Unofficial Discourse Research Articles

MODERN NEWSPEAK AS A CATEGORY
 OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

The article discusses the concept of Newspeak in the context of the cognitive and discursive approach. The author characterises different levels of the existence of the modern Newspeak and shows the continuity and uniqueness of the Newspeak of the 21st century. Newspeak is a multi-level system of intersection of discourses, which can be presented according to different criteria: online – offline communication; the language of power, media,
 intellectual elites; official – unofficial discourse (Internet comments). The modern Newspeak is a combination of Internet language and ideological language. Newspeak should be understood as a special case of modern discourse and at the same time its important element; a way of simultaneously interpreting and constructing reality; an example of a quasi-political language manifesting a political topic or politicising a non-political topic.

Musical Theatre as an Object of Transnational Political Exchange

The paper focuses on the ways Czech-language theatres in Czechoslovakia were dealingwith the obligatory presence of Soviet operetta titles in their repertoire, dating from about 1950to 1989. The reform of Czech musical theatre began right after World War II. In search of the right,nationalized form of operetta, Czech theatre organs soon understood that the example must bedrawn from the hegemonic Soviet culture. In the Soviet discourse, mainly Isaac Dunayevsky’soperettas were considered masterpieces, and Czech theatre politicians were soon paying theirattention to them. After some initial difficulties in obtaining material for the operettas, Dunayevsky’spieces entered Czech theatre and stayed on the repertoire to the beginning of the 1960s. Afterthe Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968, Soviet operettas re-entered the theatres’ repertoire; however,their reception and staging circumstances were much more complicated. The paper focuses on themain tendencies in staging Dunayevsky’s operettas in Czechoslovakia, the political and culturalbackground of productions, and the various ways of presenting it in Czech society and culture. Thecultural and historical microprocesses analysed may then throw light on a wider range of historicaland cultural phenomena, including cultural transfers and relations between Czechoslovakia and theSoviet Union, the discrepancies between the official and unofficial discourse, as well as the role ofpopular musical theatre in a socialist society.

(Re-)nostalgização: o cinema de Macau enquanto construção da identidade

The officially hinted yet unofficial discourse of “Macau-Was-Never-A-Colony” challenges postcolonial studies all hiddenly and mute(d)ly. Its rare presence in the non-Sino-Luso-academic world explains its legitimate absence. The multi-centenary Portuguese presence in or colonization of Macau marked only its attachedness to the verges of Empires. From its transitional period in the last stage of the Portuguese Empire to its self-governance under the much larger Chinese context, Macau, or better say, its name and its appearance, was no more than a short-term machine of nostalgia. In this background, the emergence of Macau cinema from the last colonial times until its present contributes to a discourse towards the production of an identity, whose future is still unknown. The proposed essay questions precisely this role of Macau cinema in this process of (re)nostalgization in the coming decades until 2049, the end of a promise of two powers that decided its 50-year long would-be future, two-fifths of which has already passed.

A carnivalistic reading of The Wedding of Zein by Taib Salih

ABSTRACT Reading The Wedding of Zein (1962) by Tayeb Salih from a Bakhtinian perspective can be helpful to trace the revolutionary touch that marks the novel. As the world of Rabelais celebrates the unofficial discourse of the festive life standing against the strictures of the feudal culture, the same celebration of the festive time in terms of merry moments of unbridled indulgence of feasting, joking and folk festivities in the carnival type could be mapped out in the narrative of The Wedding of Zein. The latter presents a reconciliatory vision to syncretise the social and spiritual worlds so as to materialise the delighted and optimistic world that Salih is panting for. The vision of the dream world of Salih collides with a harsh world involving an identity crisis. A facet of the ideal world that Salih heads to undertake lies in cancelling out the identity privileges that are determining in the social, economic and political life. In theory, the carnivalesque implications including the dismantling of hierarchies and the celebration of popular culture are the same principles postmodernism feeds upon. To this end, in view of postmodernism, Salih makes out of the narrative of The Wedding of Zein a carnival to suspend all the hierarchical prerogatives. Similar to Bakhtin as he disrupts the hierarchical social stratification privileging the bourgeois group through the gay time of the wedding, Salih interrogates the official discourse at the time of state building predicated upon the legacy of colonialism, excluding different groups from the Sudanese identity.

