Becoming a subject to oneself is a challenge. To make the task somewhat more meaningful, I have presented a narrative that builds on experiences that are likely to resonate with other scholars from the Global South. In the academic journey from separation to synthesis, I have had the good fortune of collaborating with scientists from young students to renowned scholars, to whom I owe immense gratitude. I chose to modify the given metaphor of a pillar to better suit my orientation both to my inner self and to the outside world.

This chapter demonstrates how young male Taiwanese elites turned to gendered masculinity in response to colonial redefinitions of women within the family and marriage from the 1920s onward. Taiwanese masculinity derived from the mixture of Han Chinese tradition and Japanese colonialism. Chinese men had developed their masculinity on sociocultural standings and power in and outside of the household. Meanwhile, male Taiwanese elites often received higher education in Japan, and they built Taiwanese nationalism on calls for regulating or ending the practices of bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital sex among ordinary Taiwanese men and women. In those top-down calls, Taiwanese elites defined themselves as men in terms of their ability to facilitate individual willpower and liberalize society. Far from being personal, their masculinity made it necessary for the elites to work with the colonial authorities to materialize family reforms in the late 1920s. To shore up their sociopolitical standing, those elites held women responsible for obstructing family reforms and painted them in a negative light, constructing masculinity while assigning additional gendered burdens.

This chapter demonstrates that a researcher is attached to the analytic process in ways that make it difficult to be completely independent and objective when doing research. Issues of objectivity and subjectivity are discussed, which offer a frame to understand the ways in which a researcher’s cultural familiarity with an object of study, as well as their professional vision and institutional positionality, inform the analytic process. After reading this chapter, readers will understand that discourse analysis research is inherently subjective; know that a researcher’s cultural familiarity with an object of study is crucial to doing discourse analysis; be able to identify and adopt multiple analytic perspectives; be capable of applying reflexive practices to the analytic process; and understand, and know how to deal with, the power dynamics that exist in discourse analysis research.

This chapter explores Pentecostal conversion as both an affective and a political process. It considers the kind of subjects young urban Pentecostals are called upon to become: organised, enterpreneurial, armed not only with a transformed heart but with a ‘vision’ for their future and a ‘strategic plan’. This subject both converges with and diverges from the RPF’s attempts to create ‘ideal’ subjects who are able to participate in the country’s post-genocide development. While some young Pentecostals benefited from such self-making, others became disillusioned. Instead, they highlighted the limits of the Pentecostal project and its inability to deliver the bright future they felt they had been promised.

This chapter interprets Virginia Woolf’s The Waves through the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money waxes nostalgic for a world of industrial capital where people with good characters invest in respected businesses over the long term. Keynes blames the “great slump” on a system of financial speculation made possible by the modern corporation that encourages investors to anticipate and value the vacillations of popular opinion instead of sound business practices. This chapter argues that Woolf’s novel encodes the logic of financial speculation as described by Keynes in her depiction of characters who redefine themselves according to fluctuating social configurations. The resulting novelistic poetics constitute an aesthetic of volatility characteristic of high modernism that anticipates the emergence of affective intensity as the dominant value form of our own era of capitalism.

This chapter explores the interplay between identification and distance that Lucian sets up for his readers in relationship to the speaking characters in the Dialogues of the Courtesans. While readers are, at times, invited to identify with the plights of these ‘others’ as partners in restrictive power structures, at other times, the otherness of the courtesans is emphasised through female verbal markers, female-specific cults, and women-only sexuality. Again and again, the subjectivity of the courtesan is offered to the reader, only to be withdrawn from their grasp. And, in fact, in its current form, the collection begins with a soldier and ends with a virgin – the courtesan managing to slip away. Lucian’s play with the courtesan’s subjectivity leaves his readers full of suspicions about intentional misdirection, both by the characters within the stories and by the author Lucian himself.

Chapter 6 explores charms’ re-purposing of liturgical texts from a theoretical perspective. The integrity of baptismal and Visitatio utterances and acts may be compromised, from a liturgical perspective, when they are reused for charm healing. The accommodations that result allow charms simultaneously to invoke those sacramental liturgies while accomplishing something different. As charms manipulate prayers and formulas extracted from liturgy for folk healing, the re-contextualization results in disparities. These prove important because they reveal the integration of ecclesiastical texts and gestures into traditional practices. When charms adapt particular liturgical texts and actions, the liturgical forms undergo a pragmatic-linguistic process of “de-institutionalization.” The loss of extra-linguistic context supports the charms’ discursive ends and reinforces its status as a distinct institution.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.

