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The Quest For Body And Voice In Assia Djebar's So Vast The Prison, Susannah Rodríguez Drissi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Using Northrop Frye's definition of the quest novel and Joseph Campbell's writings, Susannah Rodríguez Drissi explores in her paper, "The Quest for Body and Voice in Assia Djebar's So Vast the Prison," the motif of the journey as Djebar adapts it to her female characters. Rodríguez Drissi proposes that in previous studies concerning the hero -- such as in James Frazer's The Golden Bough or in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces -- women are relegated to a secondary role. Recently, however, it has become evident that the study of the woman as "heroine" is necessary to a …

Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting And The Condition Of Women, Ludmila Volná

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting and the Condition of Women" Ludmila Volná presents a critical culture-based reading of Desai's novel Fasting, Feasting, a work that deals with the condition of women (not only) in India. Volná analyzes both female and the male sensitivities in the novel where Desai makes use of a double symbolic of food expressed throughout the novel by (not only literal) hunger. In Volná's view, Desai's Hindu imagery of sun/fire as patriarchal power and water, which, as the counterpart of the sun and fire, represents recognition of women’s condition and a possible way to …

The Staged Self In Mary Carleton's Autobiographical Narratives, Geraldine Wagner

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "The Staged Self in Mary Carleton's Autobiographical Narratives," Geraldine Wagner examines Mary Carleton's use of romance and picaresque modes of self-representation to appropriate and redefine counterfeiting as a legitimate means to identity. The most notorious female criminal of the English Restoration, Mary Carleton, captured the public's imagination in 1662 when she stood trial for bigamy. Although acquitted on insufficient evidence, the allegation that she was a common shoemaker's wife counterfeiting the identity of a German noblewoman spawned a war of pamphlets of competing biographical accounts between Carleton and her detractors. Wagner argues that these attempts to confine …

Globalization, Ideology, And Narratives Of The East Asian Financial Crisis, Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Globalization, Ideology, and Narratives of the East Asian Financial Crisis," Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee analyzes the narratives of the East Asian financial "crisis" in 1997-98, arguing that it took place in the course of restructuring the world economy so that the first world would keep its hegemonic power. The East Asian financial crisis spread rapidly to the rest of the globe and in this urgent situation, the IMF: International Monetary Fund played its now typical role as a "savior of the world." Before the financial crisis, the East Asian economy was considered to be an exemplary model from …

Watsuji And Deleuze And Guattari In The Climate Of Culture, Seth Jacobowitz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Seth Jacobowitz, in his paper "Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture," analyzes theories of cultural properties in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus alongside Watsuji Tetsuro's prewar Climate and Culture. At stake in these investigations is the status of the West as a universalizing particular ratified by these authors in the instance of its own critique. We are confronted on the one hand with Deleuze and Guattari's exoticized, Orientalist promise of an alternative economy of meaning derived from the Balinese term for "plateau" and the morphology of the rhizome and, on the other hand, …

Whistler’S Fog And The Aesthetics Of Place, Bruce Janz

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The concept of place has usually been understood as either a phenomenological, epistemological, or ethical category. An understanding of place as aesthetic or rhetorical, on the other hand, tends to focus on the widely varied uses of the concept. First, I sketch out the wide range of uses of place, that have been drawn from writings on the concept. These uses are not definitions of place, but rather functions that the term performs. Place stands in for other ideas, and allows access to different aspects of human experience. Second, I will draw from this range of uses some ideas about …

Rhetorics Of Place: The Importance Of Public Spaces And Public Spheres, Michael Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

This special issue's emphasis on the rhetorics of place is a claim that our physical places are shaped and understood through the public sphere by the various communities of meaning competing for attention, and, in which public opinion is formed and policy decisions are made (Sanchez-Casal and Macdonald, 10-14; Strickland,165; also see Arendt; Borradori; Calhoun; Escobar; Fraser; Glissant; Habermas).

