| The dissertation combines work in literary theory, feminism, and pedagogy so as to argue for a materialist approach to the teaching of literary studies. I begin by exploring the extent to which the ideology of individualism has influenced the teaching of literary studies, so as to obscure the sociopolitical implications of people's habits of language use. In response to this tendency, I advocate a pedagogy based on the "materiality of language," a perspective that takes into account how theories of language and language practices are influenced by sociopolitical variables. Phenomena I call the "evasion of politics" and the "disembodiment of language" characterize the work of theorists such as de Saussure and Derrida, contributing to what Peter McLaren calls the "demonization of the empirical subject" in twentieth-century language theory. I also look at various intellectual traditions (humanism, modernism, postmodernism, and feminism) to see whether they participate in the "disembodiment of language" and whether they can contribute to an embodied, socially-grounded view of language. In the work of M. M. Bakhtin and Kenneth Burke, I find a counterpoint to de Saussure and Derrida, but I suggest that aspects of Bakhtin's and Burke's work are undercut by a problematic subtext of masculine individualism and quasi-religiosity, which limits the applicability of their theories to a materialist perspective of language. Using, however, some of Bakhtin's work on carnival, the body, and discourse, the dissertation moves toward an engagement of Peter McLaren's notion of a "politics of enfleshment." In the final chapter of the dissertation, I offer a case study of the materiality of language that puts these theoretical issues into context as I analyze a set of essays written by undergraduate students on topics such as the body, ideology, and gender roles. |
