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The purpose of this study was to investigate the discursive construction of teacher subjectivity by mapping and complicating the normative discourses that dictate the im/possibility of what counts as a “good teacher” in Taiwan. This research employed the “new” postmodern ethnography and various methods of data collection, including archival documents, interviews, classroom and school observations, and a researcher’s journal. Data was analyzed using critical discourse analysis and thematic analysis. Feminist poststructuralist theories of identity, subject formation, agency, and teachers as a discursive category were used to inform analyses about the working of regulatory discourses on teacher identity and about teachers’ negotiations. This study juxtaposed competing discourses and historicized discourses as strategies to destabilize commonsense assumptions about the good teacher. The stories about teachers’ schoolgirl days were also gathered not only because there is a dearth of such stories that cut across Taiwan’s history from martial law to democratization but also because educational biography is assumed to be reproduced in teaching. This research found that the normative discourses of the “good teacher” include (1) Good teachers promise students high scores on examinations; (2) Good teachers are moral teachers; (3) Good teachers devote themselves to students; and (4) Good teachers strengthen the nation. Two transgressive discourses that arise from my analysis of archival texts include (1) Good teachers recognize students’ homosexual identities; and (2) Good teachers question the government’s educational policies. The researcher concluded that the “good teacher” should be better understood as a “normative ideal” (Young, 1990, p. 320) that designates what a teacher ought to be, but obscures the cultural and historical specificities of the identity category good teachers and excludes the excessive discourses and knowledge that teachers employ to live the identity called teacher. Implications for teacher-education curriculum are provided. The researcher also suggests implications for (1) the future research on teacher education; (2) the methodologies used to study teachers; and (3) the education and educational research in Taiwan. / text

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The school of thought articulated by critical theorists Giorgio Agamben and Joan Copjec differ from each other in methodology, approach, and language. Yet, both Agamben and Copjec each write to reject positivist notions of ethics, which each theorist identifies as rooted in the same ideological apparatuses that propagate exclusionary and violent actions. By turning away from pre-given ethics and ideology, these writers attempt to delineate why these philosophies have been the vehicle of violence and racial oppression, and reiterate the importance of turning away from such thought in order for the subject to conceptualize a new way of being and relating to others that combats dominant ideology. Agamben's theoretical concept of homo sacer that lies at the center of his philosophical project, and Copjec's Lacanian understanding of the subject as inherently ruptured, both delineate subjectivity, as well as the concepts of race and racism in novel ways. Using these theorists to read Morrison's novels illustrates the critical concepts outlined by these two thinkers. In the first chapter of this thesis, I plan to outline Agamben's notion of homo sacer, and Copjec's theorizing of the subject as inherently ruptured. I employ Morrison's piece of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, to demonstrate how Morrison's literary and intellectual project as a writer also aims to refigure subjectivity, illustrating and expanding upon Agamben and Copjec's work. In the second chapter, I will move on to discuss Agamben's political philosophy and concept of homo sacer, analyzing Morrison's novels, A Mercy, and Home to demonstrate how her work illustrates and expands upon Agamben's analysis of biopolitics. Lastly, in the third chapter of this thesis, I place Morrison in dialogue with Copjec, demonstrating how Morrison's characters illustrate the notion of a ruptured subject, and why it is important to read her work through this lens. I aim to demonstrate how Morrison's characters expand upon the notions of race, femininity, and subjectivity as conceived by Copjec. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to delineate why it is beneficial to place these three writers in dialogue with one another to analyze notions of racial identity, subjectivity, violence, and trauma.

