بختیار سجادی

The present thesis seeks to scrutinize Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and Falling Man (2007) in terms of Benjaminian’s concepts of reproducibility, aura, and storytelling. Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher and literary and cultural critic, argues that the emergence of new technologies including film, photography and printing press not only has drastically changed the function of works of art in society, but also has inevitably led to a sharp decline of aura in those artworks. According to Benjamin, the concept of storytelling has diminished by the act of dissemination of the novels and the information in the modern age. For Benjamin, the act of replication of artworks led to the disappearance of other significant features such as uniqueness and authenticity, which are in close affinity with aura of artworks. In the novel Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo demonstrates Eric Packer, the protagonist, a billionaire asset manager who travels across New York City in his limousine to get a haircut. During his trip to the city, he analyzes the unstable economic situation, watches the news and videos of the death of his friends through the screens and monitors of his expensive car. Another novel, which depicts the devaluation of the artworks in modern times, is Falling Man. In this novel, DeLillo depicts the horrible situation of the character Keith Neudecker, as the protagonist, where he manages to escape from the 9/11 attacks. Keith listens to recorded songs, which have been reproduced in unlimited numbers. In the novel, Martin is an art dealer, and his fiancée, Nina, is a collector. Nina has various paintings on her wall that she has bought them from different people or art exhibitions. By focusing on the characters of the two novels, it can be recognized that DeLillo depicts the withering of aura due to the replication of works of art through the characters Keith Neudecker and Erick Packer. Also, he demonstrates the significance of storytelling by providing a rather detailed analysis of the significant character, Benno Levin and Florence Givens. Moreover, DeLillo illustrates the concept of reproducibility mainly through the reproductions of Erick Packer and Carol Shoup which has led to the devaluation of those artworks.

The current thesis attempts to present a comparative reading of Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Reza Ghasemi’s The Nocturnal Symphony of Lumbers’ Orchestra. The fundamental aim of this thesis is to trace Žižekian concepts of the parallax, the tickling object, and the ticklish subject in these two novels. Herzog, one of Bellow’s awarded novels, contains a host of unsent letters providing illustration of Moses Herzog’s psychological status. Congruently in The Nocturnal Symphony of Lumbers’ Orchestra, Reza Ghasemi investigates the protagonist’s psychological status, Yadollah. Žižekian theory of the subject provides proper theoretical framework in reading these American and Persian novels. The works of Slavoj Žižek conducted disputatious re-articulation of Subject/Object, the Displacement of an Objet Petit a (Object of Desire) with Object-Cause of Desire, and Parallax. Žižek re-articulated Lacanian concepts, but, like Hegel, he places emphasis on one-to-one relation between subject and object. This thesis sheds light upon the psychological status of Moses and Yadollah; a comparative study of protagonists’ subjectivity in both novels. Herzog’s most significant actions take place in the mind of the subject. Moses’ second wife, Madeleine, is often described as the source of Moses’ interior struggle as she abandons Moses to be lover of Valentine Gersbach, Moses’ best friend. In Reza Ghasemi’s novel, actions are narrated through Yadollah’s mind. Yadollah is left behind by his lover, Raana on one hand, and on the other hand, the fact that Yadollah has immigrated delineates his inner subjectivity. Moses’ and Yadollah’s interior struggle to find truth appears to delineate the real essence of the subjects.

