Agency, temporality, and students' positionings: Critical theory and the teaching of literature and writing.

摘要

This dissertation links the theme of the hero's journey in literature to artistic and ideological conceptions of time and space. It highlights Mikhail Bakhtin's study of the chronotope and posits the merits of a "chronotopic literacy", an approach to teaching literature and writing that encourages close reading, stimulates critical thinking and moral questioning, and integrates individual with social aspects of language and learning. A chronotopic literacy involves the reading, interpretation, and evaluation of temporal and spatial perspectives as they are manifested in a multiplicity of texts (primarily in novelistic literature, but also in other genres of writing and in art and architecture, nature, human institutions, memory and personal experience). I suggest that students can examine temporal and spatial images and indices in order to discern and challenge the thematic complexities and the underlying worldviews represented in the text. As they confront a diversity of chronotopes, students may modify their own ideological positions, adopt broader temporal and spatial perspectives, and develop a more critical and reflective stance by which to evaluate contemporary issues and moral dilemmas.; I construct my conceptual framework from a synthesis of literary, composition, and language theory. While I focus primarily on major essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, I also invoke Robert Scholes' discussion of textual studies, and turn to Paulo Freire and Ira Progoff for the linkages they see between the dialogic practice of reading and writing and the human consciousness of time and space. The practical applicability of the theory base is illuminated by sequenced examples from a humanities curriculum developed at the Catholic University of America, wherein students integrate the literary study of novels with creative and expository writing assignments and field visits to museums and memorials. Within this framework I examine the following works of novelistic literature: Homer's The Odyssey; Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses; Elie Wiesel's Night; and Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a Slave.