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Legislation As A Site Of Contested Meaning In United States Congressional Debates, John Rountree

Communication Theses

Rhetoric and public policy scholars have shown interest in uncertainty and polysemy in Congress, but they have traditionally treated legislation as a given. Members of Congress disagree about what policy should be, but they also disagree about what any given bill proposes to do. From a rhetorical perspective, I investigate the creation of uncertainty about legislation through the 2013 Senate debate on immigration. I argue that legislation is inherently ambiguous because legislative debate is consistently pushed behind the language of statutes. Rather than consider statutes unto themselves, members of Congress understand them in terms of the potential acts they sanction. …

The Chromophilic Chromophobe: Transference Of Racial Otherness In Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, Reginald Hill

Communication Theses

Reggie Hill

The Chromophilic Chromophobe: Transference of Racial Otherness in The Royal Tenebaums

In this essay, I will analyze the role that color plays in the construction of cinematic otherness through close textual analysis of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. Drawing from studies of phenomenology of whiteness and space, and of the effects of color in cinema, I will examine the relationship between characters, their surroundings, and the colors around them in order to highlight a paradox between the ways in which whiteness becomes normalized in the characters, and how what I’ll refer to as Anderson’s “chromophilic” approach to …