On Ethan Watter's Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family And Commitment, Danny Mayer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Outside of the 60s generation, there are few if any generational groupings as well known and discussed as Generation X, the term coined by Douglas Copeland to describe the generation approaching adulthood in the post-Reagan boom-years of the 1990s. As the subject of books (Generation X), movies (Reality Bites, Clerks, Slacker), TV dramas and sitcoms (Seinfeld, Friends, Ally McBeal, Sex and the City), and Prime Time news specials, there is seemingly little new to say about Gen X. It has long since been tagged as a generation …

Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity, John Shelton Lawrence, Marty S. Knepper

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paired set explores the experience of cultural identities constructed by and experienced through popular film. The essay “Discovering Your Cinematic Cultural Identity” reflects the authors’ decades of residence in the state of Iowa and their personal irritation with the stereotypes that Hollywood regularly calls upon in evoking the American rural. We gained a new perspective on this sort of imagery when it surfaced again in Field of Dreams (1989) and The Bridges of Madison County novel (1992) and film (1995). Each of these films triggered unprecedented film tourism for the state. Through an exploration of these films and others …

Cultural Commentary: The Danger Of Danger, William C. Levin

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Tracing Chinese Gay Cinema 1993-2002, Lan Dong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Lan Dong explores in her paper, "Tracing Chinese Gay Cinema 1993-2002" the recent landscape of Chinese gay cinema through discussing the following three feature films: Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993), Zhang Yuan's East Palace, West Palace (1996), and Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu (2001). The grouping derives from the concern that they all set their stories in Beijing. Using the capital city as a cultural background, the films display how queer is perceived in China from the 1920s to the end of the 1990s. All three storylines portray the characters' struggle to recognize their particular identity as gay men. In …

Introduction To New Papers In American Cultural Studies, Joanne Morreale, P. David Marshall

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Harry Potter And The Susceptible Child Audience, Kara Lynn Andersen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Kara Lynn Andersen, in her paper "Harry Potter and the Susceptible Child Audience," argues for a rethinking of assumptions of child audiences as passive readers and viewers through an analysis of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Andersen argues that instead of categorizing children as passive and homogenous subjects of analysis, they should instead be incorporated as participants in the discourse about children's books and films. Although frequently figured as especially susceptible to the affects of advertising and other media, young Harry Potter fans are particularly visible as not only consumers of the texts, but creators of new texts. Using work done …

Dust And The Avant-Garde, Jake Kennedy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Dust and the Avant-Garde," Jake Kennedy presents an interdisciplinary exploration of experimental modernism in the work of visual artist Marcel Duchamp and writer Gertrude Stein. Kennedy focuses on the strange presence of dust in the work of these two artists and argues that as an abject object -- it is literally the unwanted of domestic space -- the idea of dust engages radically modernism on a material level. Dust is also the unwanted of modernity itself, as it represents a potentially subversive sister-part to urban, masculine modernity's valorisation of machinery, glass, and steel. Transmuted into the metaphysical …

Reality Tv, Faking It, And The Transformation Of Personal Identity, Joanne Morreale

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Reality TV, Faking It, and the Transformation of Personal Identity," Joanne Morreale examines the hybrid makeover, game, and reality TV show Faking It as a cultural form that portrays the transformation of personal identity through performance. Morreale argues that the contents and performance of the show intensify the link between consumer culture and the fabrication of identity by teaching that fulfillment comes from becoming, rather than having, a commodity. In the show, participants learn to perform new selves that are perceived as "better." Faking It thus puts on display the processes of fabrication whereby the self is …

But... Can The Subaltern Sing?, Rebecca Romanow

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "But... Can the Subaltern Sing?," Rebecca Romanow discusses the dominance of the English language in rock music and the cultural values and global power that are exerted through the exportation of rock by American and British bands. Further, she explores the question of the ways in which this music represents an area of popular culture where the voices of the non-English speaking and the non-Western are silenced. Salman Rushdie, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, complains that rock music "is precisely one of those viruses with which the almighty West has infected the East, one of the …

