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Connecting The Dots: Implicit Commonalities Among Cultural Morphogenesis, Structuration, And Market Economics, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

Perhaps the central foundational issue of our time is the relationship of human agency and social structure. If human actors are constrained by the rules and rhetoric of the social system, how is it that those actors can yet bring about radical change in that social system? A similar puzzle exists in economics: how is it that individual transactions both maintain and transform the marketplace? This paper begins to identify common ground implicit in the work of Margaret Archer, Anthony Giddens, and Friedrich Hayek. Emergence, change, reproduction, time, agency, power, and knowledge are themes which can be read in these …

Introduction To Comparative Cultural Studies And Michael Ondaatje's Writing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Representations Of Buddhism In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Marlene Goldman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Marlene Goldman suggests in her paper "Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" that at first glance Ondaatje appears to promote the idea of a Sri Lankan Buddhist faith as transcending history. Ondaatje introduces the subject of Buddhism early on in the novel, emphasizing initially the devastation wrought by imperial and colonial forces. Goldman, however, argues that subsequent references to Buddhism undermine the initial portrayal of a religion besieged by external imperialist forces. For example, at one point, the character Palipana refers to the assassination of his brother, Narada, a Buddhist monk. Narada was possibly the victim of a "political …

Exploring Transnational Identities In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Victoria Cook

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Victoria Cook, in "Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost," addresses issues of identity raised in the narrative of Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost. Cook's paper is a close analysis of Ondaatje's novel, paying particular attention to the way in which Ondaatje examines identity as both a "construct" and a "process." The approach used is one that draws on postcolonial theory and takes a "transnational" perspective. Cook argues that Ondaatje's text moves beyond the concept of a postcolonial literature of "resistance" into an area that requires a theory of process rather than product. Transnationalism is shown here to be just …

Ondaatje's The English Patient And Altered States Of Narrative, Beverley Curran

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Beverley Curran argues in her paper "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Altered States of Narrative" that Ondaatje reconfigures in his novel the "romantic" figure of the father/artist as a clandestine lover, a drug addict, or an eccentric translator, all figures with dependencies. In The English Patient, the father or artist's sense of source, continuity, or authority are translated into a narrative which rejects the perverse captivity demanded of the lover and the translator by fidelity or by the tenets of realistic representation. Using sex, drugs, and translation, Ondaatje deranges both time and space to reconfigure the role of the artist …

Post-Nationalism And The Cinematic Apparatus In Minghella's Adaptation Of Ondaatje's The English Patient, Hsuan Hsu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Hsuan Hsu, in his paper "Post-Nationalism and the Cinematic Apparatus in Minghella's Adaptation of Ondaatje's The English Patient," discusses Anthony Minghella's cinematic version of Ondaatje's novel. In Hsu's view, Minghella and Ondaatje (Ondaatje collaborated on the film script) emphasize in the film the visual and social implications of mapmaking in order to align imperialism with the cinematic apparatus. While the film explores the workings of visual power, it also explores their adulteration by unmapped forces of desire: Almásy's and Katherine's adulterous relationship transgresses marital and national constraints, but also reinscribes them when Almásy desires to possess her body and Katherine …

The Motif Of The Collector And History In Ondaatje's Work, Jon Saklofske

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Jon Saklofske, in his paper "The Motif of the Collector and History in Ondaatje's Work" recognizes that Ondaatje rescues Buddy Bolden from historical obscurity by elevating and complicating the musician's largely forgotten history with a self-conscious and largely fictional synthesis of memory and imagination. The liberties Ondaatje takes in Coming Through Slaughter with his subject to achieve this re-presentation and the ownership of the portrait that results exposes this type of authorial activity as a problematic appropriation. Saklofske suggests that to understand the implications of Ondaatje's activity it is useful to compare his efforts with Walter Benjamin's "collector" figure, who …

Touching The Language Of Citizenship In Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sandeep Sanghera

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sandeep Sanghera, in her paper "Touching the Language of Citizenship in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost" discusses questions which make Ondaatje's novel a text about postmodern identity: who is this woman Anil who lives mostly in the West, travels on a British passport, works for an international organization, and no longer has any real ties to her first home? In the paper, these questions are examined via the languages Anil adopts and abandons in the novel. Sanghera elaborates on the question of foreign-ness represented by the protagonist of the novel; however, this foreign-ness is examined in the particular context concerning the substance …

