The Call from the Stranger on a Journey Home: Curriculum in a Third Space (Complicated Conversation Series)

by Hongyu Wang

Overview

This book is a cross-cultural, gendered study of both self and curriculum. Initiating a conversation between and among Michel Foucault, Confucius, and Julia Kristeva, it searches for a new (third) cultural and psychic space of transformation and creativity. Weaving together philosophy, psychoanalysis, and autobiography through lived experiences of curriculum, it calls for new configurations of subjectivity at the intersection of culture and gender, through the meeting between selfhood and the human psyche, in the dynamics of the semiotic and the symbolic, and through the interaction between the Western subject and the Chinese self. These multiple layers of inquiry provide unique perspectives for readers who are interested in curriculum theory, feminist analysis, philosophy of education, or East/West dialogue.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820469034
Publisher:	Peter Lang Publishing Inc.
Publication date:	01/28/2004
Series:	Complicated Conversation Series , #7
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	6.08(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

The Author: Hongyu Wang is Assistant Professor in Curriculum Studies at Oklahoma State University. She received her Ph.D. in curriculum theory from Louisiana State University. In addition to co-authored books and published articles in Chinese, she is a co-editor of The Internationalization of Curriculum Studies (Peter Lang, 2003).

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	Acknowledgments	xiii
1.	Introduction: The Call from the Stranger on a Journey Home	1
2.	The Call from the Other Shore: The Care of the Self, Freedom, and Self-Creation	23
3.	Back to the Root: The Confucian Self and an Ecology of Personal Cultivation	53
4.	Woman as Stranger: Can Her Call Be Heard?	87
5.	The Philosophical Self Meets the Psychic Transformation in a Cross-Cultural Gendered Space	125
6.	Curriculum in a Third Space	153
	References	185
	Index	197

Editorial Reviews

«Hongyu Wang presents an elegant and insightful journey into cross-cultural self-formation. Readers travel with her through an unusual juxtapositioning of life and academic narrative, of prose and poetry, located in a central rendering of philosophies of Confucius, Foucault and Kristeva. The text is revolutionary for its multiplicity of writing forms and for its example of a postmodern self continually in the making. As for all of us, partial selves are Wang: there is no resolution of difference or dissonance either personally or theoretically even as one desires (subconsciously?) wholeness or harmony. This I applaud most of all.» (Lynda Stone, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
«Hongyu Wang’s voice is as clear as a bell in this text and yet, at the same time, the author helps me experience myself and my own presumptions and successes and blind-spots anew. It is always a sign of hermeneutic success when, through a ‘stranger’s’ eyes and words, one’s own culture begins to appears odd and unique and not simply ‘the way things are’. I believe that this is precisely the sort of text that vitally needed right now: new voices, new conversations, new unearthings of our shared and contested lives in education.» (David Jardine, University of Calgary)

From the Publisher