This dissertation explores the redefinition of the political role attributed to literary works in the Latin American tradition, a redefinition motivated by a perceived crisis in representation that ...has been approached from cultural and literary studies particularly since the mid-1980s. In this context, I examine the relationship between the tropes of irony and allegory and the reconfiguration of the public and the private spheres observed in contemporary Colombian literature, focusing on works written in the past 25 years. It is my purpose in this dissertation to analyze how the tropes of irony and allegory have figured in cultural and literary discourses and practices in Latin America, particularly focusing on the postmodern and the postcolonial, as it is within these paradigms that the tropes of irony and allegory have been approached as indicators of political commitment—or lack thereof—in literary and critical works. This study departs from two interrelated hypotheses: that there has been a marked retreat into the private sphere in contemporary Colombian novels, and that this retreat is underscored by the use of irony and allegory, which ultimately points to the redefinition of the political role of literature in Latin America. To contextualize the discussion, I offer an overview of the way in which postmodern and postcolonial discourse has been received in Latin America, and the political potential that each paradigm contemplates. Establishing connections between Jameson, Rorty, Ashcroft, and Hutcheon, I present and problematize the premise that the ironist novel is primarily motivated by aesthetic and self-determination concerns and is circumscribed to the private sphere, whereas the allegorical novel addresses political concerns and is circumscribed to the public sphere. My analysis of several Colombian novels illustrates how the tropes of irony and allegory point to a sense of indeterminacy, even defeat, and in turn to traumatic experiences in the public sphere and a retreat into the private. It is my conclusion that such retreat does not imply an abandonment of politics, but a redefinition of its role in terms of private and everyday life, which in the long run, makes a reconfiguration of the public sphere possible.
For pragmatists, the inability to stand outside of the contingencies of human practice does not impede social criticism. However, several pragmatists have argued that Richard Rorty’s position ...unnecessarily and undesirably circumscribes the scope of social criticism, allowing for nothing more than an appeal to current practices, with no way to challenge or revise them. This article argues against this understanding, showing that on Rorty’s account, social criticism is an interpretive activity in which critics draw on elements within current practices, focusing attention on the ways in which a society’s practices fail to live up to its self-image. In so doing, Rorty’s position is shown to allow for everything that his fellow pragmatists think important, but take him to be denying.
This paper examines the relationship between truth and liberal politics via the work of Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty. I argue that Williams is right to think that there are positive relations ...between truth, specifically a realist understanding of truth, and liberal politics that Rorty's abandonment of the realist vocabulary of truth undermines. At the heart of this concern is the worry that abandoning the realist vocabulary opens up the possibility that the standards of justification for our true beliefs can be manipulated by those with the power to do so in order to further their own political ends. The political benefit of realism is that it fixes the standards of justification and makes them immune to manipulation by the use of power. However, I suggest that there is a form of realism available that Rorty can accept which would deliver the political benefits of the realist vocabulary without requiring him to accept the thick realist metaphysics that he wants to avoid. My conclusion is that there is a positive and important relationship between truth and liberal politics, a relationship that can be sustained without any necessary commitment to realist metaphysics.
A Conversation with Cornel West DUMM, THOMAS; LENSON, DAVID
The Massachusetts review,
04/2009, Letnik:
50, Številka:
1/2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
An interview with Princeton University professor Cornel West is presented. West compares his education to Du Bois wherein The degree and depth of segregation in his time was much greater than what he ...would experience. Also, he shares his opinions regarding the movement from the blues to funk to jazz.
This dissertation argues that the biblical hermeneutic of the contemporary spiritual warfare movement (CSWM), of which C. Peter Wagner and Charles H. Kraft are strong advocates, is to be rejected due ...to the fact that it strongly mirrors reader-response hermeneutical methodology, which through its presuppositions denies the scriptural text of its authority by placing personal religious and missionary experience as either equal to or above the biblical text in the interpretation process. Christian missionaries targeting Javanese Muslims should, therefore, devote their time and energy to communicating the Gospel in a contextual manner rather than focusing on CSWM missionary practices. Chapter 1 introduces the thesis by describing the missionary strategies that have been created for reaching Javanese Muslims in the past and by demonstrating the need for a biblically-based strategy for evangelizing them in the twenty-first century. Chapter 2 contains an analysis of Javanese Muslim culture and worldview, which includes an evaluation of the religious, political, and social context. Chapter 3 introduces the contemporary spiritual warfare movement (CSWM) and evaluates its major teachings and practices. The hermeneutical techniques of C. Peter Wagner and Charles H. Kraft, leaders of the movement, are given special attention. Chapter 4 provides an introduction to reader-response hermeneutical methodology and then makes a comparison with the hermeneutical approach taken by leading CSWM proponents. It is shown that the CSWM hermeneutic can best be described as that of reader-response and, therefore, devalues biblical authority. Chapter 5 argues for prioritizing the communication of Christ to Javanese Muslims instead of adopting CSWM beliefs and practices. Chapter 6 provides a summary of the conclusions and challenges missionaries to continue preaching the Gospel to Javanese Muslims.