This study aims to scrutinize Marsha Norman’s plays, being Getting Out (1977) and Night, Mother (1982) in terms of Lacanian concepts of Oedipus complex, Foreclosure, Identity, and Name-of-the-Father which serve as a methodology in psychoanalytic criticism. Along with these main concepts, other related ones such as Desire, Lack, Object Petit a, Ego, Ideal Ego and the Big Other are frequently referred. The main objective of the present study is to demonstrate the importance of the role of the father (not necessarily the biological one) and its presence or absence in shaping the subjectivity of the main characters of the two plays. Analyzing the two case studies, in terms of Lacan’s key concepts, revealed that Norman, as a playwright, records her character’s psychoanalytical growth and the troubles they face on the process of reforming their corrupt identity. Night, Mother depicts last night of Jessie Cates life, revealing the conflicts between she and her mother. After experiencing a failed marital life, epileptic Jessie is back home to live with her mother. Norman presents a modern American woman’s mental world of a repressed personality just through the abundant dialogues between Jessie and her mother. Jessie resorts to suicide to claim back her long-lost autonomy. In spite of her, in Getting Out, Arlie fantasizes an alternative self, namely Arlene, and lives “her” out to affirm her new-built identity. In this play, Norman portrays one day of Arlene Holsclaw’s life – a newly released prisoner- along with the synchronic act of her younger counterpart –Arlie- that plays in role of her past life, and illustrates the resultant conflicts of this young woman. Based on Lacan, it is by the intervention of the father that the child traverses from the whole-childish Imaginary Order to the lack-loaded Symbolic one, and any defeat in facing the role of the father may result in psychoanalytical disorders. Through an unsuccessful transition, both main characters of the previously mentioned plays were undergoing growing unfulfilled desires which mislead them in finding their true identity out. Analyzing the process in which the two main characters pass through to rebuild their fragmented identity was the main concern of studying the selected plays of Norman based on psychoanalytical theories.

Twêjînewey berdest, be zorî, perjawete ser pirsî ziman le Bakûr û Rojheɫatî Kurdistan û bandorî îdeolojî le ser pêvajoy besûjebûnî takî Kurd le rûberûbûnewe legel ew pirse da. Bem pêye, romanekanî Pêşbaziya Çîrokên Neqediyayî nûsînî Şener Ozmen û Gaboȓ berhemî Seyid Qadir Hîdayetî be gwêrey çemkgelî ‘îdeolojî’, ‘dezgayên serkut û îdeolojîkî dewɫet’ û ‘sûje’ le teorîy Louis Althusser, xwêndirawnetewe. Lêkoɫîneweke pîşan dedat, hawkat legeɫ serkutî fîzîkî, le rêgey dezga îdeolojîkekanewe, pêvajoy perawêzxistinî zimanî Kurdî pêş xirawe. Çiwar dezgay çalakî hawdestî dewɫet lem pêvajoye da, be pêy teorîyekey Althusser, maɫbat, xwêndinge û dezgayên ayînî û mîdiyayî n, ke twanîwyane le çêkirdinî sûjey milkeç da serkewin. Em sûjegele, hawkat legeɫ kirdey îdeolojîk, le rêy bekarhênanî serkutewe, zortirîn astengiyan bo sûje serbizêwekan çê kirdûwe. Serlehengên her dû roman, wek sê sûjey zimanparêzî gemarodirawî, xo deparêzin û milkeçî îdeolojîy zaɫ nabin. Boye, dekewine ber heȓiş û yekyan be destî sûjeyekî xapênrawî dezgay ayînî dête kuştin û ewanî dîkeş, rêy heɫatin degrine ber. Sûje gwêrayelekan le her dû deqeke da, le jêr karîgerîy her dû cor dezgay serkut û îdeolojîk da heɫsazrawin, beɫam le deqe Soranîyeke da, serkut zaɫtir e. Le deqe Kurmancîyeke da, dezgayên îdeolojîk baɫadest in û tiwanîwyane sûjey destajoy zimanî be serkewtûyî çê biken; be corê ke, sûjekan bo xoyan, ‘azadane’ rewşî dasepaw berhem dehêninewe. Ke wa bû, be serincdan be hêzî şarawey îdeolojî û tundtirbûnî serkutî zimanî le Bakûr, deseɫatî ewê serkewtûwanetir amancekanî pêkawe. Le Gaboȓ da, egerçî heɫwêstî sûje gwêȓayeɫekan le beramber pirtûkî Kurdî da ta radeyek be heman şêwe ye, beɫam ewan ziyatir le ber tirsyan le dezgay serkut, dijayetîy zimanî xoyan deken û îdeolojî neytiwanîwe be tewawetî mêşkyan dagîr bikat. Be giştî, keşî zaɫî Gaboȓ, serkut û hîwa û serheɫdan û keşî zaɫî Pêşbaziya Çîrokên Neqediyayî, îdeolojî û nahumêdî û doȓan e. Sereȓay emane, peşîmanîy bikujî romanî berbas, le kuştinî serlehengî mamostay û famkirdinî rastîy riwangekanî û milnedanî serlehengên Gaboȓ û serheɫdanyan le pênaw ziman, pîşanderî berdewamîy berengarî n.