Lee King Hang Roger. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-144). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Chapter 0 --- INTRODUCTION / Chapter 0.1 --- Why Study Thomas Nagel? / Chapter 0.2 --- The Contribution of Nagel / Chapter 0.3 --- Why do we need such Reformulation? / Chapter 0.4 --- The Approach of This Paper / Chapter 1 --- INTUITION / Chapter 1.1 --- Rorty's Argument against Intuitive Realism / Chapter 1.2 --- The Priority of Intuition / Chapter 2 --- VIEWPOINTS / Chapter 2.1 --- The Nature of Viewpoints / Chapter 2.2 --- The Subjective and the Objective Viewpoints / Chapter 2.3 --- The Existence of the Two Viewpoints as a Fundamental Fact of Reflective Human Beings / Chapter 3 --- REALITY / Chapter 3.1 --- Reconsidering Reality / Chapter 3.2 --- Subjective Reality / Chapter 3.3 --- Objective Reality / Chapter 3.4 --- The Inescapabilily of the Idea of Subjective and Objective Reality / Chapter 4 --- THE CONFLICT / Chapter 4.1 --- Subjective and Objective Reconsidered / Chapter 4.2 --- The Nature of the Conflict / Chapter 4.3 --- The Significance of Nagel's Reformulation / Chapter 5 --- CONCLUSION: THE ULTIMATE MYSTERY

This thesis examines a model of subjectivity - the subtle body - and the aesthetic and ethical relations that emerge from its proposition. By drawing together a number of discourses from three religious and philosophical traditions - Eastern, Western and Esoteric - the thesis develops an innovative approach to the consideration of the dualisms at the heart of the dominant Western discourse : self-spirit; mind-body; reason-emotion; I-other. The research is broadly transdisciplinary and cross-cultural, tracing conceptual interrelations across the disciplines of religions, philosophy and art-history theory. The thesis structure reflects the radical extensivity of subtle bodies and is designed to accommodate the development of many interrelating arguments. This is achieved by building the argument in a syntagmatic fashion via subsequent chapters, as well as by utilising a paradigmatic development. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Eileen Chang (1920-1995), a legendary female writer in Chinese literature history, lived in the most turbulent time of contemporary China. Her works are all about love. Her characters are all insignificant people, unrealistically invested with illusory dreams of life, but meanwhile, absorbed by worldly pursuits and pleasures. And her tone is desolate. People worship her, both as a great writer and as a mysterious woman. From 1980s, the fascination with her and her literature overtly announces itself in Chinese language cinema. Several critically acclaimed directors have intended to adapt her aura and charisma through adapting her literature. But, the result of their efforts is not optimistic; the disparity between the films and the novels still has been widely sensed. My thesis focuses on the film adaptations of her novels. I intend to explore this woman?s world through cinema; precisely, through the unexpected gap between her novels and their film versions, in order to explore the reality and moods in her mind that are hard to visualize. The same events, moments and situations presented in both the novels and the films also offer great opportunities for the comparison of two different ways of story-telling.

The goal of this project is to attempt a logical unfolding of one basic idea -that value emerges out of the chaos of energy through natural selection. The goal of the first chapter is to attempt to determine the origin of value. The goal of the second chapter is to attempt to determine the origin of the conception of value. A s a first approximation, it can be said that the first chapter seeks for an objective and the second for a subjective account of the origin of value. There is a paradox in this description, however. The objective gives rise to the subjective, but the subjective then constructs the objective. Objects give rise to subjects, but subjects then construct their objects, and different subjects may construct the world into different objects. This thesis shall attempt to resolve this paradox by describing the course of the emergence of value from the objective into the subjective and then back into the objective, without falling into the vicious circle that results from seeing the world as a juxtaposition of the objective and the subjective. As I hope to show, in the course of the first two chapters, and the ones to follow, the objective and the subjective are idealizations. They are two asymptotes which knowledge approaches but cannot touch. Knowledge ranges between objectivity and subjectivity, without attaining either. Knowledge is knowledge of something and is to that extent objective. Knowledge is knowledge by someone and is to that extent subjective. Because knowledge has an element of subjectivity, it cannot be purely objective. And because knowledge has an element of objectivity, it cannot be purely subjective. The resolution of the juxtaposition between the objective and the subjective, will allow us to describe the emergence of value out of the objective into the subjective and back in terms that do not presuppose either. Subjects arise out of reality that is undivided, and only then divide it into objects in accordance with their constitution, provided to them by undivided reality.

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