Fractured discursivity: discursive governance in Serbia in relation to nationalism and xenophobia (2012–2016)

ABSTRACT Since the end of the wars of the Yugoslav secession, and a decade after the declaration of Kosovo’s independence, the Western Balkans – Serbia included – have somewhat fallen off the radar within the realm of scholarly interest. Yet the political and social situation has changed in Serbia since 2012 and the rise to power of the former Yugoslav warmonger, Aleksandar Vučić, who currently serves as the country’s president. This article analyzes discursive governance tactics in Serbia, wherein, led by President Vučić, discourse fractures into rhetoric offered to the international community, and rhetoric promulgated within the country. Furthermore, there is a significant difference between official and unofficial governmental discourses, which is referred to in this article as fractured discursivity. Whilst xenophobia (and corresponding nationalism) is almost nonexistent in foreign relations, they are used as rhetorical strategies within the country, in a stronger fashion when it comes to unofficial discourse. Fractured discursivity is developed as a theoretical view, drawing upon existing theories of discourse and politics, in order to offer a lens through which the difference in rhetoric and discursive governance strategies can be explained.

THE POLITICS OF CONTROVERSY, VIGILANTISM AND CENSORSHIP IN GITHA HARIHARAN’S ‘IN TIMES OF SIEGE’

This paper analyses how the issues of the politics of controversy, vigilantism and academic censorship are dealt in GithaHariharan’s ‘In Times of Siege’. In the novel, Hariharan puts the narrative of Basava in centre and implicitly refer to the fissures found in historiography and mythical narratives of India. Covering the two month of troubled times in the life of Prof. Shivmurthy, she speaks of the academic freedom in India that has often been subjected to ordeal due to certain controversial calls for censorship by diverse political, social, religious and ethnic fundamentalist organizations and communities. Given the opportunism and aggressiveness on the part of fundamentalist forces in such a situation, the creative and academic space becomes a kind of battlefield where history, art and culture are to be contested in an over-zealous fashion. ‘In Times of Siege’ exposes how politics of ideology has always been a potent way mobilizing un-official historical and mythical discourse and narratives prevalent in the modern day India. Political overtones of the book become evident when we find a conscientious professor pitted against the ruthless forces of bigotry, communalism, fanaticism and narrow-mindedness embodied by the group IthihasSurakshaManch. Their demand of the subtraction of Prof. Shiv’s lesson on Basava shows how the forces of such kind aim at creating uproar by endorsing the fabricated hurt to their religious and cultural assumptions. They desire hegemony for having the remote control of the historical imagination of academic institutions to sanction a culturally-controlled version of history and myths in national curriculum.

Diversity Policing–Policing Diversity: Performing Ethnicity in Police and Private-Security Work in Sweden

This article draws upon two separate studies on policing in Sweden, both investigating “ethnic diversity” as a discourse and a practice in the performance of policing functions: one interview study with minority police officers from a county police authority and one ethnographic study of private security officers. To examine how “diversity policing” and the “policing of diversity” are performed by policing actors, their strategic reliance on an ethnically diverse workforce is examined. The official discourse in both contexts stressed “diversity policing” as a valuable resource for the effective execution of policing tasks and the legitimation of policing functions. There was, however, also another, more unofficial discourse on ethnicity that heavily influenced the policing agents’ day-to-day work. The resulting practice of “policing diversity” involved situated activities on the ground through which “foreign elements” in the population were policed using ethnicized stereotypes. Diversity in the policing workforce promoted the practice of ethnic matching, which, ironically, in turn perpetuated stereotypical thinking about Swedish “others”. A conceptual framework is developed for understanding the policing strategies involved and the disjuncture found between the widely accepted rationalities for recruiting an ethnically diverse workforce and the realities for that workforce’s effective deployment at the street level.

Stages of grief: Economic devastation and social oblivion

In the spring of 2008, after Heineken bought the major stake in “Pančevačka pivara” (Pančevo brewery) from Efes, and thus became its owner, the corporation shut down production in the Pančevo factory, fired all remaining workers save for a few managers, and soon after halted production of the only remaining brand of “Pančevačka pivara” which was named after the brewery’s mid-nineteenth century founder – Weifert. Thus, after more than 150 years of beer production in Weifert’s brewery, and more than 280 years after beer first started to be produced in Pančevo, the town is left without a significant industrial capacity and one of its key cultural and identity symbols. What should be cause for concern for researchers is the huge discrepancy between the decades-long endeavor to traditionalize the brewery and the culture of beer consumption and utilize them in the representation of the town as an industry center as well as a multicultural environment with an urban sensibility and significant Habsburg heritage, and the complete silence which followed the closing of the brewery and is still there, four years after the factory shut down. The paper examines how the deep, uncomfortable silence which has enveloped these events, the absence of any kind of public debate on the issue as well as the lack of any kind of articulated unofficial discourse about this loss can be interpreted. Starting from the assumption that any way of speaking is simultaneously a way of not speaking, I will examine the social dynamics of the reverse process in a specific social, economic, political and cultural context. In other words, what is the role of social non-remembrance and what can be gleaned from this non-speaking, repressing, intentional oblivion?

