Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-62).

Rhetorics of identification traditionally address two questions: how does rhetoric work, who or what is involved in rhetorical relations, and how do these relations unfold and proceed, and how can and should we conduct ourselves in light of this state of things, what modes of engagement and response do we have available? Rhetoricians have drawn substantially on Kenneth Burke’s work on symbolic action in answering these questions, but this emphasis on the symbolic does not exhaust the range and nature of rhetorical relations, and other modes of relationality thus warrant our attention. My work aims to consider how our understanding of identification shifts when we move beyond the symbolic frame, when we attend to rhetorical relations without grounding our inquiry in considerations of representation, interpretation, understanding, dialectics, and epistemology. Drawing on conversations in nonrational rhetorics, object-oriented ontology, postmodernism and postmodern literature, digital rhetorics, writing studies, and video game studies, I attend to the material, affective, and singular nature of rhetorical relations. I also consider the modes of engagement this understanding of identification makes available with reference to writing pedagogy and the work of authors Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. / text

The following project will consist in the study and examination of the concepts and theories that lie in the domain of political theory. The enquiry into the dimensions and complexities of the socio-political organization and the political substance of individual human agents will be conducted with the intellectual assistance of the postmodernist turn of thought. I will interrogate and develop a specifically Foucauldian reading of international politics and the emerging global world order as well as situate Foucault's insights and theorizing in a cosmopolitan framework, which calls for a progressive re-conceptualization of the dimensions of power and the modalities of state-citizen autonomy, and sovereignty. The thesis will proceed through five stages of analysis: (i) examination of freedom and self-creation as foundational and fundamental to the cosmopolitan citizenship; (ii) investigation of governmentality, power and the role of personal and political resistance in shaping new horizons of political order (iii) development of a structural approach to cosmopolitan democracy; enhanced by (iv) decoupling of identity from citizenship, and prompted by (v) an inquiry into and recalibration of the political space and sovereignty of states and political agents. I will contend for a conception of citizenship, illuminated by a postmodernist lens of analysis, set in a cosmopolitan framework and premised upon a notion of a layered and constituted dialectic, as the most adroit model for a re-articulation of the spirit of democratic qua cosmopolitan citizenship in the world of increasingly displaced loyalties, porous identities, and atrophied civic commitments. The study aims to inquire into the possibilities of meaningfully addressing the fundamental question in political theory, that of: how is the state to be organized in an era of globalization accompanied by an unprecedented compression of space and time, and re-spatialization of socio-economic and political relations. The thesis will conclude with a synthesis of proposed theoretical assumptions that are to serve as the structural basis and philosophical guidance for the institutionalization of measures conducive to the enactment and perpetuation of cosmopolitan consciousness and cosmopolitical practice.

Not available / text

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

This essay focuses on a postmodern reading of An Imaginary Life by David Malouf. It argues that language is a central theme in the novel and that Ovid’s transformation corresponds to his changing attitude towards different languages. According to Karin Hansson, Ovid’s transformation is divided into three stages. First, he longs for Latin, then he acquires Getic and in the end he seeks the languages of nature. The essay shows that stage two, Ovid’s acquisition of Getic, induces the deconstruction of the traditional high culture-low culture dichotomy in the novel. Language is understood as a representative of culture, and when Ovid considers Getic equal to Latin, the distinction between high culture and low culture collapses. Stage three, Ovid’s relationship with the wild child and his acquisition of the instinctive languages of nature, leads to the deconstruction of the animal-human dichotomy. The facts that the wild child transcends animality by gaining language and that Ovid wants to overcome human languages and immerse himself in nature promote a non-binary and multifaceted understanding of the human-animal relationship. To confirm its argument, the essay draws on Jacques Derrida’s ideas of language as well as his notions of the animal-human relationship.