The Merovingian dynasty ruled Francia for almost three hundred years, and a substantial portion of that kingdom’s record survives in the form of hagiography. This used to disappoint historians: from ...a formal perspective, vitae are principally dedicated to narrating the virtues and accomplishments of exemplary Christians. They do not claim to be exhaustive surveys. But in a time of great political and social experimentation, as the seventh and early eighth centuries were, there was hardly a consensus on what constituted a good life (“vita”), and by extension a good society, in the first place. As a result, the hagiography of this period was inherently argumentative. And because they argued for no less than a restructured Merovingian polity—in terms of its government, its wealth, and its identity—hagiographers blended elements of history, literature, and theology, along with theories of writing, orality, and cognition, in order to captivate and persuade. The vitae direct our attention to a major transformation in Francia that left traces throughout the historical record, which is that the standards for political legitimacy were changing in response to Christian ideas about social responsibility. This was a change that the vitae both documented and engineered. As a result, these texts offer privileged but complicated access to the social and intellectual world of the later Merovingian period. If scholars have already shrugged off earlier disappointments and turned to hagiography to flesh out their sense of the period, the contribution of this project is to focus on the vitae themselves as participants in that history, to consider critically the relationship between hagiography and the society it sought to represent and transform. The boundary between text and reality was porous, not just because poststructuralists suggest we see it that way, but also because hagiography insisted on it. In their narratives, and through their narratives, the vitae restructured the terms of interdependence between the crown, aristocracy, clergy, and the general population at a time when the kingdom was especially receptive to new ways of defining and defending itself.
This dissertation argues that pragmatic empathy, which is defined as the phase of communicative interaction where speakers respond as (an)other to common concerns, best articulates successful ...discursive encounters across cultural, political, and social differences. This project challenges the prevailing social constructionist paradigm that suggests that speakers must share cultural-linguistic conventions in order to communicate. By integrating the tenets of discursive interactionism—a causal description of language and communication—with the principles of North American Pragmatism, I argue that discursive competence with those we perceive as culturally, politically, or socially different precedes not through a sharing of signification practices but instead through the location and creation of meaning within the temporal limits of discursive encounters. Thus, pragmatic empathy names the limited nature of identification available to speakers in discursive exchanges across difference. The implications of this research are two-fold: First, it demonstrates how communication across difference does not require speakers to share languages or conventions prior to discourse; rather, understanding depends upon the speaker’s ethical stance toward the other; Second, pragmatic empathy offers a pedagogical and epistemological model for engaging the diverse discourse practices of students in the heterogeneous college classrooms of an increasingly globalized academy.
Many philosophers of education emphasise the impossibility to really "solve" philosophical--and with that, educational--problems these days. Philosophers have been trying to give philosophy a new, ...constructive turn in the face of this insolvability. This paper focuses on irony-based approaches that try to exploit the very uncertainty of philosophical issues to further philosophical understanding. We will first briefly discuss a few highlights of historical uses of irony as a philosophical tool. Then we concentrate on two different interpretations of irony, formulated by Bransen and Rorty, that aim at gaining insight into how we make meaning of the world, while at the same time recognising that such an understanding would be impossible. After discussing some problematic aspects of these interpretations a third interpretation of irony is developed, based on a third view of the nature of meaning-making. Following these three interpretations, we will discuss their philosophical merits and the different kinds of insight they can produce for philosophy of education.
...Vattimo understands secularization as a weakening of metaphysical propositions mat claim absolute trudi status and typically, and perhaps inevitably, are enforced with violence.7 In this weakening ...Vattimo locates the fundamental Christian commandment of love-a commandment that cannot be secularized (66). Because atheism also loses its philosophical foundations in post-metaphysical thought, "religiously unmusical" individuals such as Rorty are absolved of the need to sustain their atheism with strong truth claims or to have any opinion about God at all (30-1). ...Rorty maintains his strong commitment to anti-clericalism as a political program (33). According to Vattimo, the Bible constitutes his very being, a Heideggerian claim that emphasizes his historicity (36).
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