This chapter elaborates on why an exclusive focus on the individual within psychology cannot be culturally valid for all children. Contrasting Western individualistic goals for child-rearing and development with the more collectivistic goals and orientations of the majority world, this chapter shows that foundational assumptions regarding the nature of subjectivity differ by culture. Three specific components of the interdependent approach to child development as demonstrated by African, Latin American, Indigenous, and Asian societies are examined in depth. These themes include a holistic view of development, intelligence as a form of social responsibility, and children as apprentices. Together, these themes characterize child development processes within the majority world. Research shows that societies that consider a socially contingent self as the ideal outcome for development might be more likely to support collaborative competence. Overall, the literature reviewed suggests that Western conceptions of subjectivity and therefore intersubjectivity do not extend to all cultures. In addition, collaborative competence highlights the strengths of minoritized children in the US while supporting all children’s development.

This chapter explores the connections between ethics, the phenomenological (and hermeneutical) traditions, and education. It focuses on the idea of the subject, showing phenomenology’s contrast with the modernist picture of the autonomous subject. The chapter first briefly traces the idea of the subject in phenomenology through four representative figures – Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Levinas – and then sketches their approaches to ethics. Then it pivots to four ethical concepts in philosophy of education in this tradition – understanding, risk, subjectification, and responsibility – by connecting them to phenomenological tradition’s broad conception of the subject. The chapter brings into relief the contribution phenomenology makes to envisioning living well together and human flourishing, and education’s role in fostering ethical subjects that would enact such societies.

Chapter 2 introduces the concept of construal and explains how identical objects or real-world events can be perceived and described differently by multiple speakers, due to differences in individual speakers’ perspectives, the impact of culture as a lens on cognition, and the linguistic options available in a language. For instance, although Chinese shares similar concepts of time as English, associating time and space so that front and back can refer to temporal relationships, Chinese also exhibits a tendency to construct time vertically, in which the past is up and the future is down. Systematic crosslinguistic differences can also be found in descriptions of motion events across world languages. Learning to express time and motion in L2 Chinese often entails adjustment to new perspectives that are not articulated in a learner’s native language. L2 Chinese speakers therefore need ample opportunities to use the L2 functionally before they can develop L2-specific ways of thinking-for-speaking patterns.

This chapter highlights the importance of newspapers as essential publishing venues for American essayists during the 1880–1920 period. During this time, newspaper columns or editorials were some of the most powerful manifestations of the American essay. A new kind of personal essay emerged, revealing tensions between various categories: the genteel and the modern, progressivism and prejudice, subjectivity and objectivity. While essayistic objectivity aspired to provide verifiable evidence and to be “truthful” in its interpretations of the world, essayistic subjectivity attempted to engage the reader by means of the essayist’s own perceptions and experiences. Significantly, during this period, the essay sought new vessels for authorial subjectivity, be it in the form of fiction or nonfiction, expanding the possibilities of the personal essay. Important essayists, columnists, and editorialists of the period included H. L. Mencken, Anna Julia Cooper, Robert Benchley, Ida B. Wells, and Heywood Broun. For many of these writers, the political and personal are inseparable, and the essay often functions as a form of authorial mediation, of narrative outrage, and a call to social action.

This chapter analyses the ways in which Byron’s sense of himself as a writer was gradually, often painfully, informed by the evolving discourse of addiction as it was being medicalised throughout the early nineteenth century and subsequently used to describe a troubling new category of behaviour. For Byron, the act of writing and the emerging sense of his own identity as a poet is formulated not simply through metaphors of addiction, which he himself helped to write into culture, but also through its physical expression. This was much more than a figure of speech – his need to write emerged in painful, bodily manifestations; Byron did not simply write about his writing habit – his habit, in part, wrote him.

The Introduction argues that Faulkner discovered an epistemology for networked systems in the creation of his own imagined landscape. I present two major stages in which Faulkner’s discovery took place: (1) an earlier vision portraying how networks scale, circulate information, centralize, and produce potentially tyrannical paradigms of top-down vertical power; and (2) another view of dynamical networks that are constantly adapting to produce novel forms of movement and behavior. The Faulkner that this study evokes is at once the modernist developing a spatial narrative practice describing the emergence of complex social networks and the Romantic for whom the immanent life was paramount and even sacrosanct. That these two trajectories of inquiry and spiritual belief are not easily reconcilable gives philosophical and moral weight to the landscape and characters that Faulkner invented. They also provide a striking meditation on what it means for human beings to find themselves in systems so vast and ubiquitous that they can no longer remember what it was like to live outside them and, thus, to think outside of their ideological dicta.