The present study aims to vividly explore John Dos Passos’ trilogy U.S.A. concerning the deconstructionism concepts of différance and binary opposition. U.S.A. contains three books, The 42ND Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money which later all published in one book. Passos had added a prologue with the title U.S.A. to The Modern Library edition of The 42ND Parallel and started a trilogy beginning with it. Deconstructionism is a theory of literary criticism initiated by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, which questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth. It asserts that words can only refer to other words attempting to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings. The obvious certainty and absoluteness in Passos’ works thus demanded an approach of deconstruction to be applied to his novels and his trilogy. The novels have four major narrative styles and the attempt to deconstruct such novels with multi narrators should be certainly different for each narrator. When Dos Passos speaks through the perspectives of his characters the task is both to deconstruct the created character and Das Passos himself as the character. The Significance of this trilogy is obvious, especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, as it acts as a representative of the American people who underwent pivotal changes before, during and after the war. The decisiveness of the author for labelling undecidable terms such as n nationality, war, money, and racism and feminism has been overturned and reversed in meaning and value by requesting aid from Derrida’s concepts.

The present research seeks to critically address Lisa Unger’s In the Blood (2014) and Crazy Love You (2015) getting use of Jacques Derrida's deconstructivist concepts of otherness and logocentrism. The two novels by Unger are narrated and constructed on the basis of masculine/feminine binary opposition in order to empower women; however, it is argued that they have not succeeded in doing so. Hence, the two novels can be studied through the lens of Derrida’s concepts. Otherness, one of the key terms of this thesis, highlights the way masculine/feminine binary opposition is constructed in the two novels. The text is deconstructed to argue that neither side of the binarism is prior. Moreover, logocentrism is used to find out whether Dear Diary chapters of In the Blood and Fatboy and Priss chapters in Crazy Love You as written parts added to the course of the story are authentic. Based on logocentrism, speech is prior to writing which means writing is not authentic to take into account. This argument is deconstructed to disapprove the concept of logocentrism.

The present research seeks to critically analyse Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Jeanne DuPrau’s The City of Ember (2003) in terms of Judith Herman’s psychoanalytic concepts of hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction, which are the tree symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Moreover, the research resorts to Herman’s notions of safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection to represent the possibility of achieving recovery in a post-apocalyptic world. The Road and The City of Ember deal with characters living in a post-apocalyptic territory where there is a constant clash between traumatic experiences and survival instincts. Even though both novels share some basic similarities in their aims and leitmotifs, the study will demonstrate that McCarthy’s, as a male novelist, and DuPrau’s, as a female novelist, approaches are highly different concerning representation of conflicts and their narrative voices. The research is an attempt to orchestrate a traumatic post-apocalyptic reading of both novels and it proposes to discuss the traumatic experiences of the characters trundling in a post-apocalyptic setting.

The present study aims atclosely investigating Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream and The Demon, based on Slavoj Žižek’s critique of violence, desire, and fantasy. In a sequence of influential books, Žižek formulates a new framework to look at the role of violence within modern society, approaching it in terms of Objective and Subjective violence, and to shed light on the unbearable enigma of the desire as a state of motivation or drive for seeking pleasure through his theory of fantasy. Žižek explores the critique of ideology and states that the experience of desire is established within sets of social conditions and ideologies, and the desire of the subject is necessarily shaped by ideologies bounded with the social codes, structures, and beliefs. Requiem for a Dream and The Demon, written by the significant twentieth-century writer, Hubert Selby, are complex and monumental works that highly depict the failings of modern society. This research seeks to study his achievements of Requiem for a Dream and The Demon, in the light of the Žižek theory of the shattered fantasy, violence, cruelty and the unfulfillment of desire to analyze how these concepts were represented in the novels.

