Poststructuralist Thinking Research Articles

Replies to Criticisms

I am grateful to Noel Carroll, David Davies, Sherri Irvin, Aaron Meskin, and Paul Thorn for stimulating discussions of The Art of Theater over the past year, culminating in these carefully crafted critical comments on various aspects of the book.1 I especially appreciate the efforts of Sherri Irvin, who edited this special issue and without whose encouragement, enthusiasm, and careful editing this would not have happened. Whenever the central proposals made in The Art of Theater were made by people during the past hundred years, they were greeted with a kind of baffled outrage by many traditionalist literature scholars who had taken it as an obvious fact that theatrical performances are nothing more than illustrations or interpretations of works of dramatic literature, at best requiring artistry for performance but not issuing in independent works of art. Quite a few contemporary literature and scholars have seen errors in the traditionalist view and proposed that theatrical performances are capable of even great artistry and, perhaps, of being works of art in their own right. It must be said, however, that they will not find my defense of that position congenial. Indeed, it will seem worse still from their point of view because my defense of the position does not require semiotic analysis, let alone any sort of poststructuralist thinking about theatrical performances that depends on seeing performance as a novel kind of text a theater text. This will disappoint because, unlike many contemporary literary theorists (and even some theorists), I do not think of theatrical performances as something to be read and, further, as something that falls within the purview of literary scholarship after all. Performances are actions and are to be understood in the ways we understand all other actions. I knew the central proposals in The Art of Theater would seem a little strange to philosophers. Some of the strangeness that they have felt about the view if not the baffled outrage felt by literary theorists can be mitigated, I believe, by considering three facts that served as motivations for making the proposal. I encountered these facts while teaching experimental techniques in a workshop format. Only gradually did I come to realize they are facts about any theatrical performance its presentation, its

Exile as the Inaudible Accent in Germaine de Staël's Corinne, ou l'Italie

The question of the accent is usually muted in theories of linguistic and cultural translation, yet perhaps no other mark speaks more eloquently of exile. Exile may thus be conceived as the permanent burden of an accent in the midst of someone else's mother tongue, while cosmopolitanism may require a provisional deafness vis-à-vis the accent. This essay seeks to apply recent poststructuralist thinking on language, translation, and exile to a figure who straddles the Enlightenment and Romanticism and whose life and work starkly embody the inaudible accent of exile and cosmopolitanism: the cultural critic and novelist Germaine de Staël (1766-1817). It argues that de Staël conceived of exile in terms of translation—as the necessity, even the opportunity, of crossing borders that are not only national but also linguistic and cultural. I begin by situating de Staël in relation to recent work at the intersection of language, translation, and gender: Derrida's The Monolingualism of the Other (1996) and “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan” (2005), and Barbara Johnson's Mother Tongues (2003). I then consider the extent to which many of her key figures—drawn from the work of Novalis, Schleiermarcher, and Goethe—enable her to explore both the productive and the perverse dimensions of translation. Finally, I argue that her views on translation in “De l'esprit des traductions” (1816) and De la littérature (1800) are radically tested by her novel Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807), which can be read as an extended personification of the promise and failure of translation.

Geographic Dialectics?

As radical geography, inflected by Marx, has transformed into critical geography, influenced by poststructuralism and feminism, dialectical reasoning has come under attack from some poststructural geographers. Their construction of dialectics as inconsistent with poststructural thinking, difference, and assemblages is based, however, on a Hegelian conception of the dialectic. This Hegelian imaginary reflects the intellectual history of radical and/or critical anglophone geography. Yet, dialectics can be read in a non-Hegelian, much less totalizing and ideological, and more geographical way. This broader reading opens up space for considering parallels between dialectics, the assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari, and aspects of complexity theory.

A supplement: Godwin’s case for justice

In England in the 1790s, radical thinkers began urgently to contest not only the political legitimacy but the very ontological consistency of national law, and in so doing, they may be said almost to have anticipated elements of contemporary poststructuralist thinking. Taking Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice as a key text in this development, I examine how tensions between acknowledging the law as fictive and stressing its hegemonic power mark the work. Moreover, I argue that, as Godwin’s attempt to place justice theoretically beyond the law begins to resemble a poststructuralist, Derridean conceptualization of justice, it at the same time is at pains to avoid its own most subversive implication – that the law per se might be ontologically incoherent, that “truth” itself might be incapable of existing as anything other than a particularly persuasive rhetorical “pretence.”