Political Deliberation And E-Participation In Policy-Making, Rebecca J. Romsdahl

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Political Deliberation and E-Participation in Policy-Making," Rebecca J. Romsdahl proposes that the internet has now become a valuable medium for information dissemination and long distance communication; it is also gaining attention as a potential tool for political deliberation. Public participation has been a long-standing tradition in American democracy but most scholars today believe it needs a revival. Some of these scholars believe that e-participation in policy-making could help revitalize political discussion between citizens and government and promote greater participation by disenfranchised groups. Whether this would lead to greater opportunities for true deliberation on political issues and not …

Nation, Heritage, And Hospitality In Britain After Thatcher, Ryan S. Trimm

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Nation, Heritage, and Hospitality in Britain after Thatcher," Ryan S. Trimm examines the trope of cultural inheritance in postimperial Britain. "Heritage," an ubiquitous term in 1980s Britain, circulates largely as a conservative concept, an imagined bequest that works to exclude groups such as minorities who are disinherited putatively by not being part of the past and conceived as handing down some legacy. Such seems to be precisely the way heritage functioned under Margaret Thatcher's heritage politics, a collection of policies that associated icons such as the country house with the nation itself. However, although appeals to heritage …

Selected Bibliography Of Scholarship In (Comparative) Cultural Studies And Popular Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Yilin Liao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Cnning And Showdown: Iraq: News, New Media, And Popular Culture, G. Kim Blank

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Kim Blank's CNNing and Showdown Iraq, too, provides an innovative model for the interaction and mutual transfusion of case study and the work of theorizing. Although the backdrop to Blank's essay is CNN's cultural significance and the programming it ran under the SHOWDOWN: Iraq banner, it repeatedly returns to the busy intersection of media, technology, popular culture, and mass culture. Characterized by its author as restless, the piece strategically employs a non-linear discursive strategy deliberately mimicking the practices of channel surfing and the constant interruption of the commercial break. It re-contextualizes, in other words, the critical perspective by re-inventing it …

On Bill V. Mullen's Afro-Orientalism, Graham Barnfield

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For two decades Edward Said's Orientalism has occupied a significant place in how we think through the cultural relations between what we now call ‘North’ and ‘South’. Conceived in the 1970s, Said’s model mounted a challenge to readers in the west, suggesting they should unlearn what they know of the east. Despite its influence, one weakness of this approach was the underlying suggestion that orientalism was a one-way street, constituting a fixed set of perceptions or timeless discourses. In and without the Orientalist imagination, what is to be done with those in ‘the Occident’ who find themselves treated …

Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology Of Poopreport.Com, Marisol Cortez

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In engaging with the culture of filth, Marisol Cortez's Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of PoopReport.com questions contemporary cultural criticism's emphasis on shit's textual ambivalence. In order to avoid relapsing into either the Bakhtinian celebration of the grotesque or the too narrowly conceived Kristevan category of the abject, Cortez argues, and to find a way out of this theoretical dualism, one must rethink the very categories of filth and waste through an ecocritical reading of the scatological -- the meeting of brown and green -- performed at the confluence of ecology, cultural studies, and Marxist political economy. This perspective …

Media Discourse: Social Semiotics And The Study Of Multimodal Discourse. An Interview With Theo Van Leeuwen, Theo Van Leeuwen, Judith Reitstaetter, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

This interview article is intended to provide both an overview of the contribution Theo van Leeuwen has made to the field of semiotics and approach his work from an unconventional angle. The first aspect of our aim is covered in the form of an introduction comprised of a short biographical note, a list of recent publications and short reviews of van Leeuwen’s major works. The second aspect of what we hope to accomplish is tackled in the form of the interview itself. In this, we have tried to balance general questions – e.g. about the epistemological …

Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, And Cultures Of The Screen, Christine Scodari, Becky Mulvaney

