Suniti Namjoshis short work St. Suniti and the Dragon, found in the authors fabulist collection of the same name, is a formally amorphous text that alternates among allusion and alteration of Western canonical myth. The story, in which the journey of the aspiring hero St. Suniti is detailed, alludes primarily to Beowulf and the legend of St. George and the Dragon in a manner similar to, but expansive upon, the feminist revisionist project of the last few decades. While Namjoshi navigates feminist politics, she also examines the postmodern impulse to consider identity as subjective experience. In so doing, she deconstructs notions of canonical character archetypes while suggesting that identity politics must involve a multiplicity of archetypes that is, the self is seldom archetypal in the singular, but rather an amorphous and discontinuous series of mythic archetypes. Thus, the form of Namjoshis text generically ambiguous and varied mimics the authors suggestion for the composition of identity. The result is a story that transgresses prescribed social conventions and archetypes while simultaneously invoking their mythic sources as means of argumentation.

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This dissertation examines the treatment, forms, and representations of spirituality in contemporary American fiction. Drawing on recent theories in cultural and critical theory, sociology, and rhetoric, I argue that postmodern fiction finds sacredness in creative memory and information systems. I analyze E.L. Doctorow’s (2000) City of God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s (1991) Almanac of the Dead, Richard Powers’(2006) Echo Maker, and William Gibson’s (1948) Neuromancer. In their quest for the sacred, these works acknowledge the mystic along with the rational as a legitimate vehicle of knowledge; accordingly, the mysterious and the incomprehensible are accounted for within the epistemological structure of such spirituality. Contrary to the disparaging views of postmodern discourse as depoliticized, the fiction examined in this dissertation redefines the relationship between the sacred and the secular to engender social change and transformation. The dissertation stresses the significance of reconsidering the role of literary spiritualities as a vehicle of transformation. By advancing such reconsideration, the dissertation achieves two goals. First, it argues for the impurity of the secular as a construct and sees in this impurity a chance for theory to transcend diagnosis and deconstruction and move toward transformation. Second, by revealing a redemptive sensibility within postmodern discourse, the dissertation challenges Hutcheon's characterization of postmodern culture and discourse as "complicitous critique," showing how culture weaves narratives of restoration to counteract the pressure of fragmentation brought about by global capitalism.

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Texte remanié de: Diss.--Stuttgart--Universiẗat, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 239-263.

In this dissertation, Claire Lauer proposes a spatial-metaphorical model for exploring and communicating the self in composition. She uses the concepts of Edward Soja's Thirdspace, Michel de Certeau's tactics, and Turkle and Papert's bricolage as lenses through which to analyze and understand the spatial-metaphorical self-constructions that students in her classes built in the virtual reality of the MOO. These lenses reveal a new kind of agency, one that finds power in complexity and refuses reduction. Through their sites, students show themselves to be comfortable with the unfamiliar and the ambiguous, but also able to adapt, change shape, and see the I as an all--as an infinite sum and ever-changing total. Lauer argues that offering students the opportunity to construct themselves spatially and metaphorically disrupts their assumptions about identity and provides them with new ways of expressing their postmodern subjectivities--of speaking to and about their ever-shifting proximities to the people and events in their lives.Lauer argues that recognizing the complexity of identity facilitates a recognition of the complexity of culture and communication, and shows how identity construction assignments can thus serve as models for larger knowledge exploration and construction. She concludes by arguing that the analysis and production of new media in the composition classroom is essential to the continued goal of composition instructors fostering critical engagement in the classroom. As an extension of identity investigation, such engagement should be a cornerstone of first-year composition and does not have to be at odds with the more practical work of preparing students for their academic careers. In fact, it facilitates the more practical work instructors do in composition because it allows students to see the constructed nature of all discourses and become aware of how we both compose and are composed by the texts we encounter.

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This self-study, written in narrative form, considers the design of a “pedagogy of meaning” (Cooper, 2009) that supports children’s identity-construction, as the children uniquely “appear” in the classroom. The author shares this process with the children in her Grade 1 classroom. As part of the children’s “appearance” in the classroom, “voices” which have not often been heard come to be shared in meaningful/meaning-making ways. Also, in the course of this pedagogical design process, the author explores the construction of her own “teacher identities”. The study is theoretically inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach; in particular, the central tenet of the “image of the child” as competent, capable, and resourceful (Rinaldi, 1993). This is a postmodern image of the child brought into being through the process of telling and interpreting stories of past and present. This “image of the child” is utilized as a guiding concept as the author endeavours to conceptualize and enact her own interpretation of a pedagogy of meaning in her Grade 1 classroom context. A pedagogy of meaning is conceptualized as a relational and malleable construct negotiated between the teacher and children and among the children themselves, enriched by the participants’ individual and shared identities, contexts, and experiences.

Scholarship on David Foster Wallace understandably tends to focus on addiction in his novel Infinite Jest, as well as on his stated desire for a literary movement that transcends the recursive, ironic loop of the postmodern. This essay, however, explores issues of trauma and perversion in Wallace's fiction – primarily beginning with Infinite Jest, chronologically speaking – demonstrating Wallace's concern with the freedom of choice. A palpable friction exists between conservatism and sexual taboos, and this friction characterizes much, if not most, of Wallace's fictional oeuvre. A principally psychoanalytic reading of the sexual elements at play in Infinite Jest, as well as in several stories from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion, cultivates a more thorough understanding of the addiction theme present in his work.

The “urban” mathematics classroom has become an increasingly polarized site, one where many middle-class White teachers attempt to bridge the divide between themselves and their relatively economically disadvantaged, non-White students. With its mania for high-stakes testing, current education policy has intensified the importance of mathematics in the school curriculum—both drawing attention to and reifying an “achievement gap” between White (and Asian) and non-White students (Martin, 2009c, 2010). Keeping in mind the Mathematics for all rhetoric as it affects the academic and life success of students (Martin, 2003), this cultural polarization in the mathematics classroom provides a rich site for exploring pedagogical practices that might improve mathematics achievement and persistence for all students. As a middle-class White man, I am a teacher in such a divided situation; I have spent the past 7 years working with almost entirely Black 9th graders as a mathematics classroom teacher in an urban high school. In this study, I employ a critical postmodern theoretical perspective (Stinson, 2009; Stinson & Bullock, 2012) toward an autoethnography (e.g., Ellis & Bochner, 2000) of my experiences as a teacher in this particular educational environment. Using writing as a “method of inquiry” (Richardson, 2000), with an emphasis on two particular intersections of critical race theory (e.g., Tate, 1997) and poststructural theory (e.g., St. Pierre, 2011)—the role of storytelling and the concept of “race” as metanarrative—I examine, theorize, and (re)tell of my life and teaching experiences. My aim is to provide assistance of sorts for a new teacher in a similar situation; the kind of educator—middle class and White—who, according to projections, will more times than not be filling the role of teacher in the urban mathematics classroom. The goal of this study is twofold: (a) to gain and share theoretical and practical insight into my teacher identity and pedagogical practices, and (b) to provide potential insight for and assistance to other mathematics teachers who may see themselves in the (re)telling of my stories.