Grand Valley State University Manmade Catastrophe Nealon and Giroux Discussion

I need help with these post and then I need help after I send you a day or two after this is due of what people respond or say for theres I have to post to.

1. Explain, exemplify, integrate concepts, and agree or disagree with one or more of the following statements from Nealon & Giroux:

“[P]eople create history by doing things; history is

made

rather than

found

” (Nealon & Giroux 255).

“The inclination [is] to view the present as inevitable, the future as nothing more than a repetition of the past” (256).

“[P]eople are subject to their historical conditions rather than master of them” (256).

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2.

Explain, exemplify, integrate concepts, and agree or disagree with one or more of the following statements from Nealon & Giroux:

“Our agency—what we want, what we strive for—has contextual sources rather than some source deep inside us” (257).

“Because all meaning is contextual, all meaning presupposes an agency, an act, an analysis, a critical reading, to bring it about” (265).

“A word is a bridge erected between oneself and the other” (266).

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3

Explain, exemplify, integrate concepts, and agree or disagree with one or more of the following statements from Nealon & Giroux:

“To have agency, you’d need to wield a certain amount of power. But you also need to have a sense of how power in its various manifestations is at work on you” (259).

“Different forms of power demand different responses—some require our participation; others require total passivity. In other words, we give consent to some forms of authority, while others are achieved through coercion” (262).

“The ability to respond—that response-ability—is the birth of all agency. And you don’t get to choose, really; even not responding is a kind of response, one that has effects and consequences” (266).

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4.

In Claire Keegan’s short story “Men and Women,” we witness power dynamics in play that occur verbally, through silence, and through action. Select a single moment or passage within the text, and explain how agency occurs in the action and the response to that action (even if there is no response to the action).

How does the context of that act shape the parameters of response to the act?

Why do the characters involved choose to take such action?

How is meaning derived from this act of and response to agency?

I will post the story after someone can help me thanks.

AGENCY

Agency:

the capacity of a person to make choices and act freely in the world.

Authority:

institutionalized or legal power to constrain and convert subjects.

Culture:

the sum of social patterns, traits, and products of a particular time or group of people; practices, habits, customs, beliefs and traditions that become institutions within that time and space, particular to that time and space.

Discourse:

ways of speaking that are bound by ideological, professional, cultural, political, or sociological communities—ways of thinking and talking about the world which promote specific kinds of power relations.

False Consciousness:

an ideology that appears of value but which actually serves the interests of those in power, offering the illusion of being part of the “natural order” of things, but they actually disguise and draw one’s attention from socio-economic conditions that limit, oppress, and deny the potential of the individual. [Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Mehring” (1893)]

Hegemony:

the ‘spontaneous consent’ given by the masses to the imposed, formalized social practices of the dominant fundamental power, convincing the less powerful these behaviors are for their own good. [Antonio Gramsci,

Prison Notebooks

(c. 1927-35)]

Identity Politics:

ideological formations that typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific marginalized constituency within its larger context through assertion of power, reclamation of distinctive characteristics, and appropriation of signifiers that have been used to oppress or demean.

Ideology:

a belief system that develops out of cultural conditioning—and which may be repressive or oppressive even as it is passed off as “the way it is” in the world; these interrelated ideas form a seemingly coherent view of the world.

Interpellation:

a process by which ideology constitutes subjected identity through institutions, discourses, and other social, cultural and familial factors:

situation precedes subject, ‘hailing’ the subject who is ‘always-already interpellated’

identities are produced by social forces rather than independent agency, constituted in Ideological State Apparatuses (schools, churches, families, and so on) and Repressive State Apparatuses (government, courts, police force, military). [Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971)]

Performative Acts

: position that gender identity is compelled by social sanction and taboo, repeatedly constructed through time, and always constructed through the body: 1) speech;

2) attire; 3) behavior. [Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988)]

Political Unconscious:

the concept that all texts are destabilized by their historical reality—that is, the text is a socially symbolic act, given its reliance on an historical language and material conditions that are, themselves, ideological acts of false consciousness. [Frederic Jameson,

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act

(1981)]

Power:

an act, through ability or official capacity to exercise control of a system or function, reducing and limiting the will and freedom of the individual. [Michel Foucault,

Discipline and Punish

(1975), “The Subject and Power” (1982)]

Resistance:

refusal to accept or comply with acts of hegemonic, interpellative and biolpolitical powers that attempt to standardize life.

Subjectivity:

parameters of identity, recognized by others, as defined by cultural and social practices.