Fifty key contemporary thinkers: from structuralism to post-humanism

Early Structuralism. Phenomenology. Structuralism. Post-Structuralist Thought. Semiotics. Second Generation Feminism. Post-Marxism. Modernity. Postmodernity. The Post-Human

Bringing The Body Back: The (Mis)Languaging Of Bodies In Bio-Medical, Societal And Poststructuralist Discourses On Diabetes And Epilepsy

Recent scholarship on 'disabilities' and bodies has tended to be extreme in its orientation and has, on the whole, not been able to speak of chronic disabilities and bodily breakdown in humanistic ways. In its verve toward finding 'cures,' biomedical discourses, from which societal discourses draw their strength, have emphasized malfunctioning body parts and have made little room for bodily breakdown. Likewise, some strains of poststructuralist discourses on bodies in their tendency to emphasize the performative aspects of bodies and to see experience as constantly under erasure, make little room for bodily breakdowns. Based on an evolving exploration that includes various kinds of data, this paper focuses on how two men living with chronic ailments, namely "type-1" diabetes and epilepsy, respectively, language their bodies and 'disabilities.' The paper argues for the need for applied linguistics in general and aging-related work in particular to bring the body back to where we can speak of it humanistically, to language the body and its breakdowns in ways that eschew both the dehumanizing rhetoric of biomedical discourses and the erasure of experiences as per some poststructuralist thought. However, in keeping with other strains of poststructuralist thinking, we sought to un-fix some 'disability' interpretations by attempting to render them fluid. The paper also reflects on the extent to which we were successful, and the implications of such attempts on texting disability-related papers.

Presenting Michael Jackson™

Presenting Michael Jackson™ explicates the marketed product that parades as a man we think we know well because he has grown up on stage, in front of documenting cameras. Such screened coverage belies the calculations that Michael Jackson™ entails. To discuss them, the essay compares Michael's notorious, late and pajama-sporting arrival to his trial in March 2005 and the November 1991 debut of the short film Black or White to consider Michael the man's hand in the public dissembling of the icon so many once thought so safe. In that Michael Jackson™ is always seemingly on the verge of collapse, the essay finds an opportunity to assess the popular possibilities for poststructuralist thinking, namely the Derridean deconstruction that makes possible queer theory methodology. The kind of play that remains when reading Michael's life-as-career illustrates the enchanting reach that Derrida's “theatre of the countersignature” can have when staged by an actor who commands still a global audience. Surveillance awaits a curiosity Michael continues to deliver with such precision.

Unesco’s Road Toward Knowledge Societies

Though traditionally perceived as a more liberal international organisation, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is part and parcel of the “development machine”. Inspired by post-structural thinking in development studies and Jessop’s (2004) cultural political economy approach, we examine the organisation’s 2005 World Report Towards Knowledge Societies as a text of development construing and constructing particular discourses. First, we introduce the knowledge-based economy discourse and the information society discourse. Then we situate UNESCO’s report as an attempt to provide an alternative to the die-hard information society discourse. Next, we argue that through its allegiance to knowledge-based economy reasoning (concerning education and learning; globalisation and development), UNESCO in this report actually endorses and helps to construct the discourse on the information society. The convergence of information society, knowledge-based economy and neo-liberal thinking has very real material consequences because it provides the ideal discursive context for the ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) paradigm, the newest development craze which may belittle more than a reissue of the old modernisation paradigm.

