discovered by the Process: A Methodology for Twentieth-Century Moral Fiction

One of the great ironies of the ethical turn that literary criticism has taken in the last several decades is that while we as literary critics strive to be ethical or moral, we usually feel embarrassed at actually taking about moral concepts, especially as they are manifested in literary texts. As I am interested in how to discuss moral issues depicted in literary texts without reading them naively and reductively for guidelines to live by or for a social program to implement, my dissertation is designed to model a method of inquiry that approaches literary texts of the twentieth century as moral fiction, i.e., as explorations of the moral enabled through deployment of form, narrative methods, rhetorical and linguistic devices, and literary techniques. My method is to select texts in which particular thematic moral issues appear especially salient, but then, through a careful rhetorical and narratological analysis of the texts\u27 specific literary techniques, devices and narrative strategies, to focus on how the texts handle the issues aesthetically, structurally, and rhetorically. What I call moral fiction is fiction that confronts and engages moral issues, dilemmas, and questions but that resists overt moralizing through the use of distinctive narrative strategies and literary techniques. The most interesting moral fiction, I argue, integrates aesthetic complexity with moral responsibility and confronts moral complexity with aesthetic responsibility

The Twenty-Frist Century Pantagruel: The Function of Grotesque Aesthetics in the Contemporary World

This dissertation examines whether the grotesque, an aesthetic form associated with the carnivalesque literary mode and commonly seen as aesthetically and politically subversive, can resume its function within the contemporary context in which carnivalisation of everyday life is a frequently noted aspect of capitalist culture. Locating as its primary image the human body in the process of often-violent deformation, this study explores this problem by theorising the grotesque as Janus-faced: existing on the boundary between the Symbolic and the Real. As such, I argue that the grotesque is: a) deeply related to cultural attempts to challenge hegemonic structures, even as these challenges become themselves implicated in the power structures they oppose (Chapters 1, 2, and 3); and b) a concept that reveals the realm of the Real as independent of human consciousness while also being of profound interest for this consciousness and the subjectivity which it underpins (Chapters 3 and 4). In outlining this argument, this study deploys the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou, as well as the work of Jacques Rancière, Henri Lefebvre, Thomas Metzinger, Catherine Malabou, Quentin Meillassoux, and Ray Brassier. It, furthermore, works its way backwards from the Anglo-American cultural scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s (Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), through elaborations of punk anti-Thatcherite London(s) of the late 1970s/early 1980s (Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, and Iain Sinclair White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings), to post-1968 attempts to reinvigorate a progressive vision of the USA and write it (back) into existence through Gonzo autobiography and journalism (Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). In this way, the argument of this work tries to find a path – through a deformed human body in works of literature, film, and comics – toward a non-human world that can be deployed in the service of a progressive political vision, even while the autonomy of this non-human world is recognised

Enrichment strategies for gifted English first language (HG) pupils at the senior secondary level : a critical evaluation of a programme implemented at Grey Boys' High School, Port Elizabeth, 1986-1988

Programmes developed specifically for the gifted and talented pupil are not a novel idea. Yet, by comparison, the history of gifted education is a brief one. Highly gifted and talented pupils often have difficulty being challenged in a conventional classroom situation. Since classroom instruction is usually designed for the benefit of pupils who function at the level of the majority of their peer age-group, this teaching, no matter how well done, may not be appropriate for the extremely gifted pupil whose abilities differ greatly from this group. Even special programmes for gifted and talented students may be designed for a broad group of gifted students and may not meet the specific needs of the gifted child, especially ones with a special intellectual talent. While it is important to bear aspects such as the characteristics of giftedness and the attributes of the talented individual in mind, the basis of this dissertation examines what enrichment and acceleration strategies may be utilised by the English First Language (HG) teacher when presented with a preselected group of pupils who are gifted in English, utilising a composite gifted educational model as a mechanism for the development of this specific programme

Poetic Critique

This book seeks to breathe new life into Friedrich Schlegel's idea of ‘poetic critique,’ but also asks about its limitations. What forms might critique take when practiced poetically? Can this practice be rigorous enough to maintain a right of citizenship in the academy? How can the notion of poetic critique intervene in current debates on critique and post-critique? These essays offer a variety of new perspectives on these and similar questions

Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy

Drawing on a range of canonical and non-canonical literary, cinematic and social scientific texts produced in post-Unification Italy, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy is an interdisciplinary study of how racial and colonial discourses shaped the “making” of Italians as modern political subjects in the years between its administrative unification (1861-1870) and the end of the First World War (1919). The book includes readings of texts by Italian thinkers such as Leopoldo Franchetti and Paolo Mantegazza and it offers new readings of well- and lesser-known texts by a writer who has become Italy’s most infamous precursor to Mussolini: poet, novelist, and political provocateur Gabriele D’Annunzio. Vital Subjects concludes with an original analysis of an early film that figures prominently in the history of cinema: Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 silent film Cabiria--produced in the wake of the Italian invasion of Libya (1911-12) and celebrating ancient Roman imperialism

The value of culture: on the relationship between economics and arts

Culture manifests itself in everything human, including the ordinary business of everyday life. Culture and art have their own value, but economic values are also constrained. Art sponsorships and subsidies suggest a value that exceeds market price. So what is the real value of culture? Unlike the usual focus on formal problems, which has 'de-cultured' and 'de-moralized' the practice of economics, this book brings together economists, philosophers, historians, political scientists and artists to try to sort out the value of culture. This is a book not only for economists and social scientists, but also for anybody actively involved in the world of the arts and culture

Rhetorical memory, synaptic mapping, and ethical grounding

This research applies neuroscience to classical accounts of rhetorical memory, and argues that the physical operations of memory via synaptic activity support causal theories of language, and account for individual agency in systematically considering, creating, and revising our stances toward rhetorical situations. The dissertation explores ways that rhetorical memory grounds the work of the other canons of rhetoric in specific contexts, thereby expanding memory's classical function as "custodian" to the canons. In this approach, rhetorical memory actively orients the canons as interdependent phases of discursive communicative acts, and grounds them in an ethical baseline from which we enter discourse. Finally, the work applies its re-conception of rhetorical memory to various aspects of composition and Living Learning Community educational models via practical and deliberate interpretation and arrangement of our synaptic "maps.

Vital Subjects

Drawing on a range of canonical and non-canonical literary, cinematic and social scientific texts produced in post-Unification Italy, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy is an interdisciplinary study of how racial and colonial discourses shaped the "making" of Italians as modern political subjects in the years between its administrative unification (1861–1870) and the end of the First World War (1919). The book includes readings of texts by Italian thinkers such as Leopoldo Franchetti and Paolo Mantegazza and it offers new readings of well- and lesser-known texts by a writer who has become Italy's most infamous precursor to Mussolini: poet, novelist, and political provocateur Gabriele D'Annunzio. Vital Subjects concludes with an original analysis of an early film that figures prominently in the history of cinema: Giovanni Pastrone's 1914 silent film Cabiria— produced in the wake of the Italian invasion of Libya (1911–12) and celebrating ancient Roman imperialism