Socialist Worlds of Dissent and Discontent after Stalinism

Socialist Worlds of Dissent and Discontent after Stalinism Polly Jones (bio) Jonathan Bolton , Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism. 360 pp. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2012 . ISBN-13 978-0674064386 . $49.95 . Sheila Fitzpatrick , Vladimir A. Kozlov , and Sergei V. Mironenko , eds., Sedition: Everyday Resistance in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. 414 pp. New Haven : Yale University Press , 2011 . ISBN-13 978-0300111699 . $70.00 . Friederike Kind-Kovacs and Jessie Labov , Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media during and after Socialism. 378 pp. New York : Berghahn Books , 2012 . ISBN-13 978-0857455857 . $95.00 . Denis Kozlov , The Readers of “Novyi mir”: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past. 442 pp. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2013 . ISBN-13 978-0674072879 . $55.00 . A leaflet criticizing Nikita Khrushchev, reproduced in four copies. A charter-petition calling for change in Czechoslovakia, signed by several thousand citizens. A 40-page autobiographical letter, sent to a Soviet literary journal with no hope of publication. An obscene curse, shouted at a Stalin statue in Tallinn. These are just some of the critical statements made by Eastern bloc citizens over the three decades after Stalin’s death featured in these four studies. Not all of these were expressions of protest or even complaint, and many [End Page 637] were more private than public, but they all assumed the right to comment on socialist life, and sometimes on the political system as a whole. Some statements, such as the publications of the bloc’s varied dissident movements, were known internationally at the time they were made, but many more have only been discovered in archives since 1989–91. The collapse of state socialism has not only fueled research into such unofficial—if not necessarily dissident—discourse within post-Stalinist cultures but has also significantly shaped its modes of inquiry: such commentaries and complaints about life under socialism are often analyzed primarily in terms of their role in undermining, eroding, or destroying the system and its ideology. These four studies of post-Stalinist culture and politics all offer plentiful new evidence of the diversity and vitality of such unofficial discourse but at times channel it into teleological narratives of regime collapse, measurements of social and political significance, and binary notions of state and society. By placing these studies in the context of other recent scholarship on post-Stalinism, late socialism, and dissent, this essay proposes some alternative perspectives on their rich and thought-provoking findings. The four texts under review sketch a rough spectrum from responses to Soviet publications through relatively apolitical but controversial complaint to more theorized and institutionalized dissident activity across the Eastern bloc. At the least dissident end of this spectrum, Denis Kozlov’s impressively exhaustive survey of the huge archive of readers’ letters at the most liberal Soviet thick journal Novyi mir extends older studies of the journal’s “permitted dissent”—its decade and a half of publishing works at the outer limit of regime tolerance—into an examination of how its readership reacted to such publications.1 His intellectual history of the 1950s and 1960s presents this period as a key juncture in the journal’s history but also in the evolution of Soviet culture as a whole, a time when Stalinist dogmas were attacked in print and consequently dissolved in the minds of the Soviet people. Novyi mir, more than any other media outlet and certainly more than “de-Stalinizing” party leaders according to Kozlov, produced a genuine thaw in popular attitudes to the Soviet past and to the Soviet “media language,” which proved impervious to the Soviet authorities’ freeze on the journal and broader cultural politics in the late 1960s. From Stalin’s death up until this crackdown, the Soviet authorities permitted publications such as Vladimir Pomerantsev’s “On Sincerity in Literature,” Ilya Ehrenburg’s (Il´ia Erenburg’s) memoirs, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Emil Kardin’s “Legends [End Page 638] and Facts,” but then just as often turned against them, vilifying both their authors and the journal. Meticulously researched and lucidly presented by Kozlov, these cycles of permission and...

