Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, learn, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, enhance or mitigate disappointments, challenge or support moral order and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. It is because of this deep embedding of narrative in everyday life that its study has become a wide research field including disciplines as diverse as linguistics, literary theory, folklore, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history.
In Telling Stories leading scholars illustrate how narratives build bridges among language, identity, interaction, society, and culture; and they investigate various settings such as therapeutic and medical encounters, educational environments, politics, media, marketing, and public relations. They analyze a variety of topics from the narrative construction of self and identity to the telling of stories in different media and the roles that small and big life stories play in everyday social interactions and institutions. These new reflections on the theory and analysis of narrative offer the latest tools to researchers in the fields of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.
Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Edmond Cros is a leading French Hispanicist whose work is unique in Continental theory because it brings Spanish and Mexican texts into current literary debates, which have so far centered mainly on the French and German traditions. Equally distinctive is the nature of his work, which Cros terms sociocriticism. Unlike most sociological approaches to literature, which leave the structure of texts untouched, sociocriticism aims to prove that the encounter with "ideological traces," and with antagonistic tensions between social classes, is central to any reading of texts. Cros's method distinguishes between the "semiotic and "ideological" elements within a text, and involves the patient, exacting reconstruction of the concrete text from these elements, a process that enables the sociocritic to interpret its fault lines, its internal contradictions - in the end , its irreducibly social nature.
As its title suggests, Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism is structured in two parts. Its opening chapters analyze sociological theories of discourse, including those of Foucault, Bakhtin, and Goldman; in the second part, Cros applies theory to practice in readings of specific works: the film Scarface, contemporary Mexican poetry and prose (Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes), and the picaresque novel of the Spanish Golden Age. In their foreword, Jurgen Link and Ursula Link-Heer differentiate sociocriticism from other social approaches to literature and show how Cros's method works in specific textual readings. They emphasize his resistance to the reductive modes and "misreadings" that dominate much of contemporary theory.
Edmond Cros is a professor of literary theory and Hispanic studies at the Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier, France, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Jurgen Link teaches at the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum and Ursula Link-Heer at the Universitat Siegen, both in West Germany.
Do the first two years of life really determine a child’s future development? Are human beings, like other primates, only motivated by pleasure? And do people actually have stable traits, like intelligence, fear, anxiety, and temperament? This book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions—and proves them mistaken. Ranging with impressive ease from cultural history to philosophy to psychological research literature, Jerome Kagan weaves an argument that will rock the social sciences and the foundations of public policy.
Scientists, as well as lay people, tend to think of abstract processes—like intelligence or fear—as measurable entities, of which someone might have more or less. This approach, in Kagan’s analysis, shows a blindness to the power of context and to the great variability within any individual subject to different emotions and circumstances. “Infant determinism” is another widespread and dearly held conviction that Kagan contests. This theory—with its claim that early relationships determine lifelong patterns—underestimates human resiliency and adaptiveness, both emotional and cognitive (and, of course, fails to account for the happy products of miserable childhoods and vice versa). The last of Kagan’s targets is the vastly overrated pleasure principle, which, he argues, can hardly make sense of unselfish behavior impelled by the desire for virtue and self-respect—the wish to do the right thing.
Written in a lively style that uses fables and fairy tales, history and science to make philosophical points, this book challenges some of our most cherished notions about human nature.
This country’s most challenging writer on education presents here a distillation, for the general reader, of half a decade’s research and reflection. His theme is dual: how children learn, and how they can best be helped to learn—how they can be brought to the fullest realization of their capacities.
Jerome Bruner, Harper’s reports, has “stirred up more excitement than any educator since John Dewey.” His explorations into the nature of intellectual growth and its relation to theories of learning and methods of teaching have had a catalytic effect upon educational theory. In this new volume the subjects dealt with in The Process of Education are pursued further, probed more deeply, given concrete illustration and a broader context.
“One is struck by the absence of a theory of instruction as a guide to pedagogy,” Mr. Bruner observes; “in its place there is principally a body of maxims.” The eight essays in this volume, as varied in topic as they are unified in theme, are contributions toward the construction of such a theory. What is needed in that enterprise is, inter alia, “the daring and freshness of hypotheses that do not take for granted as true what has merely become habitual,” and these are amply evidenced here.
At the conceptual core of the book is an illuminating examination of how mental growth proceeds, and of the ways in which teaching can profitably adapt itself to that progression and can also help it along. Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner’s “evolutionary instrumentalism,” his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a culture, the acquired characteristics that express and amplify man’s powers—especially the crucial symbolic tools of language, number, and logic. Revealing insights are given into the manner in which language functions as an instrument of thought.
The theories presented are anchored in practice, in the empirical research from which they derive and in the practical applications to which they can be put. The latter are exemplified incidentally throughout and extensively in detailed descriptions of two courses Mr. Bruner has helped to construct and to teach—an experimental mathematics course and a multifaceted course in social studies. In both, the students’ encounters with the material to be mastered are structured and sequenced in such a way as to work with, and to reinforce, the developmental process.
Written with all the style and élan that readers have come to expect of Mr. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction is charged with the provocative suggestions and inquiries of one of the great innovators in the field of education.
Recently, there has been a renewed concern with highway safety, reflected in wide media coverage and new laws aimed at reducing highway deaths and injuries. Legge examines three initiatives that have been studied only in isolation: stricter drinking-age laws, mandated use of seat belts, and deterrents to drunk driving. His research covers three large industrial states-New York, California, and Michigan, as well as Great Britain, each of which uses a different mix of these initiatives. Using a combination of theory and research methodology, Legge tests a number of models on how traffic fatalities might be reduced and offers valuable suggestions for policy makers, researchers, and activists.
A noted scholar considers here a broad range of English autobiographical writing since 1800. Jerome Hamilton Buckley discusses not only autobiographies proper but also novels and poems animated by the subjective impulse. Drawing from time to time on American and Continental European writers, he focuses on British autobiographers, especially those, like Wordsworth, concerned with a larger psychological or spiritual dimension to their personal experience. With economy and grace, he examines the work of Darwin, Ruskin, Mill, Newman, C. S. Lewis, Bertrand Russell, and Edwin Muir. He discusses also the roleplaying and self-creation of Oscar Wilde, George Moore, Edmund Gosse, and Henry Adams. Variations in the autobiographical novel are described, with special attention to Dickens, George Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce. Buckley concludes by exploring the differences between the principal Victorian poets and the confessional poets of today in their attitudes toward subjectivity.
Buckley reaffirms traditional notions—that the self exists and persists through its vicissitudes, that autobiography, for the most part, reflects or represents a pre-existing self rather than creating it, and that the self is rooted in history and in the objective social and physical world. No other book has attempted to place autobiography in a similar perspective, and none combines analysis of specific autobiographies with a regard for the function of subjectivity and a concern for its cultural consequences.
Tutoring Matters is the authoritative guide for both the aspiring and seasoned tutor. Using firsthand experiences of over one hundred new and experienced college student tutors, the authors offer techniques for handling tutoring anxieties, teaching strategies, and tips for building relationships.
This new edition has been fully updated to help tutors to engage the interest of their students. In addition, it features practical “tip boxes” that provide quick-reference guidelines on a range of tutoring challenges—from making a connection in your first tutoring session to becoming familiar with your pupil's life and tutoring needs. This new edition also provides practical experience-based tips "from the trenches" about how to tutor math and reading and how to help students develop other academic skills and interests.
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