Construing the invisible : specialized literacy practices in junior secondary English

This thesis explores the representation of the contemporary secular angel in children’s literature, focusing on the works of three authors: David Almond, Philip Pullman, and Cliff McNish. In the works in question, the secular angel has been removed from all religious frameworks, including its traditional allegiance and obedience to a God or Devil figure. This absence, however, does not negate the existence of a moral compass, nor the importance of free will, which is bestowed upon and used by angelic and human characters alike. Transformation, one of the thesis’s key themes, becomes significant as I argue that the angelic figures bring about a transformation in the novels’ protagonists. Intertextuality forms an integral part of the analysis as the works of John Milton and William Blake are key reference points. The Introduction traces the angel’s trajectory from its scriptural tradition in the Middle Ages, to its progressive secularisation in the 20th century, and a chapter on each author follows. The thesis concludes by arguing that these angels’ role in children’s literature is to challenge and complicate notions of religion, innocence and experience, and science vs. faith, as they become representatives of a contemporary, secular philosophy, while retaining and embracing the spiritual.

The secular angel in contemporary children's literature : David Almond, Philip Pullman, and Cliff McNish

This thesis is about a body of contemporary neo-Victorian novels whose uneasy relationship with the past can be theorised in terms of aggressive eating, even cannibalism. Cannibalism operates on different levels throughout many works, and there is a sense of surreptitious insistence about it in the genre as a whole. Not only is the imagery of eating repeatedly used by critics to comprehend neo-Victorian literature, the theme of cannibalism itself also appears overtly or implicitly in a number of the novels and their Victorian prototypes, thereby mirroring the cannibalistic relationship between the contemporary and the Victorian. I argue that aggressive eating or cannibalism can be seen as a pathological and defining characteristic of neo-Victorian fiction. It provides a framework for understanding the genre’s origin, its conflicted, ambivalent and violent relationship with its Victorian predecessors and the grotesque and gothic effects that it generates in the fiction. Each chapter hinges on one type of ‘cannibal’ through which the discussion of the theory of neo-Victorian cannibalism is elucidated. The first chapter investigates the phenomenon of incorporating the biographies of Victorian celebrities in neo-Victorian fiction. Using Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008) and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), I discuss how Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin are portrayed as sexual and colonial Bluebeard cannibals, a form of representation which provides a revisionist critique of the misogynist, oppressive and racialist undercurrent of Victorian ideology. The second chapter examines the vampiric cannibal and analyses three neo-Victorian adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – Tom Holland’s Supping With Panthers (1996), Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula (2008) and Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s Dracula the Un-Dead (2009). In these works, the writers simultaneously cannibalise the original text and its author’s biography, and in so doing challenge Stoker’s authorial power and clear a creative space for themselves. In the third chapter, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is read as an important intertext. The chapter studies the representation of Bertha, a character often portrayed in cannibalistic terms, in Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and three relatively recent neo-Victorian novels – Lin Haire-Sargeant’s H: The Story of Heathcliff’s Journey Back to Wuthering Heights (1992), D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre (2000) and Emma Tennant’s Adéle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002). I argue that a narrative reorientation away from Bertha in the three later novels, which cannibalise both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, prompts us to reconsider the level of political engagement

Neo-Victorian cannibalism : a reading of contemporary neo-Victorian fiction

Desire is a crucial aspect of the pedagogic process. For too long, however, there has been a dichotomous relationship between understandings of teacher and student desire. The former is often configured as a pedagogic anachronism, problematised and needing to be contained. Conversely, the latter is essentialised as a force that should not be restrained by the processes of institutionalised education. Neither of these ideas is useful for thinking through complex issues around pedagogy. Overall, desire in education requires greater theoretical exploration. Within mainstream education it is rarely raised as an issue. Poststructuralist theorising, on the other hand, particularly in its use of psychoanalysis, tends to simply sexualise desire, which obscures more productive interpretations of its role in learning. There needs to be a reconceptualisation of the role of desire in the pedagogic process that moves beyond these formulations. The intention of this article is to rethink the nature and function of peda...