Oral History And The Writing Of The Other In Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion, Winfried Siemerling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Winfried Siemerling argues in his paper "Oral History and the Writing of the Other in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion" that the simulation of oral narratives in the novel imagines the conveyance of oral histories of immigrant experiences obscured by historiography. The narrative device of simulated orality -- the written text casts itself as the outcome of serial story-telling -- serves here to introduce erstwhile anonymous societal actors as makers of history, and emphasizes the collective production of story and history. Oral narratives emerge dreamlike like light out of darkness in this text; yet light, like writing, creates …

Reading Ondaatje's Poetry, Eluned Summers-Bremner

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Eluned Summers-Bremner pursues in her paper "Reading Ondaatje's Poetry" a psychoanalytic reading of Ondaatje's poetry based on Lacan's thought, highlighting occasions where nature and culture meet. Focusing on the volumes Secular Love and The Man with Seven Toes, Summers-Bremner explores how nature's troubled regions are navigated through the structural estrangement of looking for a name. In Lacanian terms, a proper name signals the contradiction of one's belonging to a biological or other kind of family, whence one's name often arises, and being a user or respondent of language, which produces meaning through its infringement or exceeding of its users' intentions, …

Selected Bibliography Of Michael Ondaatje's Texts And Studies About Michael Ondaatje's Texts, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Ondaatje's The English Patient And Rewriting History, Stephanie M. Hilger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Stephanie M. Hilger, in her paper "Ondaatje's The English Patient and Rewriting History," situates the novel within the long-standing Western tradition of writing about the cultural "Other," from Herodotus to Michel de Montaigne to Rudyard Kipling. Michel de Certeau's notion of history serves as a reference point for the analysis of Ondaatje's presentation of the "English" patient's story as well as of twentieth-century history. Hilger argues that the protagonist's physical mutilation is a metonymic representation of post-World War II and postcolonial consciousness. In the same way that the characters in the novel attempt to understand the mystery that is the …

Mexico As Seen Through American Eyes: The Evolution Of U.S. News Media Coverage, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Sociology Faculty Publication Series

The traditional Mexican view of the U.S. news media's treatment of Mexico and Mexicans is that those media have been mired in prejudice, owing to what Octavia Paz has called "the twin sisters ignorance and arrogance." Mexicans of all social levels have held to this view for many decades, denouncing the obsession of American journalists with drug trafficking, illegal migration, and governmental corruption, and for forming or reinforcing in generations of Americans a vague, exotic, touristy, sometimes downright surreal vision of Mexico.

This view, however, began to shift very markedly during the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). Especially …

Stepchildren’S Perceptions Of The Contradictions In Communication With Stepparents, Leslie A. Baxter, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Leah E. Bryant, Amy Wagner

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This interpretive study, framed in relational dialectics theory, sought to identify stepchildren’s perceptions of the contradictions that animate communication with the stepparent in their household of primary residence. In-depth interviews were conducted, producing 802 pages of double-spaced interview transcripts, which were analyzed inductively for commonly experienced contradictions of stepchild-stepparent communication. Three underlying contradictions were identified. First, stepchild-stepparent communication was perceived to be characterized by a dialectic of integration, characterized by both closeness and distance. Second, stepchild-stepparent communication was perceived to be characterized by a dialectic of parental status, in which the stepparent was, and was not, granted legitimacy in a …

An African American Cultural Critique Of Weight, Race, Gender And Class Using A Semiotic Analysis Of Queen Latifah’ S Film Roles, Angela Denise Prater

Masters Theses

This project examined the interconnectedness of race, gender, class and the physical body as interrelated marginalization factors in media representations. Using the feminist body image literature, critical/cultural theory and Black feminist thought this study examined the significance of weight as a marginalization variable interdependent with race, gender and class. The motion picture character portrayals of the iconic figure Queen Latifah are subjected to a semiotics analysis, a traditional method in critical cultural studies to examine media representations. This analysis is informed by the cultural standpoint of the author as an overweight African American female. This study revealed that Queen Latifah's …

In Focus: The Media And The New Cold War, Dennis Broe, Louise Spence

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Introduces several essays that explores the role of mass media on the transformation of the U.S. foreign policy after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Alliance of the media with globalization and permanent war; Invasion of the concept of endless war on media culture.