Playing Chinese Whispers: The Official 'Gossip' of Racial Whitening in Jorge Amado's Tenda dos milagres

This article explores the possible inauthentic nature of official discourse, as political, religious or intellectual elites manipulate facts in a process that parallels the childhood game of Chinese Whispers. Considering this process of manipulation, and the false messages it produces, it is suggested that such discourses, while official, resemble the assumed inauthentic nature of gossip. Within the framework of this concept, the article explores the fusion of official and unofficial discourse in Jorge Amado's novel Tenda dos milagres (1969). Initially analysing Amado's fictionalization of the nineteenth-century Bahian doctor Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and his theories on racial whitening, the article subsequently investigates the continued manipulation of fact by the fictional Bahian political and intellectual elite of the 1960s as the image of the protagonist Pedro Archanjo is transformed, during the official posthumous celebrations of his life, from a poor mulatto who questioned the status quo, to an obedient, white intellectual.

Canada’s humanitarian reach and Maggie Helwig’s Where She Was Standing

Canada’s official rhetoric situates the nation as one capable of perceiving and arbitrating upon humanitarian need on a global scale. Unofficial discourses confirm this perception of Canada’s humanitarian credentials. One unofficial discourse that tends to question official rhetoric, however, is that of fiction. This article examines the representation of humanitarian concerns in Canadian Maggie Helwig’s novel Where She Was Standing. The novel’s portrayal of the nature of evidence, and of its own status as a type of evidence, are discussed, leading to the proposal of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” as a potentially appropriate conceptual tool with which to deal with the difficulties in the position of Western observers of humanitarian issues in distant cultures.

Gossip and the Public Sphere

A review of Nicola Parsons Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England, a book examining gossip and other forms of unofficial discourse in their political and social contexts and demonstrating that during the reign of Queen Anne literary culture saw multiple shifts in the handling of privacy, secrecy, and publicity.

Human Security: The Making of a UN Ideology

Inspired by the conclusions of the United Nations Intellectual History Project, this article seeks to enrich the ongoing discussion on the role of ideas in UN activities. The focus here is on security, an issue often regarded as the organisation's raison d'être. The article argues that over the past two decades the ideology of human security has been the driving normative force behind the global policies advocated by the UN in the area of security. The first part analyses the UN's official discourse, and demonstrates the political importance that it ascribes to the concept of human security. The second section examines a set of global policies that illustrate how the world body has sought to put the principles of human security into practice. While recognising that these policies fall short of the ambitions articulated in UN rhetoric, the article suggests that they have opened a small but very real breach in the epistemic framework underlying the traditional conception of security.

Lenguaje y política internacional

The present work seeks to demonstrate that in all political discourse, a work of masking reality is exercised, consciously or not, aiming at justifying behaviors in the political sphere. For this, analytical categories are proposed that allow dismantling the basic structures of discourse that the various theories or ideological justifications reveal. Methodologically, the analysis focuses on the study of discourses typical of the Cold War and the post-Cold War in the Caribbean. First, the unofficial internal political discourse of the United States is analyzed, which symbolizes the discourse opposed to the line of the US government in relation to the crisis in Haiti. Second, it examines the unofficial discourse, opposed to the Sandinista government, and the official discourse of the United States regarding the crisis with Nicaragua in 1979.

Institutionnalisation d'un continuum de prise en charge des séropositifs VIH/sida à Hanoï (Viêt-Nam)

