Feeling Subjects investigates sensibility in relation to the production of subjectivity in the later eighteenth century. It creates a model of sensibility as a discursive space bringing together literary, philosophical, and medical understandings of feeling. It argues that sensibility’s discursive space produces experiential subjects in an ongoing, dynamic project of negotiating between the internalization of public experiences and the projection of private feelings and thoughts. It invokes the three-dimensional image of the Möbius strip to envision inner/private and external/public expressions of feeling as inseparable, yet distinct elements that help to produce the feeling subject. This model of sensibility represents a new theory of subjectivity in the later eighteenth-century where the literary subject and the social community that surrounds him or her are both co-constitutive and co-destructive and where the traditional binaries are challenged in a model that sees every character as simultaneously a public and private subject. The aim of the project is to show that the legacies of rational men and emotional women which have occupied scholars of the eighteenth century for much of the last fifty years suggest a much more cohesive understanding of gender and its connection to subjectivity than is revealed in much of the fiction of sensibility in the period. Feeling Subjects offers a theory of sensibility that is not inherently gendered, and that focuses on how individuals experience themselves in relation to the world around them while simultaneously generating that world. The project is divided into two halves which enact the Möbius model of private and public feeling. The first half focuses on the personally and socially productive potential of sensibility in The Adventures of David Simple, The History of Ophelia, The Vicar of Wakefield, and The Fool of Quality. The second half examines the increasingly negative expression of sensibility in A Simple Story, Secresy, The Natural Daughter, and Zofloya. Throughout Feeling Subjects, sensibility is not just a word denoting the expression of feeling, but a discursive space through which to experience the tensions and interrelations between public and private thought and feeling in theories of socialization in the later eighteenth-century novel. / English

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

This dissertation explores how rural young people imagine their futures in neo-liberal times. The analysis is based upon three months of ethnographic research with grade 7/8 students in ‘Fieldsville,’ a predominantly white and working-class rural community in Southeastern Ontario. I examine students' participation in a widely-used career-education program called The Real Game, in which they are encouraged to become entrepreneurial subjects capable of crafting productive futures in an uncertain world. My study asks: How do these young people produce and perform their imagined future selves, and what does this suggest about the opportunities and constraints that shape their current identities? Integrating insights from feminist poststructural theory and cultural geography, the project extends and challenges studies of the neo-liberal subject by integrating an analysis of place. The thesis builds upon, and contributes to, critical scholarship theorizing young lives as socially, spatially and temporally situated by exploring processes of location within subjectivity formation. Integrating classroom and playground observations with focus groups and interviews, the analysis reveals that young people draw upon diverse discourses in order to envision the person they hope to become. In addition to the subject positions on offer in The Real Game, popular culture provides a key resource in practices of self-making, as students invest in middle-class ideals of the “good life,” and distinguish their own rural location from racialized mappings of urban and global others. Although Fieldsville students are deeply invested in their rural community, tensions emerge where local attachments meet dominant narratives of mobility that encourage them to locate their futures elsewhere. These place-based tensions present particular challenges for girls, who must negotiate the gendered dynamics of rural social space alongside popular discourses of “girl power” that proffer unlimited possibilities for today's young women. Teasing apart the intersections of gender, race, class and space within students' narratives, I argue that studies of neo-liberal subjectivity must examine how dominant discourses are negotiated from particular social and geographical locations. Methodologically, the analysis demonstrates how school-based ethnography can shed light on broader socio-historical processes as they are lived in specific geographical and cultural spaces.