“If You Hit Me Again, I’Ll Hit You Back”: Conflict Management Strategies Of Individuals Experiencing Aggression During Conflicts, Loreen N. Olson, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In interpersonal relationships characterized by aggression, the negotiation of conflict is especially significant. The present study examined the conflict management strategies used by 31 individuals who had experienced verbal and/or physical aggression during conflicts with their partners. Sillars’ (1986) conflict tactics coding system was used as a framework to analyze 960 pages of transcribed data. The results of this deductive content analysis indicated that the participants reported using primarily Distributive conflict strategies. Analytic induction was also used to interpret nonverbal forms of conflict management, revealing three common tactics: crying, nonverbal avoidance, and aggression. Implications for using these conflict strategies in …

On Cary Wolfe's Animal Rites And Zoontologies, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The question of the category of the animal and its relation to that of the human is one that has recently surfaced in the work of such theorists as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway and Giorgio Agamben; this recent concern with the speciesism that underlies scientific categorization, and the faulty structure such speciesism lends for philosophical investigations into the qualities of Man, has largely been framed within the context of humanism and the problematic of articulating posthumanist ethics. Reductively, the concerns of the above authors are the ways in which the difference that has been constructed between the human …

The Latecoming Of The Posthuman, Or, Why 'We' Do The Apocalypse Differently, 'Now', Ivan Callus, Stefan Herbrechter

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The paper takes its cue from a brief but pointed passage in Specters of Marx, in which Jacques Derrida describes as latecomers those who discuss the apocalypse in a manner that disregards previous discussions of the theme within philosophy and theory. Especially concerned with tracing Derrida's wariness of the beguilements of narratives of the end, Callus and Herbrecther analyze the implications of that wariness for any study of the vexed relation between the apocalyptic and the posthuman, doing so on the basis of reference to a number of the relevant essays by Derrida, but in particular to …

Cyborg Bodies And Digitized Desires: Posthumanity And Phillip K. Dick, Jennifer Attaway

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The interaction between human beings and intelligent machines has challenged the traditional understanding of what it means to be human. In his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, phillip k. dick rethinks human identity through the positioning of human beings within a technologically mediated reality that displaces the biological body and the spontaneity of human sensation. Written in 1968, dick's novel anticipates the effect of a technologically mediated culture on the formation of a posthuman identity. dick's fictional juxtaposition of the human being and the organically anthropomorphic android complicates conventional implications of embodiment. Androids are physically …

Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, And The Cape Canaveral Fiction Of J. G. Ballard: A Posthuman Analysis, Melanie Rosen Brown

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, and the Cape Canaveral Fiction of J.G. Ballard: A Posthuman Analysis, Melanie Rosen Brown explores the ways in which the so-called Cape Canaveral short stories of J.G. Ballard anthologized in the collection Memories of the Space Age exemplify the promises of posthumanity as articulated by posthuman theorists such as Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Although Ballard's fiction is viewed by many as a needlessly pessimistic and derogatory portrayal of NASA's space program, viewed through a posthuman lens, Ballard's fiction instead reveals him to be optimistic about the future of space exploration -- cautiously …

On Mitchell's Me++: The Cyborg Self And The Networked City, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Reminiscent of books by other MIT luminaries like Neil Gershenfeld's When Things Start to Think (2000) and Rodney Brooks' Flesh and Machines (2002), William Mitchell's Me++ reminds me, yet again, of why it is so exciting to be alive in an age of wireless phones, high-speed data transmission, and cybernetic systems. Unfortunately, after a couple of years of reading Wired and developing a festering cynicism for high-tech solutions to social problems that have been caused by previous high-tech solutions (like titanic ships, combustion engines, splitting atoms, and all kinds of really horrible weapons), I am more interested in …

'Who Are You?': Alien/Woman As Posthuman Subject In Alien Resurrection, Ximena Gallardo C.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Traditionally considered a monster in outer space series, the four films comprising the Alien saga: Alien, Aliens, Alien³, and Alien Resurrection, contain a vision of the Alien creature as an agent of human evolution that, taken to its logical extreme in Alien Resurrection, produce an uncommon posthuman subject: the Alien/Woman protagonist named Ripley. In the following article, Ximena Gallardo C. explores the introduction of the series' conception of human evolution through fusion with the Alien as a driving theme in Alien. It then briefly follows through Aliens and Alien^{3, …}

