This study seeks to confront the ontological crises of the subject. Through an examination of twentieth century texts (including fiction, autobiography and Freudian case studies), I demonstrate the effects of subjective compliance with disembodied discourses. Using psychoanalytic theory, I ask: What are the ethical limits of interpretation within the psychoanalysis and literary criticism? And what alternative strategies of intersubjective exchange could we employ that would aspire to avoid instances of such hermeneutic tyranny? / Further, what evidence is there that the subject, in the face of overwhelming discursive compliance, continues attempting to realize its ontological status? My hypothesis is that while theory (i.e. discourse) may prove beneficial to the subject, it should not endeavour to prevent the subject itself from Being. Taking subjective ontology, and not liberation or self-representation, as the primary goal of interpretation, I explore means by which we may provide "good enough facilitating environments" for the subject.

Abyss Creations has been creating and selling extremely life-like silicone dolls designed primarily for sex known as Real Dolls since 1996. Since 2001, The Doll Forum has provided an online space where users of Real Dolls are able to connect with one another and discuss a myriad of issues relating to the use of Real Dolls. This thesis explores the specific ways in which members utilize The Doll Forum as a space to discursively construct gender, sexuality, and relationships as they pertain to the use of Real Dolls. Utilizing the theory of performativity, I engage in a Critical Discourse Analysis of one month of posts from The Doll Forum. I argue that through the discussions and images which members post within The Doll Forum, they discursively work to both reinforce and challenge current constructions of gender, sexuality, and relationships. By doing so, members of The Doll Forum use the space to normalize their sexual behaviour, as well as reinforce the performative nature of these constructions.

Through an analysis of History Geography and Social Science subject matter in the elementary level curriculum in Chile, this thesis highlights the role of official education in constructing a notion of human being that gravitates toward Whiteness. The law of education and the curriculum are analyzed to examine the way in which official curriculum operates as a mechanism for oppression, exclusion, and marginalization. It is argued that through the curriculum, a national ideology that incorporates a hegemonic notion of ideal human being and citizen is promoted. Using an anti-colonial, anti-racist discursive framework, and techniques from Critical Discourse Analysis, this work locates Chilean official education and curriculum as the culmination of colonial and racist notion of human and citizenship values supported by the neoliberal state. The researcher advocates for equity and justice in the education system that acknowledges Chile as a multicultural country where different ways of knowing coexist.

No description available.

This thesis is a description of the process of constructing a productive Other for the purpose of being admitted into Canada as a Convention refugee. The manuscript is divided into two parts: in Part One, The Claimant, the process of claiming refugee status is analyzed with respect to two actual cases which were transcribed in Montreal in 1987, and contextualized by reference to the laws and jurisprudence that underlie it. In Part Two, The Other, I re-examine the entire process with reference to methodologies from the realm of discourse analysis and interaction theory, paying special attention to the works of Marc Angenot, M. M. Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Teun Van Dijk, in order to illustrate the movement from Refugee claimant to claimant as "diminished Other."

This study offers a pragmatic account of verbal irony, arguing that verbal irony can be best treated as a special type of conversational implicature.As the first part of the thesis, Grice's theory of conversational implicature is revised. This is done by 1)an addition to Grice's Maxim of Quality so that this maxim will be able to take presupposition into account; 2)an inclusion of the notion of mutual knowledge in Grice's framework and 3)an establishment of speakers' motivation for violating Grice's Maxims. This motivation is subsumed into three principles--the Politeness Principle (PP) (following previous writers such as R. Lakoff, Brown and Levinson), which embodies the speaker's need and want to be polite to others, the Selfishness Principle (SP), which constrains the speaker to say things that will bring him/her desirable consequences, and the Expressivity Principle (EP), by observing which the speaker will succeed in leaving more propositional and emotional impact on the hearer. Lastly, a heuristic of implicature production and understanding is offered which is believed to be more coherent and explanatory than Grice's original procedures for implicature calculation.Second, the revised theory is applied to verbal irony. Based on the heuristic of implicature production and understanding, a heuristic of irony production and understanding is provided. This heuristic demonstrates that irony is both similar to and different from ordinary conversational implicatures. It is similar in that it results from the speaker's observance of the motivating principles, and thus violation of Grice's maxims. It is different because 1)It is seen as the violation of the Maxim of Quality alone, while in ordinary conversational implicatures, any of the maxims may be violated; and 2)This violation is caused by all the three motivating principles, the PP, the SP, and the EP, whereas an ordinary conversational implicature is usually motivated by one of these three principles. Finally, this heuristic is applied to various cases of verbal irony, showing that the revised theory of conversational implicature is better than previous proposals on the subjuct. / Department of English

Abyss Creations has been creating and selling extremely life-like silicone dolls designed primarily for sex known as Real Dolls since 1996. Since 2001, The Doll Forum has provided an online space where users of Real Dolls are able to connect with one another and discuss a myriad of issues relating to the use of Real Dolls. This thesis explores the specific ways in which members utilize The Doll Forum as a space to discursively construct gender, sexuality, and relationships as they pertain to the use of Real Dolls. Utilizing the theory of performativity, I engage in a Critical Discourse Analysis of one month of posts from The Doll Forum. I argue that through the discussions and images which members post within The Doll Forum, they discursively work to both reinforce and challenge current constructions of gender, sexuality, and relationships. By doing so, members of The Doll Forum use the space to normalize their sexual behaviour, as well as reinforce the performative nature of these constructions.

No description available.

Discourse connectives are metatextual comments that signal discourse coherence relations. They can be realized by sentence adverbials that have their roots in verb phrase adverbials and have followed a path of development that is well attested both for English and cross-linguistically. This study investigates how and why it occurs. It claims that the development belongs to a wider phenomenon of unidirectional internal semantic change, that this change involves context-induced reinterpretation, and that both the immediate discourse context and the wider rhetorical context can be instrumental in bringing it about. Using diachronic and synchronic data in a corpus-linguistic approach, the frequency and distribution of the adverbials after all, in fact, at least and of course are investigated. These are found to follow similar paths of development at different rates and to varying extents. Each undergoes some increase in frequency, subjectification and abstraction, shift of discourse plane and categorial reanalysis. Each acquires at least one connective function to express rhetorical relations such as concession, contrast, justification or elaboration. These relations are defined using the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. The analysis identifies, in the history of the expressions, contexts of co-occurrence with particular relations that are argued to generate connective implicatures which later crystallize. During long periods the expressions may have stable but defeasible implicatures in the relevant contexts. These contexts include rhetorical structures spanning two or more clause complexes and often consisting of quasi-conventional sequences of rhetorical relations typical of argumentation. They may be described as incipient discourse constructions or rhetorical idioms. The emergence of new discourse connectives is seen to share many of the features attested in the grammaticalization of lexical material. It is argued that these phenomena are best accounted for in a single, usage-based theory of internal semantic change.

No description available.