"Encountering 'this season's retrieval': Historical Fiction, Literary Postmodernism and the Novels of Peter Ackroyd" engages the novels Peter Ackroyd has published, and situates them within broader generic considerations and critical dialogue. Part I, an extended prefatorial apparatus, places Ackroyd and his published fiction within three historicocritical contexts: the problem of author-as-reliable-source and the disparate histories of (a) the historical novel and (b) postmodernism in general (and literary postmodernism in particular). By interrogating the histories and points-of-contention of these areas, this Part aims to problematize critical discourse enveloping Ackroyd's fiction. Part II, comprised of four chapters, discusses specific groupings of Ackroyd's novels. After providing an overview of relevant aspects of the novels and their reception by critics, Chapter A, "Moulding History with Pastiche in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Milton in America." considers the multiple functioning of pastiche—often considered a mainstay postmodern implement—in Ackroyd's work. The chapter concludes that rather than achieving a singular effect in the novels, pastiche works in divergent manners and confounds the reading of past historical actuality they ostensibly represent. Chapter B, "The Presence of the Past: Comedic and Non-Realist Historicism in The Great Fire of London and First Light." provides an overview of relevant aspects of the novels, and then analyzes how the presence of comedy in otherwise sombre historical fiction interrupts the realism of the narrative. This chapter argues that while camp comic effects disrupt the authority of quasi-historiographic techniques they cannot fully subvert realism and so create a suspensive modality. Chapter C, "PastlPresent: The Uses of History in Hawksmoor. Chatterton. The House of Doctor Dee and English Music." interrogates elements of the past-present fugue trajectories of these novels in order to problematize schematic readings of their supposed cultural politics. Finally, Chapter D, "Those Conventional Concluding Remarks: The Plato Papers. (National) History and Politics," places Ackroyd's most recent novel (one uncharacteristically set in the future) within the preoccupations of his earlier fiction. The chapter concludes with a brief outline of future scholarship that would investigate the national Englishness constructed throughout Ackroyd's biographical and novelistic work.

My dissertation is motivated by two general problems within contemporary North American racial politics. First, the increasing ideological impetus of a “post-racist” society contradicts a spate of events that are symptomatic and constitutive of racial and ethnic essentialisms. Second, the logic of multiculturalism and antiracism has often been expressed in a language of race and identity rooted in a rigid system of immutable differences (Hall, 1997; Ang, 2001). The challenge is to deconstruct race and ethnicity in a language that is critical of new racisms as well as the ways in which racial and ethnic difference is seized and diffused by market multiculturalism. While some theorists have used elements of postmodern theory to develop a “resistance multiculturalism” sensitive to shifting social meanings and floating racial signifiers (see McLaren, 1994), they have rarely explored the political possibilities of “ludic postmodernism” (parody, pastiche, irony) as a critical response to multicultural ideologies. If part of postmodernism as an intellectual movement includes self-reflexivity, self-parody, and the rejection of a foundational “truth,” for example, the various racial and ethnic categories reified under multiculturalism are perhaps open to revision and contestation (Hutcheon, 1989). To develop this particular postmodern critique of multiculturalism, I draw on three case studies concerned with identity and representation in North American popular media. The first case considers vocal impersonation as a disruption to the visual primacy of race by examining the stand-up comedy films of Dave Chappelle, Russell Peters, and Margaret Cho. The second case turns to the postmodern bodies of cyborgs and humanoid robots in the science fiction film I, Robot (2004) as a racial metaphor at the crossroads of whiteness, inhumanity, and redemption. The final case discusses the politics of irony in relation to ethnolinguistic identity and debates surrounding sports mascots. Each case study recycles racial and ethnic stereotypes for a variety of political purposes, drawing out the connections and tensions between postmodernism and multiculturalism. A postmodern critique of multiculturalism may offer antiracist politics an understanding of race and ethnicity rooted in a strategic indeterminacy, which allows for multidimensional political coalitions directed against wider socioeconomic inequalities.

Cette etude propose une analyse de "Tel Quel" en tant que mouvement de neo-avant-garde situe a la frontiere de la modernite et de la postmodernite. Nous y considerons tous les textes de creation (roman et poesie) publies dans la collection "Tel Quel" entre 1960 et 1982, sans negliger l'etude de leur rapport avec la reflexion theorique exposee dans les essais et les articles de la revue. Cette these represente en meme temps un effort de synthese des principales typologies ou tentatives de definition proposees par la critique occidentale pour caracteriser les mouvements litteraires issus des societes post-industrielles: modernite, postmodernite, modernisme, postmodernisme, avant-garde, post avant-garde et neo-avant-garde.

This thesis intends to describe the contemporary self as drawn by literary theory and writing practice. This objective implies defining the human being considering its history as well as studying its representation in narratives. / In order to circumscribe today's self, we undoubtedly have to study its historical evolution. Exploring the diametrically opposed conceptions suggested by modernity and postmodernity will lead us to a better understanding of the hybrid composition of the contemporary self, which is characterized by a search for coherence and meaning to a multidimensional and constantly evolving individual. / This definition, so far theoretical, will have to be confronted with the representations of the self found in autobiographies. The study of such self-narratives will provide the opportunity to observe in concrete terms the conception of the human being today. / The essential role of narratives will be identified beforehand. Narrative form certainly allows the representation of the self, but moreover it enters in the constitution and definition of the being itself. Self-narrative permits to establish the coherence of the self, hence it clearly appears at the basis of the identity. Overall, the narrative constitutes the foundation of the contemporary self amidst modernity and postmodernity.