The Subject Is Coming Back

The whole history of social sciences?and even more of natural sciences?could be summed up as the elimination of the concept of the subject. Natural sciences do not refer to a God who would have created the universe. A mathematician answered Napoleon, who had noticed the absence of any reference to God in his book: "Your Majesty, this is an hypothesis it was not necessary for me to introduce." Anthropocentric views of the universe have been eliminated, the Darwinian theory of evolution broke the barrier which separated man from other species. More recently, Freud limited the notion of consciousness to be the "skin" of psyche, which is in contact with the outside world but which does not control most of the psychological processes. A large part of the intellectual history of the late nineteenth century, of the "fin de si?cle," especially in German-speaking countries, can be interpreted as the rupture of the subject. From Von Hofmansthal to Musil, the subject is figured out as an empty place. An extreme point seemed to be reached when the concept of structure conquered a central place in social sciences, especially in linguistics and in anthropology and, for different reasons, in economics. What is left aside of these "natural human sciences" is hermeneutics, the analysis of texts and of intellectual constructions, which does not refer either to the concept of subject. The intellectual life of the 1960s and the 1970s has been dominated by post-structuralist thinkers. Among them, Michel Foucault announced that the concept of man is disappearing like the wind erases a movement of the sand on the dune. Finally, we are reluctant to refer to human rights because we are afraid that this general concept conceals, in a voluntary way or not, real situations which must be defined in terms of power relations and concrete actors. We have suffered discovering that very often references to universalistic notions are used by the most powerful groups to fight against class, national or cultural movements.

Hvordan analysere sociale differentieringer?

The current Danish reception of the concept of intersectionality has largely been of a poststructuralist bend. However, the history of the concept is not necessarily as tightly related to poststructuralist theory as often assumed. Although the contributions produced by this reception must be recognised, the poststructuralist version of intersectionality is problematic from a specific sociological position. When social categories are presented as something people do, the reality of social differentiation is downplayed. Poststructuralist thinking rests on an inadequate conception of the material, as this form of thought tends to theorize this as another type of discourse or as a consequence of discourse. It furthermore tends to homogenise the logics underlying different forms of social differentiation. These points are illustrated by the works of Bourgeois and Wacquant where socio-cultural interpretations are transformed by changes on a material level.

Rhetorical Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Power, and Resistance

A sense of subjectivity as fluid, dynamic, and multiple has become almost or thodox throughout the humanities. The widespread influence of poststructural thought has seemingly routed earlier Enlightenment notions of a unified, tran scendent subject and opened the door for critical approaches to the numerous and changing manifestations of human subjectivity. The fluidity of the human subject, however, is not without its bounds or constraints. Indeed, the same line of poststructural thinking that served to de-center the Enlightenment subject, especially the work of Michel Foucault, also stipulated that the subject was positioned by larger formations of discourse over which they had limited if any control. These two sides of poststructural subjectivity?its fluidity and its positioning?establish not so much two divergent approaches, but the two poles between which the human subject can be thought to operate. In turn the two poles of the apparent fixity of the subject position and the seeming fluidity of the subjectivity manifested within that position suggest the kind of productive ten sion through which we are simultaneously limited and enabled by the discourse formations within which we operate and against which we, at times, resist. This productive tension between the multiplicity of the subject and the singularity of the subject position has, of course, been the focus of numerous inquiries. In his later work, Foucault attended to the processes by which the subject makes itself an object upon which work might be done and urged a more aesthetic approach to the continuous crafting of the self.1 Along similar lines, Judith Butler has conceived of the subject in terms of its performativity and the ways that the I is crafted through numerous and fluid citations of existing power relations. Conceived in this way, the notion of the self is a constantly changing object crafted and re-crafted out of the points of identification provided in the exterior fields of power and knowledge. These points of identification, in turn, provide symbolic anchors by which a subject is moored, at least temporar ily, into a particular subject position within which they become identifiable and intelligible in terms of the broader formation of discourse.

Technology in Search of an Artist: Questions of Auteurism/Authorship and the Contemporary Cinematic Experience

