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French
The notion of a “subject” as an identifiable person who produces a text is rooted at least partly in the linguistic and anthropologic traditions of French research (for example, R. Barthes and C. Lévi-Strauss). The subject in their work is conditioned by the linguistic, social, and anthropological codes of the period and cultural location (Clifford, 1991, p. 40). In linguistic analysis, the subject might be seen as specific (the student who speaks about experiences and bases his written or spoken text on this: “I am from a rough neighborhood and I hate school”), or voice of general truths (“Students from rough neighborhoods are part of a marginalized group and cannot do well in school”), or still again as the French third person generic “on” that simultaneously can include the speaker and permit him or her to speak for everyone.
E. Bautier et D. Bucheton (1997) offer the notion of “postures” to study the complex question of student-subjects and their discursive positions in both their written texts and their classroom participation. The term “posture” might seem to carry negative implications, but in their use, it is simply a way of framing the variety of subject positions students adopt. The posture in question (and of course it is generally a question of more than one posture in a given language situation) is temporary, always displacing itself in new instances (whether situations or tasks). New postures are being invented regularly. Nor are these postures immediately « readable » moments ; they are rather ways to bring together and name the various movements of subjectivation which present themselves (and construct themselves) in a written or spoken text.
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English
Subject, subject position:
The social constructivist frame includes attention to “subject positions” in a heavily social understanding inspired by the work of L. Althusser, among others, and used to designate and theorize the student writer and his or her explicit or implicit integration into a text. According to Clifford (1991), Althusser proposed that individuals are constructed in and by discursive networks: we “permit” ourselves, not necessarily consciously, to be interpellated by the discourses that surround us. For Althusser, the “subject” is neither the person/personality of the text’s writer, nor the rhetorical persona, but “a composite of subject positions, simultaneously active in the reproduction of positions” (cited in Faigley, 1989, p. 403). The traditional conception of a unified self and its place in the social order are thus always imaginary. The student writer in learning situations is vulnerable because he does not see himself as “textual subject,” subject for whom the institution of education has prepared a place (as opposed to the student choosing that place) (Brodkey, 1989).
Althusser’s thinking also dominated understanding of our relationship with dominant discourses and ideologies, always naming and positioning us even as we believe we are free agents acting by choice (Kavanaugh, 1995, p. 310), including in the texts we write or say in which we claim to present our authentic selves.
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