Browsing by Subject "Subjectivity"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Open Access
"And they had a big, big, very long fight:" The development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional stories told in a peer-group context
(Cambridge University Press, 2021-04) Nicolopoulou, Ageliki; Ilgaz, Hande; Shiro, Marta; Hsin, Lisa B.
This study examined the development of evaluative language in preschoolers' oral fictional narratives using a storytelling/story-acting practice where children told stories to and for their friends. Evaluative language orients the audience to the teller's cognitive and emotional engagement with a story's events and characters, and we hypothesized that this STSA context might yield new information about the early development of this language, prior to elementary school. We analyzed 60 stories: the first and last story told by 10 children in each of three preschool classrooms (3-, 4-, and 5-year-old classes) that used STSA throughout the school year. Stories were coded for evaluative expressions and evidential expressions. Five-year-olds used significantly more evaluative language than did 3-year-olds, and children at all ages used significantly more evaluative language at the end than at the beginning of the year. The number of stories told throughout the year explained unique variance in children's evaluative language growth.
Open Access
Breaking up, down and out: Anomie in Georgi Gospodinov's Natural Novel
(Modern Humanities Research Association, 2015) Harper, M. P.
This article argues that Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov's Estestven Roman (Natural Novel, 1999) exposes the simultaneous precariousness of anomie, a condition associated with post-Communism, and the vital significance of its productive activity. Fluid memory fragments augment the interpenetrating hi/stories of narrators, both conflate chronological sequentiality enabling the text to resist and subvert orthodox classifications, be they dialectical, moral, deductive or causal. Through its deployment of dispullulations — multiplicitous, paradoxical complexities of peculiar (inter- and intra-) textual events — Natural Novel, I propose, forges a critical ontology with implications for the individual, Bulgarian culture, and even the contemporary moment globally.
Open Access
Chaos as a mode of living in Samuel Beckett's the unnamable
(Indiana University Press, 2012) Harper, M. P.
In this article, I examine the deployment of chaos as a textual practice in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. My contention is that, in its endeavor to wrest chaos from the appropriative gestures of order and make room for newness, the text breaks with grammatical frames and conceptual systems that organize subjectivity. The Unnamable “squirms” involuntarily and willfully at the same time, in-between paradoxical turns, multiplying “I”-s, and stream-of-consciousness eruptions. Its squirming undermines stability, identity, and order, inviting into them the unborn, the unthought, chaos. Every proposition that the speaking voice utters subverts the premises upon which subjectivity is constructed and, thus, endeavors to turn the self into a site of chaos. Through its syntactic and semantic movements, The Unnamable inhabits the impossibility of “pure silence” as pure chaos and locates in it an impetus for self-transformation.
Open Access
Constructing the visual-essay in theory and practice : a home-dweller's life through the essayistic
(2014) Çakar, Arın Ada
Montaigne’s establishment of the essay as a literary genre brought about a revolution of the mind in that it made possible an infinity of new manner’s of expressing thought and human emotion possible. The essayistic spirit thus born by Montaigne’s midwifery infiltrated in the last century the artistic genres of film and photography. The essay found a visualized mode of practice, commonly observable in contemporary art today. This more recent embodiment of the essayistic expression, however, appeal to qualities and operates through principles that expand on what the literary genre entails. In light of what these are, this thesis explores the evolution of the essayistic from its literary expression discussed by Adorno and Lukacs, to its examples in film and photography and these examples’ scholarly consideration in the available literature. Generic utility of the term essay is then problematized and “visual-essay” is proposed as a more proper and comprehensive term. The point of origin of these discussions are found in a visual-essay project, entitled “A(WAITING) HOME / EV (DE) BEKLER”, which I have produced. Accordingly, the evaluation of the essayistic mode of expression in contemporary art is conducted in perspective of the thematic of home, home-dweller and the seemingly essayistic relationship of the two. This is done in terms of both a theoretical deliberation of home-dwelling, and a reflection upon how this thematic had been explored by my project, thus purposed to be reflective on home as much as on the very generic form in which it found expression, that is the visuallyessayistic.