This dissertation explores how rural young people imagine their futures in neo-liberal times. The analysis is based upon three months of ethnographic research with grade 7/8 students in ‘Fieldsville,’ a predominantly white and working-class rural community in Southeastern Ontario. I examine students' participation in a widely-used career-education program called The Real Game, in which they are encouraged to become entrepreneurial subjects capable of crafting productive futures in an uncertain world. My study asks: How do these young people produce and perform their imagined future selves, and what does this suggest about the opportunities and constraints that shape their current identities? Integrating insights from feminist poststructural theory and cultural geography, the project extends and challenges studies of the neo-liberal subject by integrating an analysis of place. The thesis builds upon, and contributes to, critical scholarship theorizing young lives as socially, spatially and temporally situated by exploring processes of location within subjectivity formation. Integrating classroom and playground observations with focus groups and interviews, the analysis reveals that young people draw upon diverse discourses in order to envision the person they hope to become. In addition to the subject positions on offer in The Real Game, popular culture provides a key resource in practices of self-making, as students invest in middle-class ideals of the “good life,” and distinguish their own rural location from racialized mappings of urban and global others. Although Fieldsville students are deeply invested in their rural community, tensions emerge where local attachments meet dominant narratives of mobility that encourage them to locate their futures elsewhere. These place-based tensions present particular challenges for girls, who must negotiate the gendered dynamics of rural social space alongside popular discourses of “girl power” that proffer unlimited possibilities for today's young women. Teasing apart the intersections of gender, race, class and space within students' narratives, I argue that studies of neo-liberal subjectivity must examine how dominant discourses are negotiated from particular social and geographical locations. Methodologically, the analysis demonstrates how school-based ethnography can shed light on broader socio-historical processes as they are lived in specific geographical and cultural spaces.

The central concerns of this project are the visual constructions of feminine and feminist subjectivities, significations and semiotics of the (brown) female body, and the pleasures and power of global visual culture. I consider the primary visual fields that seek to tell the story of Pakistani women, and Muslim woman more broadly, after September 11th, 2001. Specifically, I offer detailed case studies of three visual stories: international human rights sensation Mukhtar Mai; twice elected Prime Minister of Pakistan and first woman to lead a Muslim country Benazir Bhutto; and female terrorists/religious martyrs of the Red Mosque events in Islamabad, Pakistan. I locate the relevance of these visual stories on three axes − human rights, democratization and the war on terror − where each operates as an arm of, what Jasbir Paur (2007) calls, the U.S. hetero-normative nation. I also examine the structures of affect, pleasure and eroticism that are embedded in these popularized representations and narrations in the U.S. cultural context. Finally, I offer ways to reread the potential radical subjectivities or possibilities that these visual subjects and their political labor open up.

This dissertation aims to map the black female subject in Toni Morrison¡¦s six fictions¡XThe Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz¡Xby exploring the dialectic between space, which produces power, and the body, which receives or/and resists the power. Since subjectivity relies on the interrelationship among mentality, space, and social power, I use psycho-geopolitical viewpoints about space and the body, which combine Henri Lefebvre¡¦s psycho-spatial concept of ¡§abstract space¡¨ reigned by a logic of visualization and Nigel Thrift¡¦s theory of ¡§personality¡¨ and ¡§socialization¡¨ referring to the individual¡¦s constant negotiations with power relations within space. The introductory chapter presents the motivation of this study, the historical context of the fictions, literature reviews on relative issues, and finally the methodology and organization of the whole thesis. Chapter Two, by explaining the sites of power, the body as the site for articulating the power, and the ensuing strategies of resistance, elaborates how the subtitle of my dissertation¡Xspace, body, and resistance¡X would work in Morrison¡¦s works. Then in each following chapter, two novels would be discussed. In Chapter Three, ¡§Positionality and Self-Love in Beloved and Jazz,¡¨ I study how Lefebvrezian spatial abstractions, through slavery and capitalism, present black female characters a deprived or distorted mirror image and consequently deny or corrupt their positionality and self-love. They then undergo a series of Thriftian socialization by first internalizing the white discourse and the urban mores, then by unearthing and letting go the historical repressed, and finally by recovering their love for self and others in order to reconstruct their subjectivities. They thus gain a budding sense of self. In Chapter Four, ¡§The Failure of Subjectivity in The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon,¡¨ I would examine, in terms of Lefebvre¡¦s ¡§visualization¡¨ within space, how the urban discourse in the Northern setting influences the reading of the body and subordinates the female youngsters to a capitalist and patriarchal hierarchy of power. Chapter Five, ¡§Subjectivity with-out the Community: Sula and The Tar Baby,¡¨ is an attempt to analyze the black female characters¡¦ subjectivity construction upon claiming difference from the community, which confronts spatial abstraction by the phallic power embodied in racial colonization, patriarchy, and capitalism. The heroines thus take marginality or shift locations through journeys as strategies for resistance. The final chapter is a conclusion of the whole thesis.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--California State University, Long Beach, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 312-319). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-212).