Technology in Search of an Artist:Questions of Auteurism/Authorship and the Contemporary Cinematic Experience Anna Notaro (bio) Being a director is a lonely job. You are in the midst of a crowd, but you are on your own. Everybody else looks to you. —David Lean The work of art is valuable only in so far as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future. —André Breton Questions of authorship keep recurring since "The Death of the Author" was first claimed by poststructuralist philosophy. Since the term hypertext was invented by Ted Nelson in 1965, theorists like George Landow and Michael Joyce have transferred the core thesis of poststructuralist thinking to the literary application of hypertext. Hyperfiction, seen as a "garden of forking paths," seems to semantically represent the looseness of the signifier-signified relation as the multiple narrative lines subvert any control by the reader and undermine the author's power to fix all contexts and therefore all meanings of the text sequences. Although Landow sees this hypertextual dimension as a fulfillment of the poststructuralist claim (that meaning is only constituted by the reader and not determined by the author), one cannot but wonder whether the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century legal and aesthetic discourses that have constructed the ideal of authorship still persist today, in other words, whether the "question of the author as a privileged moment of individualization" (Foucault) can tame collaboration's democratic potential. It has been suggested that the notion of hypertext, by altering hierarchical and linear structures of reading/writing and by diffusing individual authorial control, has political ramifications. In this sense Deleuze's comments on his working relationship with Guattari are illuminating: "We are only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us. We stopped being 'author.' And these 'between the twos' referred back to other people, who were different on one side from on the other. . . . In these conditions, as soon as there is this type of multiplicity, there is politics, micro-politics" (Deleuze and Parnet 17). If we leave the literary sphere and consider other fields such as music, cinema, and the visual arts it becomes apparent how new forms of cooperation and communication are deeply changing the notion of the author in ways that supersede artistic or disciplinary boundaries. Today, in many cases, it is difficult to clearly identify an author. Rather, we see emerging a system of multiple, hybridized, collective authorship. New technology demands new knowledge and skills from the traditional authors—the Artist, the Architect, the Scientist, the "Master" Filmmaker—and encourages them to work in an interdisciplinary multimedia context. By considering, among others, the latest trends emerging on the fringe of mainstream Hollywood (Hollywood 2.0) and the most experimental cinematic expressions (Internet cinema, the Future Cinema exhibition), this paper investigates whether a new model of coauthorship that (inter)actively involves the audience is surfacing or whether, conversely, we are witnessing an "illusion of authorship." It is my contention that the aura of authorship, under new performative semblances, appears to be reaffirmed right at a time when it is most challenged. The Impasse of Auteur/Author Theory The aim of this section is to succinctly reassess auteur/author theory by tracing what I call the "various incarnations" of the auteur from the early formulations in the Cahiers du Cinéma, its (hastily) proclaimed "death" in the late sixties, to the commercialization of authorship typical [End Page 86] of postmodernity. The impasse that characterizes auteur theory today is not entirely due to the impact of the so-called digital revolution on the medium of cinema; rather, such a revolution has magnified preexisting inner tensions between the medium's "unauthored" qualities and its persistent faith in the distinctive creative drive of the "aster" filmmaker. The terms auteurism/authorship are purposely juxtaposed through the section—and the essay—because of their coterminous character. Cinema resists being thought of in terms of traditional notions of authorship. Scholars have frequently emphasized the collaborative nature of the medium, its commercial underpinnings, and its reliance on analogic modes of representation as evidence of its "unauthored" qualities. Nevertheless, the author...

Getting Personal: How Early Childhood Teacher Education Troubles Students' and Teacher Educators' Identities regarding Subjectivity and Feminism

This article constitutes an attempt to investigate how student teachers and teacher educators in the context of Swedish early childhood teacher education are invented and reinvented by practices that are inspired by feminist and post-structural thinking. I give examples of practice that explicitly make use of different aspects of the personal, such as subjectivities, voice and experience. These are theorized, problematized and troubled in relation to concepts of power, resistance and emancipation. The article questions the possibility of ‘getting outside’ of the regulatory regimes of power production through practices of ‘getting personal’, and asks just how much freedom is possible, even given overtly ‘emancipist’ teaching.