Caring for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) encompasses various tasks, from prevention to palliative care. It involves a set of consistent and coordinated actions. This article presents the first free-of-charge management programme including antiretroviral treatment in Vietnam (as opposed to research and evaluation programmes). It was launched in 2004 in Hanoi. Our study was conducted in 2003-2004 as part of a collaborative research programme led by IRD (Research Institute for Development) and the National Economic University in Hanoi and was funded by ESTHER (Together for a Therapeutic Solidarity in Hospital Network) group. Data collection included 68 qualitative interviews with patients, members of their families and members of the hospital staff, observations of outpatient consultations, and analysis of inpatient files. The results show that patients, their families and hospital staff members all perceive a comprehensive care and treatment programme as very important and consider that it should include social and psychological care as well as an integrated set of actions involving various types of participants. Outpatient and inpatient care are closely linked: they take place in the same hospital department, they involve patients with similar social and demographic characteristics marked by multiple risk behaviours and recourse to several kinds of healthcare services. The observation of outpatient consultations showed the limitations of strictly biomedical care to which social and psychological care were added only lately. One of the principal difficulties is patients' difficulties in keeping their outpatient appointments. Overall, patients consider themselves lucky to able to receive care and treatment with antiretroviral drugs. They nevertheless complain about the lack of social and psychological support, which they expect should help them to tolerate and adapt to their biomedical treatment and to include counselling and information about this treatment and its consequences. Hospital staff with the greatest contact with PLWHA report more frequent attempts to avoid this contact. This stigmatisation is due to lack of information, failure to implement workplace safety measures, and to pejorative representations of HIV/AIDS. Official and unofficial discourse still follows the Ministry of Health in associating HIV/AIDS with drug use and commercial sex, and HIV/AIDS prevention and control policy is still linked to the "social evils" policy. Hospital staff also emphasized the importance of community care for PLWHA in their interviews. Informal care for PLWHA by family, close relatives, close friends and members of non-official groups complements hospital care, which is sometimes limited to its biomedical component and provides the material, moral, financial, social, economic and relational care essential for PLWHA and their close relatives and friends. This informal care has also some pernicious effects and leads to internal contradictions due to the multiple social roles played by the many and various participants involved. HIV/AIDS prevention and control policy relies on a series of choices between more specificity through vertical programmes specialised in HIV/AIDS and the synergy that can develop through more integrated health services. Vietnam has developed links between HIV/AIDS prevention and control programmes on the one hand, and harm reduction programmes for injecting drug users (access to substitution products such as methadone) and condom distribution, on the other. Nonetheless, HIV/AIDS prevention and control policy faces difficulties in reaching its objectives. The results of this policy, intended to help achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) n degrees 6, depends partly on the success for other MDGs, including the fight against poverty, the promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women, and the improvement of reproductive health. To be able to succeed in implementing the continuum of care necessary for treating HIV/AIDS within its institutions, Vietnam can apply the lessons of international experience, adapted to fit local constraints and the social, cultural and political context. The shortcomings encountered in this endeavour shows how difficult it is for this country to implement such a complex set of measures at an accelerated pace. They should not, however, hide or minimize the great efforts, the vigour, and the capacity to adapt already demonstrated by local participants.

The Authoring of School: Between the Official and Unofficial Discourse

Theoretically the paper addresses the question of how official and unofficial discourses are related and what function the unofficial register serves for the official one. It draws on the idea of ‘underlife’ and the heterogeneity of discourse in order to show how the unofficial discourse can be a productive tool for students to both distance themselves from school and negotiate school identities in order to create new, and (for students) more compatible, forms of ‘school’. Institutional settings do not automatically produce the institutional scripts, positions and norms they are associated with; rather, they need to be authored by participants who ‘instantiate’ these scripts, positions and norms. This paper focuses on how students author school (the official) but at the same time produce alternative discourses (the unofficial). A data set of transcribed student group talk in a multi-ethnic classroom in the Netherlands is used for the analysis.

Peer Tutoring in a Multiethnic Classroom in the Netherlands: A Multiperspective Analysis of Diversity

Previous articleNext article No AccessPeer Tutoring in a Multiethnic Classroom in the Netherlands: A Multiperspective Analysis of DiversityMariëtte de Haan and Ed ElbersMariëtte de Haan Search for more articles by this author and Ed Elbers Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull TextSupplemental Material Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 49, Number 3August 2005 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/430262 Views: 123Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref © 2005 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Zana Vathi, Veronika Duci, Elona Dhembo Homeland (Dis)Integrations: Educational Experience, Children and Return Migration to Albania, International Migration 54, no.33 (Jan 2016): 159–172.https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12230Ed Elbers, Mariëtte de Haan Parent–teacher conferences in Dutch culturally diverse schools: Participation and conflict in institutional context, Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 3, no.44 (Dec 2014): 252–262.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2014.01.004Karen Nicholas, Jo Fletcher, Niki Davis Raising numeracy and literacy to improve vocational opportunities, Journal of Vocational Education & Training 64, no.44 (Dec 2012): 433–451.https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2012.727850Kennedy Tielman, Perry den Brok, Sanneke Bolhuis, Bertha Vallejo Collaborative learning in multicultural classrooms: a case study of Dutch senior secondary vocational education, Journal of Vocational Education & Training 64, no.11 (Dec 2011): 103–118.https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2011.622448Mariëtte de Haan The Reconstruction of Parenting after Migration: A Perspective from Cultural Translation, Human Development 54, no.66 (Jan 2011): 376–399.https://doi.org/10.1159/000334119Mariëtte de Haan, Renske Keizer, Ed Elbers Ethnicity and student identity in schools: an analysis of official and unofficial talk in multiethnic classrooms, European Journal of Psychology of Education 25, no.22 (Mar 2010): 176–191.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-010-0016-7Kate Ferguson‐Patrick Writers develop skills through collaboration: an action research approach, Educational Action Research 15, no.22 (Jun 2007): 159–180.https://doi.org/10.1080/09650790701314585Mariëtte De Haan The Authoring of School: Between the Official and Unofficial Discourse, Culture & Psychology 11, no.33 (Jul 2016): 267–285.https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X05055500

