Peter Pericles Trifonas

In attempting to explain the relationship between reader and text, theorists have alternated focus upon either the reader or the text, to clarify and validate perspectives on epistemological problems of hermeneutics—or interpretation—as the logical culmination of the reading act. Beyond facilitating comprehension, the essence of teaching reading in language education is the determination of cross-cultural aspects of communication and language competence wherein the heart of hermeneutics lies. Therefore, this paper surveys a diverse field of cross-discipinary research incorporating both philosophical and empirical methodology in literary theory, semiotics, reading theory, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and linguistics, in order to more clearly define an approach to investigation of hermeneutics in relation to the reading act and literature (or written text).

In a recent book, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, Henry Giroux (1999) analyzes the intentionality of corporate culture-making. That is, the “organization and regulation” (p. 2) of a political economy of signs as driven by a multinational media conglomerate that touches and teaches the everyday lives of children and adults alike. The Mouse that Roared presents a critical yet balanced view of the educational force of “[m]ass-produced images” (p. 2) that inform the “most intimate perceptions and desires” (p. 2) of our daily existence. As Giroux (1999) quite correctly explains, it would be too easy—unfair and unethical—to concoct conspiracy theories portraying Disney as “part of an evil empire incapable of providing joy and pleasure to the millions of kids and adults who visit its theme parks, watch its videos and movies, and buy products from its toy stores” (p. 4). There is an inconsolable temptation to overdetermine and therefore to overstate and simplify the effi- cacy of its role as an active agent of truth construction and a purveyor of a pedagogy of diversion. But there is also another side to gauging the influence of such an enormous media and entertainment company and investigating the way the signs it produces have functioned to educate the cognitive and affective dimensions of subjective agency in the shaping of popular culture. By using a critically balanced approach, Giroux (1999) provides the theoretical and methodological grounding and analytical framework for examining the ethical and moral force of Disney and its rendering of culture as a byproduct of “media culture” without dismissing the complicated value of its “public pedagogy” (p. 4) as a means of constructing a pleasurable escape “from the drudgery of work” (p. 5). The veneer of images Disney spins out simulates reality and stimulates the imagination. It garners responses. Here we must probe beyond the surfaces of corporate signs to show how the logic of representation is thoroughly and deeply infused with traces of ideological force and political power. Disney’s illusion is neither naïve nor innocent. As in all means of media production and representation, there is an element of intentionality involved. However, the creative impetus of the means of representation is neither technical nor technological as much as it is an instance of artifice that is poietic in nature. This extensional production is a neglected or understated aspect of media. It produces something other than the technology of itself, that is not remote controlled by the technology itself. We could not even call it technological because it is an independent production of meaning spawned from its interpretable nature. The medium is the message. Yes. Marshal McLuhan was correct in this observation. But the medium therefore becomes transparent, that is put in the background, forgotten, in its purely instrumental role as the visible reflection of content. A message has to be produced on a fundamental level to justify the conceptual and material resources expended to facilitate the attempt made at communication (Trifonas, 1998). What is the point of representation if not to engage the other in a reciprocal act of meaning making? This obvious fact of communication theory allows us, like Giroux (1999), to turn our attention to how the ideological impetus of this political economy of signification that Disney engages in facilitates the subjective interpretation of its signs. That is, how it is possible for a corporation to use the media as a pedagogical tool or device in order to convince the public of the redeeming cultural value of its idiosyncratic point of view. The effects of this form of expression constitute the real moments of teaching and learning: In short, they are (mis)educative in nature.

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco essentially presents an educative vision of some basic semiotic principles that infuse the textual form of a popular fictional genre—the detective story. In effect, it characterizes the postmodernization of the traditional “whodunnit” moving the genre from the realm of “the real” or the plausible into the realm of “the metaphysical” or the unthinkable. The Name of the Rose is a practical application in semiotics. Or, how the aesthetics of textual production as generated through the lexical signs and codes manifest the discursive text of a novel work. The semiotic twists and turns of the detective story facilitate this educational function and the purposeful transformation of the reader into an individual capable of appreciating and grasping the conflicting ideological viewpoints expressed through its dialogical structure. The detective genre enables the Umberto Eco to produce an educational narrative via the intricacies of plot in the detective story while teaching main aspects of semiotic theory.

... This kind of supplementarity deter-mines in a certain way all the conceptual oppositions within which Rousseau inscribes the notion of Nature to the extent that it shouldbeself-sufficient. But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. ...

