Digital Commons Network^™

Generic Identity And Intertextuality, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality," Marko Juvan proposes that an anti-essentialist drive -- a characteristic of recent genology -- has led postmodern scholars to the conviction that genre is but a system of differences and that its matrix cannot be deduced from a particular set of apparently similar texts. Juvan argues that the concept of intertextuality may prove advantageous to explain genre identity in a different way: genres exist and function as far as they are embedded in social practices that frame intertextual and meta-textual links/references to prototypical texts or textual series. In Juvan's view, genres are cognitive …

Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz In Seventeenth-Century New Spain And Finding A Room Of One's Own, Deborah Weagel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Seventeenth-Century New Spain and Finding a Room of One's Own," Deborah Weagel examines the life of the seventeenth-century nun and compares her life with the ideals Virginia Woolf portrays in A Room of One's Own. Woolf asserts that in order for a woman to develop innate gifts, she needs a certain degree of financial freedom and private space in which to create. The concept of having one's own room, or space, that can be segregated from the activities of home and public life can be considered both literally and metaphorically. …

Exilic Perspectives On "Alien Nations", Sophia A. Mcclennen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sophia A. McClennen's paper, "Exilic Perspectives on 'Alien Nations'," is an excerpt from her book, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures (Purdue UP , 2004). In the paper, McClennen summarizes her theory that exile writing is inherently dialectical. Focusing on writers working in the latter part of the twentieth century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, McClennen proposes that exile literature is best understood as a series of dialectic tensions about cultural identity. Through a comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel …

Clear Channel And The Public Airwaves, Dorothy Kidd

Media Studies

No abstract provided.

Shooting Kennedy: Jfk And The Culture Of Images [Book Review], Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Forty years after his assassination, the memory of President Kennedy continues to grip the popular imagination. Recently, media and scholarly attention to the memory of John F. Kennedy has been evidenced in television documentaries and books that have recalled his presidency, his personal life, and his assassination. In Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images, David M. Lubin explores photographs of Kennedy to understand Kennedy’s popularity with the American public. Lubin, a professor of art, argues that Kennedy was significant not only for his political role as president but because he became an icon of twentieth-century postwar America. …

Muted Voices: Latinos And The 2000 Election, Richard Pineda

Selected Works Temporary Series

Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Elections. Edited by Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005; pp. ix-276. $29.95 paper.

Cultura Cyber: Commodifying Latina/O Nationalism And Rhetoric On The Internet, Richard Pineda

Selected Works Temporary Series

No abstract provided.

Coyote's Tale On The Old Oregon Trail: Challenging Cultural Memory Through Narrative At The Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, Jackson B. Miller

Faculty Publications

This essay examines the oppositional narratives presented in a Native American museum in order to explore the efficacy of narrative as both a strategy for resistance to hegemonic narratives of the settling of the West and a medium for sharing culture. The positioning of the museum visitor as co-participant in the museum’s narratives is also considered, with a particular focus on the relationships among narrator, story, and audience. Finally, the narrative of tribal life presented in the museum is evaluated for its potential as a vehicle for both cultural change and continuity.

Accent, Linguistic Discrimination, Stereotyping, And West Virginia In Film, Teresa L. O’Cassidy

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This study examines connections between accent, linguistic discrimination, and stereotyping in portrayals of West Virginia film characters. Ten films featuring West Virginia characters were examined for accent and stereotyping: The Right Stuff (Kaufman, 1983), Matewan (Sayles, 1987), Blaze (Shelton, 1989), The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), October Sky (Johnston, 1999), Hannibal (Scott, 2001), A Beautiful Mind (Howard, 2001), The Mothman Prophecies (Pellington, 2002), Wrong Turn (Schmidt, 2003), and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (Luketic, 2004). Coders were employed to score character accents. Stereotyping data was gathered by comparing portrayals with stereotypical traits associated with Appalachian and/or hillbilly characters. …

Muted Voices: Latinos And The 2000 Election, Richard Pineda

Departmental Papers (Communication)

Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Elections. Edited by Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005; pp. ix-276. $29.95 paper.

Living Waters: An Invitation To Contemplative Spirituality For The Quail Springs Church Of Christ, Wyatt E. Fenno

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This project addressed an acknowledged need for ministry action to promote and facilitate communal spiritual formation in the present and future life of the Quail Springs Church of Christ. The focus of the project was to present a model of contemplative spirituality determined to be accessible to the ministry context at Quail Springs. In addressing the problem of community fragmentation at Quail Springs, this model was offered as a means of grace to deepen faith and strengthen relationships in church life at Quail Springs. A pilot group of six women and six men served as the working group for this …

But Who Is Any Longer Interested In The Possible?: Kathy Acker In Hell Failing Fuck You, Jake Kennedy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In 'But who is any longer interested in the possible?': Kathy Acker in Hell Failing Fuck You I explore and celebrate Acker's use of a tropics of failure (plagiarism, pain, terror, gender-play, bad jokes, dumbness) as an inimitable strategy for achieving counter-cultural art and community. The prose style and scholarly apparatus of my article reflect not only my position as a poet/academic but also attempt to model an ethical, non-authoritative, Acker-informed critical language.