The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry Stamos Metzidakis Shaw, Mary Lewis. The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Pp. 226. ISBN0-5210-0485-3 This is a pedagogically wide-ranging and highly practical book. It provides readers with indispensable socio-historical, stylistic and rhetorical terms as well as assorted bits of useful information about a dazzling array of French poets, schools and movements from the Middle Ages to the present. The precise, compact glossary of terms alone will answer many a teacher's prayer for just such an aide-mémoire, since it includes definitions of many items beyond basic notions like rhyme schemes and meter; namely, tropes and figures, such as catachresis, syllepsis and synecdoche. The book is an ideal mixture of more or less traditional literary history – complete with publication dates, biographical details, etc. – and close textual analysis, and incor-porates some of the best scholarship on these subjects. Throughout her survey, Professor Shaw is careful not to neglect the usual canonical subjects and suspects found in, say, the Lagarde et Michard series, from chansons de geste and major troubadours to various avant-gardes and Bonnefoy. Yet, at the same time, she seamlessly expands previous canons to include equally deserving women and Francophone poets, like Catherine Pozzi, Edouard Glissant, Gaston Miron, Joyce Mansour and Anne Hébert. She also discusses at length powerful poetic theories first articulated by Plato, Aristotle and Horace, later by Malherbe, Boileau, Hugo and Breton, that continue to influence French-speaking poets and critics. In the process, she demonstrates how the latter often revisit earlier models and systems. Shaw's study thus constitutes a worthy successor to textbooks used in countless French literature survey courses which have introduced thousands of students to basic French literary genres over the last twenty five years or so. In particular, I think of a now-classic text used to teach the devices characteristic of poetry, prose and plays, co-authored by Peter Schofer, whom Shaw thanks for helping her design a book for a new generation of readers. Rather than treat all genres at once, however, Shaw has the wonderful idea here to devote her full energies to presenting the fundamentals of French poetry alone. In this respect, she joins a growing number of recent critics who have been working to rehabilitate the serious study of a genre that has always occupied a major place, perhaps even the major place, in the world's literature. This does not mean, of course, that close examination of French poetry ever really disappeared. In retrospect, it does appear, however, that after the neo-formalist and structuralist passion for versified forms in the 1960s – consider, for example, the widely discussed reading of Baudelaire's sonnet "Les Chats" done by Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson and the subsequent responses to it – came a generalized post-structuralist drift away from poetry to prose. Indeed, while focusing much of their attention on the ostensibly greater informational "density" of prose over poetry, some post-structuralist thinkers eschewed a type of writing which, in actuality, never waned. Poetry may well, in fact, have been undergoing a simultaneous renaissance of its own, as evidenced by the recent advent throughout the world of hip-hop, rap, raï, [End Page 407] poetry slams and cafes. Thus, as Shaw insists, nothing could be further from the truth than the all too frequently expressed opinion that (French) poetry is at an unacceptable remove from matters of great social, philosophical or political import. My use of parentheses in this last sentence is deliberate, for it underscores an implied plea found throughout the book for a greater appreciation of the universal roles and functions of poetry, rather than for some "universalist" insistence on the superiority of French language, civilization or poetry. As Shaw writes: "[D]espite our emphasis on "French" aspects we have hesitated to define [French poetry] otherwise than as a network of poems composed in the language known as French" (175). For these reasons, her book deserves a place in the library of everyone studying French in today's multicultural environment, as well as on every teacher's personal desk, from ap high school classrooms to...

Does Poststructuralist Thought Represent a Challenge to the Neoliberal Project and Actually Existing Capitalism?

Does Poststructuralist Thought Represent a Challenge to the Neoliberal Project and Actually Existing Capitalism?

Europe, Continental philosophy and the philosophy of education

On what might a comparative discussion of philosophy of education that takes Europe as one of its terms be based? This paper begins by addressing the complexity that attaches to the name 'Europe' in this context in order to lay the way for a more detailed consideration of so-called 'Continental' philosophy--specifically of poststructuralism. It makes reference to the ways in which the work of poststructuralist thinkers has often been interpreted in 'postmodern' educational theory and seeks to reveal certain errors in this regard. Distinctions are drawn between postmodernity, postmodernism and poststructuralism, illustrating the last of these in terms of two influential strands of thought drawn from Levinas and Nietzsche, and indicating their value for education. In conclusion, some brief remarks are offered regarding the institutionalization of philosophy of education in Europe.

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala (review)