ABSTRACT This text weighs the ethical consequences of a virtual education that posits a learning community based on the free exchange of ideas and the economy of knowledge cultivating the circulation of ideas. It explores the ethical implications of a virtual educational enterprise characterised by exchanges that do not take place face to face but are still grounded within the belief that technology can offer an ethical form of instruction responsive and responsible to individuals, groups and communities.

... The appeal to common sense and its conservative pre-suppositions inform the traditional con-ception of education in the public sphere. Disney is a part of that machinery that puts an end to the innocence of representation and communication-not that it ever was!-through the ...

... discourses have suffered the same fate (eg the standardization of Marxism and psychoanalysis). ... post-modern spirit of pessimism caused by feelings of alienation and homeless-ness ... However, the epistemological legitimacy of knowledge suffers when the ethics of research are ...

ABSTRACT In recent decades, proponents of naturalistic and/or critical modes of inquiry advocating the use of ethnographic techniques for the narrative‐based study of phenomena within pedagogical contexts have challenged the central methodological paradigm of educational research: that is, the tendency among its practitioners to adhere to quantitative forms of analysis. The innovativeness of ‘qualitative methodologies’ has succeeded in calling for a reevaluation of traditional solutions to educational research problems within the dominant paradigm. The concept of paradigm was introduced as a gesture to illuminate the historicity of science as loosely configured sets of ever changing assumptions with respect to our understandings of the world. What it did was to account for the proliferation of emergent patterns of knowledge production and disciplinary agendas that serve to convene actual research praxis in the sciences. But it also entrenched a certain incommensurability of intents and purposes, not to mention epistemological and methodological constraints that created disciplinary divisions. The engendering logic of such a paradigmatic conception of research sets up divisions according to a methodological basis for confirming knowledge claims as the products of a science. Post‐structuralism, as a theoretical movement framed after the work of Jacques Derrida, transformed the discourse of the debate over the paradigmatic nature of educational research science. It enabled a displacement of the almost undisputed primacy of quantitative methodologies by qualitative forms of analysis. The implications of arguments for and against qualitative inquiry as a valid and reliable means for conducting pedagogical research will be addressed in relation to the work of Derrida through a discussion of: (1) epistemological questions about the nature of ontology; (2) theoretical questions concerning the knowledge of sense perception; and (3) methodological questions regarding the scientific truth‐effect of procedure.

Would it not be more ‘responsible’ to try pondering the ground, in the history of the West, on which the juridico‐egological values of responsibility were determined, attained, imposed? There is perhaps a fund here of ‘responsibility’ that is at once ‘older’ and—to the extent it is conceived anew, through what some would call a crisis of responsibility in its juridico‐egological form and its ideal of decidability—is yet to come, or, if you prefer, ‘younger.’ Here, perhaps, would be a chance for the task of thinking what will have been, up to this point, the representation of university responsibility, of what it is and might become, in the wake of upheavals no longer to be concealed from ourselves, even if we still have trouble analyzing them. Is a new type of university responsibility possible? J. Derrida (1992) Mochlos; or, the conflict of the faculties, R. Rand & A. Wygant (Trans.), in: R. Rand (Ed.) Logomachia: the conflict of the faculties (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press), p. 11. Original translation has been modified.

... elements of fictional plotting as conceived via the workings-out of the literary imagination. ... & Information Literacy Education, Volume 1, Issue 4 (November 2001), 1–10 © University of ... and pro-gressive education that originally began with the social reconstructionist movement of ...

ABSTRACT This article examines the educational implications of this focus by presenting a re-reading of Derrida's reading of the non-ethical aftermath of the sign, or what is a cultural and pedagogical by-product of the epistemic value of a phonological theory of signification and the notion of an interpretative community of speech. This type of unforgiving logocentrism, carried on in the tradition of the teachings of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is effectively questioned here by counter-posing its 'linearist'—both structural and metaphysical—premises of representation as predicated on the voice, against the most crucial elements of the post-structural version of difference or the idea of the play of the sign of the writing of the Other. Thus are set the argumentative preconditions through which to 'test' the theoretical matrix of deconstruction and what it has brought to bear on the practical domain of the disciplinary areas of the application of structuralism within the 'social' or 'human sciences'. The example considered within this contextual site of praxis is Derrida's reading of 'The Writing Lesson' to be found in Claude-Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques , an ethnological master text representative of the 'Age of Rousseau', the epoch of the founding of modern anthropology. By expanding upon the ethico-political dimensions of the deconstruction of the ethnocentrism of the representation of the Nambikwara given, the present article renders an interpretation of Derrida's reading of the intersubjective violence characterizing the cultural politics of the sign in light of the politology of a structuralist 'educational' agenda dismissive of script.