(M)other Lands, (M)other Tongues: Resistance to the Linear in Two Postcolonial Moroccan Texts

This project focuses on French language novels by two Moroccan authors, Love in Two Languages by Abdelkebir Khatibi and With Downcast Eyes by Tahar Ben Jelloun. Both these novels were written in the 1980s. In Love in Two Languages, which is a novel with a deconstructed plot, the narrator deals with the struggles of having a French lover while being Moroccan, ie. from a country that was colonized by France, as well as his strained relationship with the French language. Ben Jelloun’s book, With Downcast Eyes, is about a young Moroccan girl who moves to France with her family and her struggles to learn French, while also feeling in a constant middle space between Morocco and France. How do both create a new linguistic space, one that is anti-colonial, while also writing in French? How are they reconfiguring the French language and creating a poetics of relation, moving away from a linear colonial conception of poetics? This project examines how these books create a liminal literary space, one that questions its own use of language and does not take French for granted. It is a space which reexamines its relation to the Other, with a capital O. Firstly, this thesis looks at the ways in which muddled narrative structures, character movements and the blurring of geographical settings all work to create a nonlinear literary space, in other words a space that refuses to adopt trajectories of colonialism. The second chapter of this project examines the ways in which the narrators deal with colonial trauma. The chapter focuses on both narrative and linguistic moments of friction and conflict in the texts, which at once shows the need for new literary spaces but also the constant tension in which these spaces exist

Challenging Tongues: The “Irreducible Hybridity” of Language in Contemporary Bilingual Poetry

Contemporary bilingual poetry provides readers with an opportunity to explore and better understand how contemporary artists address the reality of their linguistic contexts. These works pose a challenge to traditional canonical (often national) literatures; furthermore, bilingual poets are keenly attuned to the ways language use represents the personal and political values at stake for their cultures. Bilingual poetry functions as a site of translation where languages interact within the text without traditional demarcations of original and translated text, representing a larger ideological challenge to institutional hierarchies that are often imposed on language. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Internet has fostered bilingual poetry; the quality and proliferation of these works emphasise the need for more critical recognition of this form of expression. The friction, fluidity, cacophony, and subversive impulse of bilingual poetry embodies the convergence of enmity and rapport experienced by the very real speech communities that give them context

Constructing entrepreneurial identities: the case of entrepreneurial dyads

This thesis investigates the processes of identity construction and identity work in entrepreneurial dyads. Entrepreneurial dyads are defined as two-person teams, in which members are bound both by a strong social tie and by a common commitment to start and manage a new business venture. The thesis builds on the work of Watson (2008) and adopts his conceptual framework for understanding how discourse shapes social identities and how these are used to inform the production of a coherent self. The business stories of three entrepreneurial dyads are used as case studies. Data were collected through both storytelling in interviews and direct observation. Entrepreneurs were asked to produce an individual account of their business story. In addition, the dyads' interactive dynamics were directly observed in their natural settings. The business stories produced by the dyads were analysed using the narrative method. First, the narrative styles of the business stories were assessed looking at elements such as plot, structure, and characterisation. This analysis allowed an understanding of the socially available discourses which provided the entrepreneurs with a system of meanings that shaped their presentations. Second, a process of narrative deconstruction allowed the identification of their locally meaningful discourse, uniquely created within each dyad by social interaction. What emerged shows that the entrepreneurs recounted not only traditional business stories, but enacted a unique discourse of 'being entrepreneurial'

Patient Safety As An Interactional Achievement: Conversational Analysis In The Trauma Center Of An Inner City Hospital

In this dissertation, I apply the methodology of Conversational Analysis to highlight the informal communication of an emergency room work group with the objective of discovering recurrent patterns of interaction and the inherent relational work necessary to accomplish the safe medical care of patients in a Trauma Code on a level of safety comparative to that of ultra-safe systems as described in the literature of High Reliability Organizations. The significance of relational elements of interaction on emerging social order is highlighted in processes of attunement, or the diminishing of difference of status in the use of mitigated speech and the co-construction of narrative. The use of mitigated speech and narrative serve as conversational moves of consequence, by which participants seek cooperation, coordination, and collaborate in face-to-face interaction, in a mutually constructed course of action; that is, in providing safe medical care in a highly complex and high risk environment