This study is a reading of Anita Amirrezvani's The Blood of Flowers and Equal of the Sun in terms of Hayden White's notions of emplotment and narrativity. Through analysis of Amirrezvani's treatment of real historical events, the study raises several questions regarding the historical truth of the presented events, the author's role and purpose in reshaping the past, and the effects of contemporary discourses on Iran's past and present on the narratives. In an attempt to rewrite history, Amirrezvani deviates from official historical records and invents stories about those parts of history that have been marginalized or written out of historical narratives. Amirrezvani has depicted many characters, events, and situations, many of which familiar to us from official records of history, but she mixes these real elements with many imaginary elements, and subjects them to a process of emplotment to support her own reading of Iran's past. This process of emplotment has been worked out through techniques such as selection, insertion, dramatization and novelization. The results of the study show that Amirrezvani's main project in her two novels has been to read Iran's past in terms of the current debates on Iran, especially the place of women in the Iranian society, Amirrezvani articulates some of the dominant contemporary discourses on Iran and accordingly rewrites Iran's past history in a way to make it appealing to contemporary audiences.

The present study aims to investigate major historiographical negotiations in Pat Barker’s selected novels of Life Class (2007) and Noonday (2015) concerning theoretical premises of ‘history as narrative’ and ‘emplotment’. Life Class, as the first novel from Barker’s trilogy under the same name, takes into account the significant incidences prior to and during the outbreak of the First World War. The subsequent novel, Noonday, as the last novel of the historical trilogy under consideration, includes a detailed description of the closing years of the Second World War. Novelist’s employment of literary and aesthetic techniques, alongside her imagination in mingling the factual and the fictional, play an exceedingly momentous role in the selected works. The principal proposition of postmodern aesthetic historiography is that in textualizing history artistic criteria are principally concerned. Within this procedure, the realities of history are prefigured in the mind of the historian and subsequently institutionalized in a poetic context. Hayden White’s two major premises of history as narrative and historical emplotment primarily function as the essential instruments in the process of encodation of structure and meaning. Ultimately, it is concluded that in the narrative representation of the two World Wars in the context of the novels under investigation, the aesthetic historiographical conventions are employed with a particular emphasis on rhetorical techniques.

The present research seeks to critically address Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013) concerning the postcolonial concepts of unhomeliness, liminality, and hybridity. The Namesake demonstrates the struggles of a Bengali family migrated to America. Gogol, their son, is embarrassed by his name and his parents’ culture and traditional practices. As the story continues, his conflicts become stronger and he hates his culture more and more. The Lowland narrates the story of two brothers, Udayan and Subhash, with two different worldviews. Udayan is interested in political movements and it leads to his death. On the other hand, Subhash marries Gauri, Udayan’s wife, and they raise Bela, Udayan and Gauri’s daughter, together. Additionally, each of them has different inner conflicts to tackle. These two postcolonial novels by Lahiri can be studied through the lens of Bhabha’s concepts. Unhomeliness, one of the key terms of this thesis, highlights the way a colonial subject identifies the world as split between two cultures and furthermore, that subject does not have the experience of having a home culture. The other key concept, hybridity, is a term used by Homi Bhabha to describe what happens when two cultures commingle. The nature and the characteristics of the newly created culture change each of the two cultures in a process called hybridity. Also, liminality means to be at the threshold. In a liminal state, the colonial subject is stuck between two cultures. This research attempts to shed light on how these concepts are represented in the novels and how each of those processes are different and yet related to each other. In this study, the hybridization of identities of the major characters are explored as well.

This study investigates Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and Cosmopolis (2003) in terms of Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of production of space. Lefebvre’s complex theory of production of space is offered as a triad of interconnected and necessary elements which includes spatial practices, representations of space, and representational spaces that leads to a true knowledge of space. The main argument of this study is to illustrate space as a fundamental element in the operation and organization of society within historical modes of production and consequently shapes the identity of the characters. Capitalism as a mode of production tends to create social cohesion in a society without lasting traditions by make use of abstract space which is not homogenous itself, thought it contains homogeneity in its aims. The mode of production in both novels is capitalism which tends to homogenize the characters’ identities through abstract space, consumerism, and everyday life. White Noise deals with a capitalist society, the criticism of capitalism, and post-industrial consumption-oriented society as a result of capitalism through the use of distinct spaces and places throughout the novel. Cosmopolis as a postmodern novel investigates the relationship between futurity, technology, and subjective experience in a postmodern society by make use of spaces and places. This study analyzes the production of social space in White Noise and Cosmopolis through the framework of Lefebvre’s theory of production of space and the influence of these social spaces on the identity of characters. The result of these analyses demonstrates that capitalism, as a mode of production, produces social spaces related to consumerism and consequently shapes the characters’ identity as consumerist individuals.