The Mirror of Criticism

The Mirror of Criticism Roberta Seelinger Trites In the first chapter of Through the Looking Glass, Alice expresses concern that "if I don't make haste, I shall have to go back through the Looking-glass before I've seen what the rest of the house is like!" Her concern may well mirror the concern of many literary critics; critics often fear that if we do not look closely enough, we will not know what the rest of the literary house looks like. Indeed, the mirror functions as an interesting literary metaphor that ties together several of the essays that appear in this issue of the Quarterly. In "Rebellious Voices: The Unofficial Discourse of Cross-dressing in d'Aulnoy, de Murat, and Perrault," Lisa Brocklebank argues that authors who rely on literary trans-vestism in seventeenth-century fairy tales hold up a mirror of cultural critique that allows us to better understand political issues of the day. Brocklebank explores how instances of transgendering in several French fairy tales serve as a form of both social and political criticism. Fairy tales provided authors with a mask to wear while criticizing their king, but the fairy tales, nonetheless, mirror a level of social unrest in the culture from which they arose. Contextualizing these fairy tales as the products of the intellectual salonières that arose in protest of Louis XIV's political excesses, Brocklebank takes specific note of the importance of cross-dressing as a venue for criticizing the Sun King's impotence. While Brocklebank explores fairy tales as mirroring their culture, Fiona McCulloch defines a literary instance of narrative authority refusing to act as a straightforward mirror of cultural attitudes. She writes of R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island: the "text is not a mirror image of absolute authority, but is a shattered textual lens that self-consciously probes the verisimilitude of narrative within the realms of an escapist fiction layered with sailors' yarns." The narrative of The Coral Island, she writes, distorts contemporary ideologies rather than functioning mimetically. Mike Cadden also investigates the relationship between mirrors and narrative authority. Cadden asks us to interrogate the responsibility of the narrator (and the author) in revealing the use of irony within a text. Since irony can mask an author's intention, Cadden makes a case for authors to help their readers learn how to read the irony they create: "This help, I believe, would remove the need for the author to make evident the larger narrative irony of stepping out from behind the mirror." Cadden's use of narrative theory problematizes how first-person narrators function in young adult novels. Writing with an international focus, Louise Salstad explores the ideological implications of the Spanish Comisión Católica Española de la Infancia Prize for children's literature, which is an approximate parallel of the American Library Association's Newbery and Caldecott awards. The C.C.E.I. judges proclaim that "All that involves a worthy content in a rich literary form has its place" in their considerations. Salstad's article will serve as an introductory exploration into a part of the literary house—Spanish children's literature—that may be unfamiliar to many readers of the Quarterly. Mirrors have a rich tradition in children's literature. Not only Alice's looking glass, but also magical mirrors from the one that Snow White's mother consults to those at Harry Potter's school serve important functions in children's and adolescent literature. Mirrors reflect children's images back to themselves, both reinforcing notions of self and confirming for the child that s/he is separate from the mother, as Lacan would have it. But for literary critics, mirrors provide a metaphor for our need to recognize more—more about other cultures, more about when texts distort reality, and more about reading honestly. [End Page 127] Copyright © 2000 Children's Literature Association

Labor Pains: implementing the Australian Labor Party's policy of ‘district provision and school reorganisation’ in Victoria, 1989‐92

Abstract Consent engineering is a consultative approach frequently resorted to by public policy‐makers to secure the legitimacy of proposed policy changes. This process usually entails the involvement of representative interest groups in the definition and implementation of policy. Using the example of the reorganisation of post‐compulsory schooling in Victoria, Australia, this article outlines the circumstances under which consent engineering goes awry at the point of service delivery. This is shown to occur when schools see an otherwise benign discourse of consensus being relied upon to drive centrally imposed policy changes they deem to be counter‐productive or threatening to their vital interests. An official discourse of bureaucracy is shown to invoke a range of political symbols to legitimate policy whereas schools, on the other hand, respond with a counter‐discourse of their own designed to invalidate and circumvent the new initiative. But however well intentioned, such unofficial discourse is show...