This dissertation looks at the way in which the shifting configurations of nation, gender and future in Micah might affect readers' positioning as subjects---that is their positioning as agents of speech and action---in a way that might engender resistance to oppression. It is suggested that if readers of Micah identify with the ambiguous and shifting national and gendered identities, within the context of the book's visions for the future, they are urged to recognize contradictions within their own subjectivity. This has the possible effect of shifting the reader's pre-formed subject position, or at least interrogating it, a process which may allow for resistance to oppression. The theoretical problematic for this approach originates within recent discussions of textual determinacy in biblical and literary criticism: "is it the text or the reader that controls meaning?" The work of theorist Homi K. Bhabha on the negotiation of cultural difference in colonial and post-colonial contexts is used to engage the position---common to much contemporary literary and cultural criticism---that the reader comes to the text already formed as a subject within ideology, and that this will necessarily affect or control the way she reads the text. Zizek's reading of Althusser through Lacan is taken as a starting point for an understanding of "subject formation" thus conceived. This position, which tends toward the fixity of the subject, can be seen as analogous to Bhabha's discussion of the role of "pedagogical objects and discourses" (cultural icons, stereotypes, formative events) within the construction of national identity. By way of contrast, Bhabha's key concepts---hybridity, third space, outside the sentence, liminal identification, time-lag, agency in indeterminacy; in short performative practice---envision an identification with difference in a way that allows for the subject to be repositioned and for meaning to be reinscribed. Bhabha's notions of pedagogical object and
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.37828 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Runions, Erin. |
| Contributors | Culley, Robert C. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Faculty of Religious Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001807074, proquestno: NQ70143, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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