1?6ARTHURIANA Elizabeth scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, andLiterary Structure in Late Medieval Enghnd. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. xix, 284. isbn: 0-312-24043-0. «59-95Poststructuralist literary and cultural theory and their vocabularies appear more and more frequently in medieval studies. Elizabeth Scala's book on the 'absent narratives' in late Middle English texts is an attempt to bring these frameworks and reading strategies to medieval texts. Her approach is informed both by poststructuralist (especially psychoanalytic) literary theory and manuscript studies, a productive mixture; but in the final analysis the book is tilted towards the theoretical pole. Scala's starting point, developed convincingly in her Preface and Introduction, is the analogy she finds between the structure of late medieval literary texts as determined by the stories that they do not, cannot, or will not tell (the title's 'absent narratives'), and the culture of manuscript textuality that produced them (where manuscripts relyon exemplars and authority depends on previous texts, the Origins') (xvii). The three spaces where she locates her examinations are thus textual history, the history ofcritical/editorial reception, and the text itselfas a literary work ofart. She uses a basically psychoanalytic framework and vocabulary in the interpretations; gender, representation, and narratological considerations are also important foci. Treating the 'absent narratives' (untold stories which are nevertheless signalled as lacking) as 'repressed,' Scala's theoretical metaphor is that narratives are like subjects, in an explicitly Lacanian sense, whose unconscious operations affect their meaning (what they 'say') and their structure (what they 'do') (12). The discussion of this analogy leads into a series of case studies, interpretations of Chaucer's Book ofthe Duchess, 'Squire'sTale' and 'KnightsTale,' Sir Gawain andthe Green Knight, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Malory's Morte Darthur. Scala's interpretations are sensitive and fresh, integrating but also taking issue with a variety ofrecent theoretically minded approaches, such as Stephen Nichols's work about manuscript textuality and the 'manuscript matrix.' Her reading of Sir Gawain in terms of the discourse that substitutes the story acted for the (lacking) story told, the rational world for the uncontrollable, repressed and marginalized magical world figured by Morgan Ie Fay, stepping into the gap at the end, certainly throws new light on a number ofdetails. So is the approach to the 'Squire's Tale' as both figuring and sidestepping the telling of the incest story of Canacee, or the interpretation of the 'Knight's Tale' as romancing (and controlling) the Amazons and the feminine. But whenever Scala reaches more specific theoretical questions, so promisingly treated in the Introduction in the context ofmanuscript textuality, a specific 'medieval discourse,' and in terms of representation, the theoretically minded reader is frustrated. All we ever get at such points is that the text's concern is with the slippages and non-transparence of language, or with 'problems of representation'; a deeper analysis ofwhat exactly the texts tell us about this 'medieval discourse,' or how they redefine frameworks of representation is never given. Likewise, expectations as to the theorizing of manuscript textuality in detail as a place where such shifting signifying practices operate, and as to the particulars of REVIEWSIO7 these practices, are not fulfilled either. The theory of the absent narratives, as the repressed material ofthe textual unconscious that return and resignify in repetitions and substitutions, produces an application ofa set oftheoretical concerns to specific texts and their specific meanings in the case studies; it is not an all-embracing theory ofthe 'medieval discourse,' signification, and meaning production in general in late medieval England. But if poststructuralist thinking has taught us anything, it is that all-embracing theories are always suspect. One ofthe three spaces where the examination is situated, the manuscript context, is also somewhat less emphasized than one would expect from the Introduction. This is a book rather for the theorist and literary scholar than the codicologist. A wonderful exception is the chapter on Gower, where the manuscript's marginal Latin commentary (also its illustrations) is shown as an alternative discourse to the text: instead of limiting its meaning, this alternative discourse further elaborates it and contributes to the author/narrator figure's self-fictionalization. But the last...

History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100-1300 by Michelle R. Warren (review)