The Book as Computer: A Numerical and Topological Analysis of Only Revolutions

oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/3The novel Only Revolutions: The Democracy of Two Set Out & Chronologically Arranged (2006), by Mark Z. Danielewski, establishes a relationship between its bibliographic coding (i.e., its graphical and material form as a book made of letters, pages and openings with a specific typographic design), its linguistic coding (i.e., its phonetic, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic form), and its narrative coding (i.e., its form as story). Only Revolutions uses the Möbius strip and the circle, in their multiple material and symbolic manifestations – including letter and number shapes – as the organizing principle of this triple universe of signs. Circularity and mirror symmetry function simultaneously as the structure of the book, the structure of language, and the structure of narrative. This article describes the book’s numerical and topological form as a mechanism for creating feedback loops between those structures

Poetic Witness in a Networked Age

When online videos mobilize protestors to occupy public spaces, and those protestors incorporate hashtags in their chants and markered placards, deliberative democratic theory must no longer dismiss technology and peoples historically excluded from the arena of politics. Specifically, political models must account for the role of repetition in paving the way for unheard and unseen messages and people to appear in the political arena. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of the Performative and Hannah Arendt’s Space of Appearance, this paper assesses that critical and generative role of iteration. Repeating unheeded acts performs the capacity for those acts to be entered into discourse. The World Wide Web evidently augments such performativity with features such as accessibility, potential for ‘viral’ proliferation, and an endurance unlike non-networked acts. This paper eventually grapples with the hazards and risks of networked repetition (e.g. desensitization, trivialization, etc.) in order to propose a poetics of repetition to mitigate those dangers. Such poetics ultimately distinguishes the witness from the spectator

Form, science, and narrative in the anthropocene

A significant strand of contemporary fiction engages with scientific models that highlight a constitutive interdependency between humanity and material realities such as the climate or the geological history of our planet. This article looks at the ways in which narrative may capture this human-nonhuman interrelation, which occupies the foreground of debates on the so-called Anthropocene. I argue that the formal dimension of scientific knowledge-as manifested by diagrams or metaphors used by scientists-is central to this narrative remediation. I explore two analogical strategies through which narrative may pursue a formal dialogue with science: clusters of metaphorical language and the global structuring of the plot. Rivka Galchen's novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), for instance, builds on a visual representation of meteorological patterns in a storm (lifted from an actual scientific paper) to stage the narrator's mental illness. Two other contemporary works (Orfeo by Richard Powers and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki) integrate scientific models through the overall design of the plot. By offering close readings of these novels, I seek to expand work in the area of New Formalism and show how formal choices are crucial to bringing together the human-scale world and more-than-human phenomena

Incivility in social media as agonistic democracy? : a discourse theory analysis of dislocation and repair in select government texts in Kenya

In an era when adversarial politics is condemned for either being archaic or right-wing extremism, proposing that incivility can be used to counter existing hegemonies, despite its potential to incite violence, is proposing an unorthodox project. By rejecting foundationalist approaches to the current incivility crisis, this study sees an opportunity for it to act as a populist rapture that defies simple binary categorisation and deconstructs incivility, at an ontological level, to reveal the deep meanings and concealed causes that contrast the grand narrative of hate speech. After an overview in chapter one, the study continues with a theoretical review of literature on incivility, guided by the works of radical democracy theorists who universalise what seems particular to Kenya. This review is followed by the description of Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalesque as utani, a joking relationship common in East Africa. For its theoretical perspective, the study is guided by Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy and a research method developed by transforming Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) work in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic, into a method for Discourse Analysis. Various concepts from Laclau and Mouffe’s work are used to innovate an explanation of how political practices in social media, both linguistic and material texts, enhance incivility and the struggle to fix a regime’s preferred meaning. Guided by Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Analysis, the study describes how the government is using linguistic tools and physical technologies to repair the dislocation caused by incivility in social media in its attempts to re-create hegemonic practices. Without engaging in naïve reversal of the polarities between acceptable and unacceptable speech, and considering that at the ontological level politics is a friend—enemy relation, the study argues that incivility in social media is part of the return of politics in a post-political era, rather than simple unacceptable speech. While remaining aware of the dangers of extreme speech, but without reinforcing the anti-political rational consensus narrative, incivility is seen as having disruptive counterhegemonic potential, that is, if we consider the powerplay inherent in democracy. It means that binary opposition is blind to the way power produces, and is countered through unacceptable speech.Communication ScienceD. Litt. et Phil. (Communication Science