The present dissertation attempts to study Virginia Woolf’s To the Light House and Orlando in terms of Judith Butler’s concepts of gender, performativity, and agency. Woolf examines women and their struggles and positions in literary history, and their needs for independence. She is among the founders of Modernist movement which also includes T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pond. Themes in her works consist of gender relations, class hierarchy and the consequences of war. In most of her novels she moves away from the use of plot and character and instead she emphasizes the psychological aspects of her characters. It would thus be of interest to see how the novels and their characters developed Butler’s concepts. Butler is a prominent figure in the field of gender studies and she is under the influence of Derrida and Foucault; therefore, one could call her that she is a post-structuralist. Two of her great works are Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matters, where she demonstrates the gender issues and her other significant concepts such as gender identity, agency, and queer theory. Consequently, there is a confluence between Butler’s critical theory and the development of Woolf’s female characters, and this dissertation seeks to explore that relationship by closely reading Woolf’s novels in terms of her concepts.

The present dissertation seeks to closely investigate JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarian and Life & Times of Michael K in terms of Fredric Jameson's concept of the political unconscious. The central Argument of the present research is to demonstrate how JM Coetzee’s waiting for the Barbarian and Life & Times of Michael K are in close association with the core idea of the political unconscious. Jameson believes that any work of art could be read in a context of its historical circumstances, that is to say, its socio-economic determinants. To this end, the present dissertation has been colored to enrich itself by investigating other code words such as totality, narrative and interpretation, ideologeme(s), mode of production, and the ideology of the form. Jameson’s dialectical aesthetic in The Political Unconscious is the corollary of the confluence of Freud and Marx’s fundamental premises of unconscious and sociopolitical anxieties respectively. Fredric Jameson’s intellectual hermeneutic lies in uncovering the way in which the contradictions and antinomies as well as sociopolitical and cultural anxieties are to be unfolded within his three semantic horizons of interpretation, namely, ‘the political’ or ‘the textual’, ‘the social’ and ‘the historical’. The present dissertation argues that Coetzee’s selected novels, through the political unconscious analysis, reveal the repressed desires encoded in the unconscious of the narratives. To unravel the underlying contradictions and antinomies beneath the surface of the text, the narrative demands interpretations so as to pierce into the latent meaning of the novels. Coetzee’s selected novels depict the cultural and sociopolitical anxieties by which the south Afrikaners’ collective consciousness is determined and shaped.

This study investigates Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005) in terms of the Lacanian concepts of Subjectivity, Desire and the Symbolic. Along with these main concepts, other related ones such as the big Other, the Name-of-the-Father, object petit a, ideal Ego, ego Ideal, subject of the statement, subject of enunciation, subject of causality, das Ding, tuché and automaton are frequently referred. Lacan is famous for his ideas on the truth of man’s desire and his understanding of himself and of the world around him. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is a significant link between subjectivity, the unconscious and language. The central objective of this research is to demonstrate the affinity between the Symbolic Order, in which the characters are positioned, and their subjectivity. The analysis of the two case studies, in terms of Lacan’s key concepts, showed that McEwan, as a novelist, records his characters’ psychological growth and the troubles they face in their attempt to locate truth. In an attempt to affirm and demonstrate Lacan’s famous statement that “man’s desire is the desire of the Other”, many scenes, events and descriptions from both novels are taken into account and analyzed. In Atonement, Briony moves from one field of desire to another in order to regain her lost object of desire or object petit a. Likewise, in Saturday, Theo and Daisy’s search for das Ding causes their entrapment in the pitfall of Grammaticus’ desire. Furthermore, two facets of Lacan’s traumatic Real, namely, automaton (the network of signifiers) and tuché (encountering with the Real), are demonstrated in relation to Atonement and Saturday respectively. The results of the analyses show that the main characters’ encounter with a traumatic situation is the harbinger of the truth of their lives, the objective knowledge of their position in the world as puppets at the mercy of the big Other.