REVIEWSIO7 these practices, are not fulfilled either. The theory of the absent narratives, as the repressed material ofthe textual unconscious that return and resignify in repetitions and substitutions, produces an application ofa set oftheoretical concerns to specific texts and their specific meanings in the case studies; it is not an all-embracing theory ofthe 'medieval discourse,' signification, and meaning production in general in late medieval England. But if poststructuralist thinking has taught us anything, it is that all-embracing theories are always suspect. One ofthe three spaces where the examination is situated, the manuscript context, is also somewhat less emphasized than one would expect from the Introduction. This is a book rather for the theorist and literary scholar than the codicologist. A wonderful exception is the chapter on Gower, where the manuscript's marginal Latin commentary (also its illustrations) is shown as an alternative discourse to the text: instead of limiting its meaning, this alternative discourse further elaborates it and contributes to the author/narrator figure's self-fictionalization. But the last chapter, on the 'Arthur function' (with terms and concepts borrowed from Foucault and Barthes) in Malory, returns to a more literary reading relating to the manuscript only as far as it offers an explanation—a relevant one, admittedly—for the continued critical anxiety about the Morte's 'unity' or plurality. Arthur, whose story is emphatically missing from amongst the innumerable stories of his knights, is the absent centre of Malory's textual world, a position which nevertheless shows signs ofinterdependence with the other signifying elements ofthe text. But that argument does not depend on details of the manuscript, or even manuscript textuality. This book presents a very interesting theoretical framework, which points out the 'medieval discourse' and specifically medieval signifying practices as a critical space open for further work and introduces concepts and conjunctions of critical fields which are very promising and useful in approaching medieval texts with the tools ofpoststructuralist theories. Its greatest interest therefore lies in its methodology, a way of reading and integrating such recent systems of thought, and its sensitive leadings in demonstration of the relevance of its governing principles. GERGELY NAGY Institute of English and American Studies, University ofSzeged, Hungary Michelle R warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders ofBritain, 1100—1300. Medieval Cultures Vol. 22. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 302. isbn: 0-8166-3491-2. $34.92. Michelle Warren uses Excalibur as a metaphor for the writing ofArthurian history in 'border cultures' in the central Middle Ages. These areas ofBritain and France— the Welsh March, Champagne, Brittany—witnessed great military clashes in the period c.1100-1300, but the pen proved as mighty as the sword, for these regions also launched the literary careers ofArthurian writers like Geoffrey ofMonmouth and Wace. Warren explores the links between teal-world military struggles and those so vividly portrayed in Arthurian literature. The book is organized both chronologically and geographically, with six chapters devoted to the six border regions that produced consecutive Arthurian histories. io8arthuriana (Somewhat surprisingly, this book about geographical borders and border history has not a single map illustration to help the reader locate his or her self in the changing landscape oftwelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain and France: two poorly reproduced photos ofthirteenth-century maps offer little aid). After a discussion of methodology and theory in chapter one, Warren devotes the next chapter to Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae. Warren calls this work an 'historia in marchia,' for not only was Monmouth a border region harboring many cultures (Welsh, Breton, Norman, English), but Geoffrey's dedications show him deftly maneuvering between rival political factions in the civil war between Stephen and Matilda (and similarly maneuvering between rival historians in the epilog). While in the Historia Corineus and Brutus's sons divide Britain and thus create borders, Arthur uses Excalibur (Caliburnus) to break borders through conquest and territorial expansion. The restored unity ofBritain is, Warren points out, short-lived, and Arthur's doom serves for Geoffrey as a parable on the fragility of imperialist ambition. In chapter three Warren moves across the Severn to examine the reception ofGeoffrey's Historia among the Welsh in both Latin...

Michel de Certeau and the Limits of Historical Representation

AbstractThe polymath Michel de Certeau is traditionally seen as one of a group of French post‐structuralist thinkers who reject constructs in the social sciences in favor of the diversity of the everyday or the past. However, in this paper I will show that, as a historian, Certeau did not discard these constructs, but rather valued them as a means of doing justice to the “strangeness” of the past. The position that Certeau adopts can be seen most clearly from his theoretical debate with Paul Veyne, which is the starting point of this article. I then show how Certeau's first major historical work, The Possession at Loudun, exemplifies his theoretical position. An analysis of this work demonstrates how the historian's active reconstruction of interactions between exorcists, medical doctors, state officers, and possessed nuns helps us to perceive the complexity of the past in a way that can be seen as a microhistory avant la lettre. I will suggest that during his writing of the history of Loudun, Certeau implicitly raises more theoretical and epistemological problems, and in so doing he “practices” a theory of history. The most elusive aspect of the story at Loudun turns out to be the drama around the priest Grandier. This article demonstrates how Certeau pays tribute to Grandier by using “scientific” methods, thus showing the “limits of representation” through disciplinary means. Finally, the article explores the implications of Certeau's theory and practice of the writing of history for understanding historiography at large. The historian not only appears as a tramp who looks for remains that are forever lost to us, but is also a “scientist” who uses both models and concepts in order to put them to the test.

Definitions of the ‘Subject’: The relations between the discourses of educational assessment and the psychology of motivation and their constructions of personal reality

AbstractThis article engages critically in a study of two areas of academic discourse, educational assessment and the psychology of motivation, in order to examine the dialectical relationships between their modes of classification, ordering and defining, and the construction of personal realities. Its approach draws on post‐structuralist thinking associated with critical discourse analysis and Foucault's genealogical method. The first section raises questions about the use of metaphor and its function; the second provides ‘readings’ of three research texts on children's attributions for their different ideological assumptions; the third brings together issues about the ‘subject’ and ‘emancipation’. The text raises questions about educational assessment's positioning within a paradigm associated with the social construction of knowledge.