Informed by selected postmodern theories and cultural criticism, this study argues that while American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s bears the outward signs of a return to realism, it also evidences recurring themes of postmodernism, such as alienation, social disintegration, personal despair, historical dislocation, and authorial self-reflexiveness.

Informed by selected postmodern theories and cultural criticism, this study argues that while American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s bears the outward signs of a return to realism, it also evidences recurring themes of postmodernism, such as alienation, social disintegration, personal despair, historical dislocation, and authorial self-reflexiveness.

This book presents three generations of German, French, and Anglo-American thinking on the Hegelian narrative of desire, recognition, and alienation in life, labor, and language—a narrative that has been subject to extensive commentary in philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. The texts focus on a central topos in Western thought, the story of self-consciousness awakened in nature and in history. John O'Neill argues that current postmodern rejections of the Hegelian-Marxist narrative demand an understanding of the texts included here. Without Hegel and Marx in our toolbox, he argues, we will flounder in a world marked by the split between postmodern indifference and premodern passion. The book makes a strong selection from the history of Hegelian-Marxist debate, hermeneutical and critical theory, and Freudian/Lacanian and feminist commentary on the dialectic of desire and recognition, on the levels of social psychology and political economy. Included are articles by Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sarte, Georg Lukács, Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Howard Adelman, Shlomo Avineri, Jessica Benjamin, Edward S. Casey and J. Melvin Woody, Henry S. Harris, George Armstrong Kelly, Ludwig Siep, Judith N. Shklar, and Henry Sussman. The texts and commentaries show how the Hegelian-Maxist narrative of desire, recognition, and alienation is a contested story, one in which class, race, and gender issues are drawn into a historical romance that is being rewritten in contemporary cultural politics.

This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not just be a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to – and thus make sense of – the individual bits of experience that we place into those structures. But of course at precisely this juncture a question arises: do we make that sense, or do we discover it? The twelve chapters brought together here lucidly and steadily reveal how the matters at hand are far more intricate and interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. This is a book that investigates the ways in which life and literature speak to each other.

Russians have often been characterized as people with souls rather than selves. This study considers the stories of self of men and women across 200 years, from peasants to Tolstoy, as 15 historians and literary scholars situate narratives of self in their historical context.

wide criticism both from Western and Eastern scholars.

Mathematics curriculums used in progressive classrooms of the United States and in classrooms of the People’s Republic of China presuppose markedly different philosophies. Xie and Carspecken reconstruct different assumptions operating implicitly within mathematics curriculums developed by the Ministry of Education in China and NCTM in the United States. Each curriculum is constructed upon a deep structure holistically integrating presuppositions about the nature of the human self, society, learning processes, language, concepts, human development, freedom, authority and the epistemology and ontology of mathematical knowledge. Xie and Carspecken next present an extended discussion of the two main philosophical traditions informing these curriculums: dialectical materialism in the case of the Chinese mathematics curriculum, and Dewey’s instrumental pragmatism in the case of NCTM. Both philosophies were developed as movements out of Hegelian idealism while retaining the anti-dualist and anti-empiricist insights of Hegel’s thought. The history of dialectical materialism and Dewey’s instrumentalism is carefully examined by the authors to identify both similarities and sharp differences in the resulting mature philosophies. Drawing upon more recent philosophies of intersubjectivity (Brandom, Habermas) and dialectical materialist psychologies (Vygotsky, Luria), the authors conclude this book with arguments for overcoming the limitations of a purely instrumentalist framework and for expanding potentialities implicit within dialectical philosophies. This book will be of value to a broad audience, including mathematics educators, philosophers, curriculum theorists, social theorists, and those who work in comparative education and learning science.