Between Alienation and Agency: A Bakhtin-Foucauldian Approach to the Adolescent Subject

• In Event: 66.080 - Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 66.080-12 - Policy and Power

Abstract

Foucault's 1981-82 lectures at the Collège de France, while often overlooked, provides the key concept of an "exegesis of the self" (17 February 1982: First hour), from which this paper constructs an aesthetic theory of the self. Employing narrative and discourse analysis to analyze student narratives from an ethnography of a middle school language arts classroom, the author, interested in students’ writer identities, views these findings through the late work of Foucault and early theoretical work of Bakhtin. The paper ends with the suggestion that Foucault and Bakhtin's aesthetic theory of the subject has theoretical and methodological affordances, especially when attempting to elucidate emic conception of students' situated identities.

Author

• Robert Heggestad, The Ohio State University