A Feminist Jungian Analysis Of The Representations Of Teenage Females In Films 1950s To 1970s, Lea O'Dea

Theses : Honours

This thesis is framed within the broad study of film theory and analysis. It is my research into the representations of teenage females in mass media films made and released in the USA and Australia in the years before and after the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and Women's Liberation Movement that began in the 1970s. This work is significant primarily in that it is an analysis specifically of teenage females who feature as lead characters in films. The sample of films has been chosen because as mass media, mainstream films their distribution is indicative of their acceptance within the …

I Connect Therefore I Am: Connectivity And Networking In Bodies, Technologies, Communities, And Selves, Anthony Lambert

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The notion of connection refers to both metaphorical and material practices informing our understandings of the flows of energy and information within human bodies, communities, geographies, and technological networks. Cranny-Francis offers a definition of connection which accounts for the term's significance in the contexts of both Cultural Studies and multimedia literacy:

It refers to the ways in which texts generate meanings through their relationship with other texts, to the development of multimedia technologies that are characterized by their connectivity (the web, the net), and to the ways in which meanings are generated crucially by the connection between texts …

Reading Owen's Between Reason And History: Habermas And The Idea Of Progress , Ali Rizvi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From the start Habermas' work has been an attempt at synthesising certain core insights from Kant and Hegel, as it is clearly evident from the beginning chapters of his first major work Knowledge and Human Interest (KHI). In the structure of the book Marx's position is as the mediator of Kant and Hegel and all subsequent authors are considered in order to overcome the shortcomings of this Marxian mediation (KHI: chapter 1-11, Habermas, 1982: 239ff Cf. Kortian, 1980).

Review Of The Aesthetics Of Cultural Studies, By Michael Bérubé, 2005, David Banash

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Specters Of The Subaltern : A Critique Of Representations Of Rural Women In Contemporary China, Tsui Sit

Lingnan Theses

China has speeded up modernization since the reform and open-door policy was introduced in 1978. After accession to the World Trade Organization in 1999, China has been further incorporated into the global track. The national policy of economic development requires a continuing exploitation of natural resources and intensive labor from the rural sector, and over the last few decades, there has been a ceaseless wave of rural women going to the cities and working mainly as assembly-line workers, domestic helpers and sex workers.

Developing a subaltern and feminist perspective, this thesis examines representations of rural women in academic research and …

Habermas's Public Sphere : Politics And Australian News Media, Tim Balfour

Theses : Honours

Jurgen Habermas’s theory of an eroded public sphere is common to media studies that address the functions and shortfalls of news media in society. The theory tackles many aspects of society, but is most usually associated with the mass media and its role in facilitating informed public debate among private persons coming together as a public to hold institutions of power to account. The term has been used to such a degree that its authority is taken as rote, which has subsequently reduced the complexity, subtleties and strength of Jurgen Habermas’s original arguments. In turn, this has caused critics to …

Separatist Nationalism In Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants, Karsten H. Piep

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Karsten H. Piep, in his paper "Separatist Nationalism in Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants," argues that only recently rediscovered among American scholars and still awaiting much critical work, Gilbert Imlay's The Emigrants offers an intriguing case study in the complex relationship between fictional representation and late eighteenth-century nation formation. Tracing briefly the novel's reception history, Piep locates The Emigrants within the socio-political context of eighteenth-century discourses on revolution, emancipation, and independence. Taking Benedict Anderson's study on the rise of nationalism as a point of reference, Piep argues that Imlay's novel offers an example of a perhaps uniquely American separatist nationalism that …

Literary Cosmotopia And Nationalism In Ariel, Camilla Fojas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Camilla Fojas, in her paper "Literary Cosmotopia and Nationalism in Ariel," argues that turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan literary texts encoded political interests and that they were concerned with the proper way of being cosmopolitan and national at the same time, of forging literary and diplomatic parity between national and international interests. Unfortunately, this search for balance was beset by rhetorical and ideological prejudices manifest in phobic language about the corrupting forces of cosmopolitan effeminacy on national character. The conflict of cosmopolitanism with nationalism was played out as a kind of war between the sexes, as a gendered battle for dominance. This tension …

