The Insistence Of The Letter

Originally published in 1992. What kinds of literacy are appropriate for life and work in the late twentieth century? What historically is the relationship between curriculum and literacy, and how is it changing? The essays in this book provide an innovative forum for discussion for what are often two quite distinct enterprises: literacy research and curriculum studies. They re-frame and redraw the traditional boundaries between these two disciplines, examining socio-cultural theories and classroom practices in a diverse and lively debate. They explore readings of the modernist/postmodernist debate and specific studies in curriculum politics and history, rhetoric, language and literacy education, media studies and educational linguistics. This multi-voiced anthology brings together researchers from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States in a common critical reassessment of the curriculum/literacy nexus.

Through a series of theoretically informed readings, this book explores the uncanny effectivity of history in its seeming absence in canonical works by Burke, Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire written in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1848. The book begins with the discovery that, in these writers, issues of narration and figuration are already taken up in the political and historical questions raised by the two revolutions; conversely, historical-political positioning and representation are involved from the beginning in problems of narration and figuration. This co-implication of aesthetics and history in each other has profound consequences: once historical events take the form of figures, they no longer act as literal, material referents but rather interrogate the status of reference itself. Far from being denied, history becomes a problem for analysis, one whose normative frames of understanding and founding concepts, such as “event,” “experience,” and “chronology,” must be rethought. This can be most easily seen in the fact that the four writers, in their different ways, all miss historical occurrence—not when they try to flee it, as many older accounts of Romanticism have claimed, but just when they attempt to engage it most intensely.

The first book in English to examine one of the most important and influential texts from a literary perspective.

Americans' first attempts to forge a national identity coincided with the apparent need to define--and limit--the status and rights of Native Americans. During these early decades of the nineteenth century, the image of the "Indian" circulated throughout popular culture--in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, plays about Pocahontas, Indian captivity narratives, Black Hawk's autobiography, and visitors' guides to the national capitol. In exploring such sources as well as the political and legal rhetoric of the time, Susan Scheckel argues that the "Indian question" was intertwined with the ways in which Americans viewed their nation's past and envisioned its destiny. She shows how the Indians provided a crucial site of reflection upon national identity. And yet the Indians, by being denied the natural rights upon which the constitutional principles of the United States rested, also challenged American convictions of moral ascendancy and national legitimacy. Scheckel investigates, for example, the Supreme Court's decision on Indian land rights and James Fenimore Cooper's popular frontier romance The Pioneers: both attempted to legitimate American claims to land once owned by Indians and to assuage guilt associated with the violence of conquest by incorporating the Indians in a version of the American political "family." Alternatively, the widely performed Pocahontas plays dealt with the necessity of excluding Indians politically, but also portrayed these original inhabitants as embodying the potential of the continent itself. Such examples illustrate a gap between principles and practice. It is from this gap, according to the author, that the nation emerged, not as a coherent idea or a realist narrative, but as an ongoing performance that continues to play out, without resolution, fundamental ambivalences of American national identity.

Indigenous peoples around the world are calling for control over their education in order to reaffirm their identities and defend their rights. In Latin America the indigenous peoples, national governments and international organisations have identified intercultural education as a means of contributing to this process. The book investigates education for and by indigenous peoples and examines the relationship between theoretical and methodological developments and formal practice. An ethnographic study of the Arakmbut people of the Peruvian Amazon, provides a detailed example of the social, cultural and educational change indigenous peoples are experiencing, an insight into Arakmbut oral learning and teaching practices as well as a review of their conceptualisations of knowledge, pedagogy and evaluation. The models of intercultural education being promoted by Latin American governments are, nevertheless, biliterate and school-based. The book analyses indigenous and non-indigenous models based on different conceptualisations of culture and curriculum in the context of the Arakmbut search for an education which respects their dynamic oral cultural traditions and identity, provides them with a qualitatively relevant education about the wider society and addresses the intercultural lives they lead.

The Son’s Book of the Father, as Richard Freadman termed it, is a rich field of relational autobiography, offering a unique set of tensions and insights into modes of masculinity, notions of identity and the ethics of representing another’s life in writing one’s own. This study of modern Australian life writing by sons who focus on fathers places an emerging sub-genre within its literary ancestry and its contemporary milieu. Providing compelling readings of Raimond Gaita’s ‘Romulus, My Father’, Peter Rose’s ‘Rose Boys’ and many others, this is the first study of its kind within Australian literature.

A substantive commentary that helps pastors, students, and teachers understand the meaning of 1 Peter.

“A tour de force . . . provocative ideas expressed in Heideggerian, Derridean, and Deleuzian rhetoric . . . for a new wave of Christian theologians” (Bibliographia). The Insistence of God presents the provocative idea that God does not exist—God insists. God’s existence is a human responsibility, which may or may not happen. For John D. Caputo, God’s existence is haunted by “perhaps,” which does not signify indecisiveness but an openness to risk, to the unforeseeable. Perhaps constitutes a theology of what is to come and what we cannot see coming. Responding to current critics of continental philosophy, Caputo explores the materiality of perhaps and the promise of the world. He shows how perhaps can become a new theology of the gaps God opens. “John D. Caputo is at the top of his game, and he is not content to reiterate what he has already expressed, but continues to develop his own ideas further by way of a thorough engagement with the fields of theology, Continental philosophy, and religious thought.” —Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas “For those allergic to theological certainty―whether of God’s existence or of God’s death―Caputo delivers storm-fresh relief: the theopoetics of God’s insistence.” —Catherine Keller, Drew University “In my life I have read no more stimulating book of theology. Buckle your seatbelt!” —Dialog “An excellent text that opens the way into new forms of theological thinking. He puts forward an argument that must be wrestled with and brings to light new avenues for both religious and theological thought. Caputo is not for the faint of heart.” —Reviews in Religion and Theology