This dissertation seeks to critically investigate Martin Amis’ Night Train and London Fields in terms of Jacques Derrida’s concepts of deconstruction, supplement, and undecidability. Deconstructing Night Train as a novel which presents two categories of masculine and feminine, the text determines two recognizable sets of identities of which the feminine is marginalized. However, the one-to-one relationship of the marginalizing process demonstrates différance, i. e., the marginalized loses the difference which posits it in the secondary locus of the supplement. As a result of the constantly alternating position of the supplement there emerges the free-play of marginalization in the feminine/masculine binary which is closely in correspondence with the homicide/suicide binary. Considering that the novel explores the feminine suicide and the underlying motives, the text seeks to privilege the nature of a silenced act, the unprivileged feminine suicide. However, the problem of différance and the interchangeable locus of the marginalized result in undecidability and a democratic voice of both feminine and masculine together with homicide and suicide as two equal acts; therefore, the attribution of suicide to women does not p[rove that women are marginal and infirm. Furthermore, the phallogocentrism in question is deconstructible due to the problem of transcendality, différance, the interchangeable locus of the supplement, and undecidability.

The present research is an analysis of Mark Ravenhill’s selected plays, Some Explicit Polaroids, Faust Is Dead, The Cut, and Product in terms of Anthony Giddens’ major theoretical concepts regarding the condition of Late or High Modernity. The study attempts to consider Giddens’ critical concepts including Globalization, Risk, and Uncertainty in the selected plays. Reading the plays in light of Giddens’ theories, it will be illustrated that Ravenhill, as a dramatist, records the social changes of the contemporary era in his plays. The researcher addresses the concept of Globalization in these four plays and how the transformations brought by it have affected individuals’ day to day life. Each of Ravenhill’s plays represents the social state of their setting. Anthony Giddens is well-known for his theory of Globalization and Late Modernity; according to him, the world of Late Modernity is full of risks and dangers. This concept, for him, has a highly significant place in individuals’ life. Similar to Risk, the concept of uncertainty plays a prominent role in today’s world. These two concepts are investigated in Ravenhill’s plays in order to demonstrate that these features have penetrated into people’s lives undoubtedly. The main argument of this study is to indicate how people’s personal issues have been transformed in the globalized world they live in. Giddens’ critical concepts are explored in each play separately. Not only these three concepts but also other remarkable concepts including: Trust, Dilemmas of the Self, and the Transformation of Intimacy are investigated as well. Additionally, the study explores the impacts of those issues on the process of Self-identity in the condition of Late Modernity. According to Giddens, the characteristics of contemporary world intrude deeply into the heart of self-identity and personal feelings.

By undermining the fundamental assumptions of the Enlightenment and modernist approaches to history, the postmodern philosophy offered a new outlook at defining history as a discipline in humanities by foregrounding its ontology. One such postmodern approach is that of the American philosopher of history Hayden White. White challenged the rudimentary presuppositions of Enlightenment/modernist philosophies of history to render them insufficient and incomplete. At the same time, parallel to the development of the poststructuralist philosophy of history, historiographic metafiction burgeoned to criticize the positivistic attitudes to history by, for instance, intermingling the historical and the fictional. Instances of such historiographic metafiction are the Ishmael Reed's novels Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada. In the preset study, while providing a comparative study of the major approaches to history, it is attempted to analyze Mumbo Jumbo and Flight to Canada to investigate the strategies and novelistic techniques by the help of which he embraced such postmodernist tenets. By reading these novels based on White's critical key terms on history, it was observed that in deconstructing the fundamental conventions of historiography and of the classical historical novel, Reed constructs apocryphal histories of Western civilization and American history respectively. Such counterhistories provide a new narration of history by the help of which Reed foregrounds the history of the black people as a racial minority and makes their silenced voices be heard and acknowledged. This new narration of history in turn leads to a new narration of identity in which Reed distances his narrative from the traditional essentialist accounts of identity and welcomes the poststructuralist tenets