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Christine Scodari's and Becky Mulvaney's Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, and Cultures of the Screen investigates the 2003 romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give, written and directed by Nancy Meyers as exceptional in its featuring a fifty-something woman as leading actress. Beginning with an analysis of the filmic text itself, the authors do not confine themselves to it, but go on to critically engage with its reception in both the press and academia. While the focus is thus shifted from the film to the meta- and para-texts produced in the course of its reception and promotion, the underlying questions asked …

The Agenda Setting Function Of Mass Media, Tampa, John Howard, Print Media And Public Opinion: How It All Came Together In Melbourne, Rosemary Schultz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper will explore the ways in which the rhetoric of the Australian news media – the print media of Melbourne, specifically – has the power to shape and construct public sentiment toward national issues. Specifically, the paper explores the crafting of public opinion toward asylum seekers in the country through the use of specific rhetoric in print media outlets. The paper will focus on the “Tampa” incident of August 2001 as a basis for exploring asylum seeker issues in Australia. With the Agenda Setting Function Theory of Media Communications as a research base, and through personal interviews, extensive research …

The Brazilian Telenovela "El Clon": An Analysis Of Viewers' Online Vicarious And Virtual Learning Experiences, Elizabeth Barbosa

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

This research involves investigating Brazilian telenovelas as a medium to disseminate knowledge about different cultures and customs. Through a qualitative content analysis this study examines messages posted in the "El Clon" telenovela-world forum with reference to the Muslim cultural theme explored by the telenovela.

The theoretical framework overarching this study is the combination of Bandura's social learning/cognitive theory and Freire's dialogical/participatory communication. In order to operationalize the study, a qualitative content analysis is undertaken utilizing the sub-dimension parasocial interaction model proposed by Sood & Rodgers (2000). The messages are analyzed in order to explore how forum participants engage in the …

Trends In Organizational Communication Research: Sustaining The Discipline, Sustaining Ourselves, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This paper began as a keynote address delivered at the 16th annual Organizational Communication Mini-Conference hosted by Western Michigan University. In it, I identify topical trends in organizational communication research, noting ways in which these trends are flexible, enduring, diverse, and problem-centered. I go on to invite current doctoral students to join us in developing these trends further. Specifically, I discuss how we might engage research in ways that sustain the vitality of the discipline as well as our own personal vitality. I conclude by offering a list of key articles that could serve as starting points in the ongoing …

An Introduction To The Work Of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate In Literature 2004, Andrea Bandhauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "An Introduction to the Work of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2004," Andrea Bandhauer explores reactions of the press to the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek after she received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Bandhauer discusses how the extreme irritation following this announcement was frequently directed at the author's public persona rather than at her work. Against this background, Bandhauer explores the ambivalent relationship of the public towards a politically and socially engaged and outspoken public figure who in her literary work produces highly hermetical texts. As a writer, Jelinek is preoccupied with language and form …

The Arachne Myth In Oral And Written Literature, José Manuel Pedrosa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "The Arachne Myth in Oral and Written Literature," José Manuel Pedrosa explores the folktale about a person who prides himself being the most intelligent individual and whom the gods punish with a metamorphosis into spider. Pedrosa discusses similar myths in existence in modern oral traditions and in literary works such as the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Quran, and García Márquez's masterpiece Cien años de soledad. The universality of the myth is underlined by the existence of a folktale registered among the Bubi people of Equatorial Guinea. Not known about it until the twentieth century, the oral transmission …

Modernism And The Issue Of Periodization, Leonard Orr

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization," Leonard Orr describes how literary theorists, historians, and anthology editors have put forward many conflicting models for literary periodization, while simultaneously expressing their doubts about the categories they have created. They are caught between intellectual despair and pragmatic necessity, scholarly journals and presses and academic departments imagine they are working at the cutting edge of thinking about their subjects but period concepts remain in place, even while every article focused on the subject expresses strong objections to the terms. Orr traces in his paper these problems and issues through the twentieth …