and knowledge in a contested postmodern world is the main focus of this paper. Within the postmodern discourse which informs and shapes the paper, particular attention is given to the problematics of autobiography, fiction and “truth”, and the undecidability of meaning.FindingsExplication offers managers the prospect of “new” explicit knowledge and skills based on their prior experience and, more importantly perhaps, explication helps people to develop a honed philosophical mindset which can recognise and deal with the empty arguments, flawed recipes and fictions that often characterise traditional management theory.Research limitations/implicationsFuture empirical research on the ways that explication is described and practised, is urgent and vital. This will yield interesting and valuable insights for those who practice explication, and for those who design and implement OD solutions including the corporate university.Practical implicationsThe paper outlines the handful of related activities which make up the explication process.Originality/valueThis paper locates the idea of explication within a postmodern discourse. The paper benefits from previous work by the author which encourages managers to exploit their experiential learning so as to create and to share their own theories rather than rely on the dictums of others.

Resurrection—Interruption—Transformation: Incarnation as Hermeneutical Strategy A Symposium

Because of its commitment to the Incarnation and the Resurrection, Catholic theology is impelled to deal productively with the issues of embodiment and particularity. These have been noticeably absent in postmodern discussions of religious experience, which tend to be abstract, “dis-embodied,” and dismissive of specific religious traditions. This symposium continues the important intervention of Catholic fundamental theology in these discussions, so that theology might respond more adequately to the embodied religious experience of Christians and the sacramental imagination of the Catholic tradition. The authors argue for the necessary employment of “incarnation” as a fundamental hermeneutical strategy, and apply it to issues in eschatology, theological anthropology, interreligious dialogue, and theological epistemology.