Hellenism, Hebraism, And The Eugenics Of Culture In E.M. Forster's Howards End, Seth Jacobowitz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Seth Jacobowitz, in his paper "Hellenism, Hebraism, and the Eugenics of Culture in E.M. Forster's Howards End," explores how the culturalist principles of Hellenism and Hebraism theorized by Matthew Arnold as the basis of Englishness in Culture and Anarchy (1869) were incorporated into the text of E.M. Forster's Howards End (1910) to show the close institutional and conceptual linkages Forster shared with Arnold. Further, Jacobowitz seeks to bring Howards End into dialog with Forster's only major work of science fiction, The Machine Stops (1928), to address their mutual themes of eugenics, the racialization of class difference, and concerns over the …

Can China Import Western Ideas?, Fang Deng

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Czech Literature, The King With The Horse's Ears, And Its Translations By Karel Havlícek Borovský And Milan Uhde, Michelle Woods

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Michelle Woods, in her paper "Czech Literature, The King with the Horse's Ears, and Its Translations by Karel Havlícek Borovský and Milan Uhde," analyses the adaptation and "translation" of the Irish legend into the Czech language in Karel Havlícek Borovský's 1854 epic poem Král Lávra and in Milan Uhde's 1964 play Král Vávra. The translation of Irish language myths and legends into English functioned as way of constructing and disseminating the notion of a great literary and heroic past within the language of the colonizer but also in dissent to the constructions imposed by that language. Woods focuses on how …

The New Woman In Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, Jin Feng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Jin Feng, in her paper "The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction," proposes that the representation of the "new woman" in Chinese fiction was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals. Previous scholarship on fiction of the period probed occasionally the thematic implications of female characters in specific works but has not engaged in systematic study of the "new woman" as a figure through a discussion of the politics of the narrative form. Feng addresses aspects of audience in early-twentieth-century Chinese …

The Welcome Theory: An Explanation For The Decreasing Number Of African Americans In Baseball, David C. Ogden

Communication Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

The percentage of African Americans on the rosters of major league baseball teams is at a 30-year low, while the percentage of Caucasian players in the major leagues has remained relatively stable. Research indicates that the number of African Americans will continue to drop. The Welcome Theory uses several theoretical perspectives to explore why African Americans have turned away from baseball and embraced other sports, such as basketball. The theory has implications for designing sports programs that socialize youth into sports.

Portals To Knowledge: Confluence And Conflict Between Enlightenment And Postmodern Currencies, Benjamin G. Lanier-Nabors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In order to provide any viable critique of twenty-first-century discourses -- whether signified by late capitalism, epistemological hegemony, cultural domination, or globalization (the catch-word for all of these) -- one must not employ an ahistorical or static lens; alternatively, one must dredge up and analyze the sediments that underlie current discourses, and many of these sediments are found in the eighteenth century. More specifically, by reading the thoughts of such writers as Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, one is forced to read the links and antipathies between the discursive economies of epistemology -- philosophical, scientific, and economic -- …

Cultural Topology: An Introduction To Postmodern Mathematics, Brent M. Blackwell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

This essay develops a new way of thinking about the cultural relationships among and within the sciences and the arts through a new understanding of the term postmodernism that at once derives from literary theory and the mathematical discipline of topology. While topology forms the main vertebra of this connective approach in its capacity as the mathematics of connectivity, quantum mechanics and non-Euclidean geometry -- the atlas and axis of this spinal column -- form the context through which this “postmodern” approach will develop. However, in order to position topology as a “postmodern” branch of mathematics, some brief …

A Privatization Of Politics: Anthony Elliot's Concepts Of The Self (2001), Paula Murphy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

It would be difficult to find a more appropriate image of selfhood in the modern world than that found in Ezra Pound's poem In a Station of the Metro. It is a selfhood which is at once unique and conglomerative, fleetingly visible then tantalizingly out of focus. It is this slippery, indefinable entity that is the subject of Anthony Elliot's book. The title bears witness to the enormous breadth of its subject matter: Concepts of the Self is an attempt to engage with the various contemporary theoretical frameworks through which selfhood is explicated. Elliot's approach is admirably inter-disciplinary, …

Review Of Writings, By Vilem Flusser (2002), Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Of Parts And Wholes: Self-Similarity And Synecdoche In Science, Culture And Literature, Dirk Vanderbeke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The discussion here centers on how self-similarity, or parts resembling a whole, has been a recurring aspect in the most diverse fields of human thinking from antiquity to the present. Primary examples are drawn from physics, biology, cybernetics, alchemy, philosophy, myth and, of course, language and literature. The author argues that self-similar patterns are one of the persistent ways in which the human mind structures its experience and knowledge of the world, and then examines some of the questions that arise when an almost ubiquitous concept, structure or linguistic and literary phenomenon resurfaces in a new guise in …