Schizophrenics, Cyborgs And The Pitfalls Of Posthumanism, Angela Woods

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In Schizophrenics, Cyborgs and the Pitfalls of Posthumanism, Angela Woods invites us to revisit two canonical analyses of the postmodern: Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Donna Haraway's A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. Jameson and Haraway introduced to contemporary cultural criticism two posthumanist icons: the schizophrenic, a pathologized victim of postmodernity, and the cyborg, a vision of strategic posthuman subjectivity. In her timely and critical analysis of these articles, Woods challenges the established notion of an oppositional relationship between the schizophrenic and the cyborg. She turns …

Toward A Posthuman Ethics, Dongshin Yi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editor's Introduction]

Setting a posthuman ethics as a goal toward which the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics must move, Yi in his essay, Toward a Posthuman Ethics, points out that the collaboration is detained because current debates on the cyborg harbor on the question of representations and consider how political, social and cultural problems of the human are reconfigured, and possibly resolved, by the cyborg. Thus, the debates are bound to be retrospective in approach and circular in direction, as they fail to recognize new possibilities that the cyborg may present. Arguing that the failure indicates the cyborg is being …

The Infinite Plasticity Of The Digital: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment And Technology In William Gibson's Interstitial Trilogy, Tama Leaver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Ever since William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson's second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties), focusing on the way digital technologies and identity intersect and interact, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment. Using the work of Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and N. Katherine Hayles, it is argued that while William Gibson's second trilogy is infused with posthuman possibilities, the role of embodiment is …

Post·Hum·An·Ous, C. Jason Smith, Geoff Klock, Ximena Gallardo-C.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The Death of the Human is in many ways one of those characteristic intellectual bids for attention, in the vein of Lacan's Woman does not exist or Baudrillard's the Gulf War never happened. Flashy and rhetorically misleading, such assertions nevertheless create a discursive space in what otherwise appears to be a closed, natural(ized) system. Posthumanism, like any other movement or -ism, is difficult to introduce, first and foremost, because of this kind of rhetoric: its first infiltrating tactic is to call the time of death on the current age. Perhaps the most salient example of this self-defined loss …

Monénembo's L'Aîné Des Orphelins And The Rwandan Genocide, Lisa Mcnee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Monénembo's L'Aîné des orphelins and the Rwandan Genocide," Lisa McNee discusses Tierno Monénembo's L'Aîné des orphelins, a novel that offers a double discourse and a dual memory of the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. McNee argues that L'Aîné des orphelins presents us with an extraordinary kind of fictional testimonial to genocide. Although Monénembo is not from Rwanda and did not participate in the tragedy, only someone who has paid the price of the clarity needed to distinguish between good and bad faith could have written a novel like L'Aîné des orphelins. Monénembo's characterization of …

Medieval Cosmopolitanism And The Saracen-Christian Ethos, Marla Segol

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Medieval Cosmopolitanism and the Saracen-Christian Ethos," Marla Segol argues that in Floire et Blancheflor and Aucassin et Nicolette, two medieval Occitanian romances, the writers work actively to incorporate Islamic culture and its accomplishments into a hybrid communal identity. The hybrid elements of this identity are demonstrated in two ways: first, through the portrayal of mixed couples and second, through depiction of a biculturally constituted landscape and culture. Intercultural relations between the characters are dramatized through the structures of religious conversion. Each romance features a mixed couple, with one member Christian and the other, formerly Muslim but converted …

From Commonwealth To Postcolonial Literature, Edward O. Ako

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper,"From Commonwealth to Postcolonial Literature," Edward O.Ako begins by establishing the link between Empire and English-language literature. Drawing on Elleke Boehmer, Gauri Viswanath, and Terry Eagleton, Ako discusses the ideological uses of literature and argues that the textual forms that emerged as "resistance" to imperial domination were referred to by a multiplicity of terms: Commonwealth Literature, New English Literature, Literature in English, Third World Literature, World Fiction, Minority Literature, Multicultural Literature, or Postcolonial Literature. Ako examines the merits and handicaps of each designation and explains why, in his view, the term "postcolonial" is the more appropriate notion and …