Teaching bodies/learning desire: rethinking the role of desire in the pedagogic process

This paper is concerned with the gender politics of the contemporary international anarchist punk scene which extends the punk ‘Do It Yourself’ (referred to as ‘DIY’ from now on) ethic to gender. This DIY ethic originates from the rejection by punk bands of the apparent compromise of signing to major music labels, choosing instead to record, release and distribute music, and organise gigs, themselves. It has been extended by participants in the punk scene to other cultural creations and to everyday politics, wherein participants avoid the ethico-political compromise of participation in institutions and practices they consider exploitative, doing as much as possible themselves, according to an autonomous anarchist ethos. This results in a politics that seeks to deconstruct gender as a site of authority and reconstruct it on autonomous non-hierarchical terms. Contemporary anarcho-punk and hardcore politics often engage with gender politics in a way that demonstrates congruence between understandings of power and authority in poststructuralist accounts of gender and the antiauthoritarian or autonomous politics of DIY anarchism. This is reflected in domains considered to be ‘political’ and the way that the term ‘power’ is understood, as well as the modes of political action and ‘resistance’ considered to be effective. I suggest that DIY anarcho-punk shares with poststructuralism a productive notion of power, specifically in terms of gender, resonating with Judith Butler’s notion of gender as a process or performative. Further, intervention is undertaken at discursive levels, resonating with poststructuralist assertions of the discursive production of power. The dominant understanding of punk used in traditional subcultural theory has focused on the ‘spectacular’ aspect of punk, and serves to privilege a structuralist semiological framework for analysis which tends to

Approaches to gender, power and authority in contemporary Anarcho-punk: poststructuralist anarchism?

In this essay I investigate systematically how relevant parts of Foucault's work might be brought to bear on issues in the study of literature. I approach Foucault's intellectual career as one with four phases: (1) an early archaeological phase, in which Foucault regarded literature as one of a number of "counter-discourses" partly associated with the experience of madness and opposed (as an "Other") to an all-encompassing Reason; (2) a later archaeological phase, beginning in the late 1960s with the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge, in which Foucault no longer saw literature as a counter-discourse but, like the associated discipline of literary criticism, as one of the many discourses governed by an anonymous set of rules; (3) a genealogical phase, when Foucault turned from the analysis of the rules governing discursive formations to the question of such formations as embodiments of ubiquitous power relations concerned with the production and formation of subjects; and (4) a phase in which Foucault returned to problems of selfformation and subject agency and considered the possibility of an "aesthetics of existence." In a separate section, between the discussions of phase (1) and phase (2), I discuss Foucault's influential essay on authorship in relation to the parameters of phase (2). Finally, in a brief concluding section, I summarize my largely negative findings.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1773331.pdf

Foucault and the Study of Literature

Anyone who engages in even a fairly superficial study of the plethora of available interpretations of Henry James's famous story The Turn of the Screw must come to the conclusion that literary criticism has reached or perhaps has always been in a state in which, in Paul Feyerabend's words, \"anything goes.\" If being published in widely circulated and reputable journals is a standard for what counts as acceptable knowledge in this field of study, then the many and often utterly conflicting interpretations of this story seem to testify to either an extreme relativism or to an almost total absence of agreedupon general methodological principles. What to some may appear to be a sign of a healthy pluralism, others and I tend to sympathize with this latter group regard as an intellectual scandal. I would like to begin with a brief demonstration of this disturbing state of affairs by quoting at some length from an article by Brenda Murphy (1979) entitled \"The Problem of Validity in the Critical Controversy Over 'The Turn of the Screw.' \" Murphy begins her paper by simply compiling some of the results other critics of James's story have come to. This is what she has to say:

Dieter Freundlieb

Papers

Foucault and the Study of Literature

Explaining Interpretation: The Case of Henry James's the Turn of the Screw