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The Phenomenology Of Büchner's Woyzeck: Historical And Critical Problems In The Ongoing Adaptation, Jonathan W. Myers

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Georg BUchner is considered by many to be the father of 20th century drama, despite his death in 1837 at the young age of 23. His legacy is visible in any contemporary survey of the history of theater. The origins of the styles and techniques of Naturalism, Expressionism, Theater of the Absurd, Existential Drama, Theater of Alienation, Theater of Cruelty, Socialist theatre, and documentary drama may all be feasibly traced to BUchner's own innovative themes and playwriting techniques. His final manuscript Woyzeck remained incomplete at his death, leaving what would become a dramaturgical puzzle for the theater scholars of each …

經典製造 : 金庸研究的文化政治, Shuo Chen

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

金庸自一九五五年在新晚報開始連載第一篇武俠小說《書劍恩仇錄》，至一 九七○年封筆作《鹿鼎記》，共創作了十五部小說。這十五部小說在華人世界中 歷久不衰，更引起不少討論。一九八四年，台灣遠景出版社出版了一系列「金 學研究叢書」，「金學」一詞正式出現。最初，討論金庸作品都以短小的筆記型 文章為主，集中在閱讀金著的感受、討論書中情節和人物等。一九八○年代末 開始，「金學」己成為學術界的熱門研究課題，有大學更主辦「金庸小說學術研 討會」，與會者多為享負盛名的學者，最近更出現了所謂「金庸學」(Jinyonology) 一詞。「金學研究集」發行人王榮文認為金庸「極有可能在有生之年看到其作品 「經典化」的完成，這真是古今中外作家們少有的幸運」。王德威在《金庸小說 國際學術研討會論文集》的序言中亦提到：「本書的出版，無疑為金庸作品經典 化發展，再下一城。」

這情況在當代華文創作圈中非常罕有，實在是一個值得深思的文化現象。 金庸小說能發展到現在成為「經典」，內在原因當然是其小說本身的確是不可多 得的好作品。然而，這並不是唯一，甚至不是最重要的原因，外在的文化脈絡 因素發揮的作用更大。作為作者，金庸花了很大心力把自己的小說包裝成「經 典文學」呈現在讀者面前；另外，經過中國大陸、香港和台灣的學術界和文化 界不斷討論，金庸小說終於成為「經典」。然而，由於三地的政治文化環境不同， 金庸小說的經典化在中港台所經歷的道路也有很大差異。本論文的研究目的， 首先是分析金庸如何為其小說製造出一個「經典」形象，再進一步對金庸小說 不同的經典化過程作一疏理，從而探討其間三地在金學研究現象中所包涵的文 化政治意義。

Press Controls In Wartime: The Legal, Historical, And Institutional Context, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

News coverage of warfare poses a dilemma for social systems with a free press, such as the United States. In an era of high-tech weaponry and nearly instantaneous global communications, conflict is inevitable between the obligation of the press to inform the general public and the obligation of the military to successfully conduct war. The importance of secrecy to the conduct of warfare heightens the issue in the current counterterrorism operations. The competitive advantage of live coverage raises the stakes in a crowded media market. The military’s control over newsgathering during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War set off a controversy …

Solutions/Fixations: A Transformation, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First two paragraphs]

As I write from the heartland, in a small rural town in Northwest Ohio, the world, with the help of my government, is undergoing a process of reorganization.

This has been going on for some time. Media and its various material incarnations have stumbled around the world and back, layering it with new meanings, creating new sites of production. Rays of feedback, echoes, have coated the world with a many-layered web of meaning.

The Electronic Polis: Media Democracy And The Invasion Of Iraq, Jeff Lewis, Kirsty Best

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The American-led victory in Baghdad was announced to the world with scenes of Iraqi citizens dragging down the statues of the deposed tyrant. Like the spectacle of World Cup Soccer or the Olympic Games, the image was transmitted live through the global media network to the billions of people who had been closely watching the three week invasion. President Bush shared in the celebration, announcing the dawn of a new age for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. This new democracy, the president proclaimed, would bring stability and prosperity to the region through the obliteration of terrorism …

Stuffed Animals And The Predicament Of Culture: Lost In The Bedroom Jungle, Walter Putnam

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

These preachings are from the gospel according to Reverend Billy, spiritual leader of the Church of Stop Shopping (qtd. in Kalb). For several years, Reverend Billy has been waging a guerilla war in Lower Manhattan against the likes of Starbucks and Disney, including agit-prop performances where he brandishes stuffed animals atop tall poles like skulls adorning savage palisades. His inversion and subversion of these multivalent emblems of consumer culture reinforce the anti-consumer message he delivers in our era of late capitalism and globalization. His conspicuous utilization of stuffed animals highlights the manner in which these ubiquitous and inconspicuous …

The Cia World Factbook: Marriage Of Archive And Empire?, Jack Shuler

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

A recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art cites the production of textiles as integral in establishing the power of the Mongol empire. In the accompanying notes to the exhibit, the museum curators write that, In the creation of luxury textiles and objects for the Mongol elite, Chinese artists developed a visual language that was an effective means of establishing their rule and continuous presence throughout the vast empire. These artists used certain motifs such as the dragon and phoenix, to create tangible representations of power. The mythical beasts integrated the ideas of cosmic force, earthly strength, …

Review Of Writing Back: Sylvia Plath And Cold War Politics, By Alan Clinton, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of Mapping Tourism, By Stephen P. Hanna And Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr., Alexandra Ganser

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Homeland (In)Security : Roots And Displacement, From New York, To Toronto, To Salt Lake City, Marusya Bociurkiw

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

On September 11, 2001, broadcast and print media around the world narrated the destruction of New York City's World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of its occupants. This paper will examine the ways in which television and its appendages (the telephone, the internet, the newspaper) operated to organize the discursive meanings of this traumatic event. I will propose that between September 11 and February 2002's Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, ideas about home, roots and rootedness (and their Others: foreignness, homelessness, nomadicism) operated as a discursive mapping of that which could otherwise not be …

Review Of Heredity, By Jenny Davidson, David C. Froemke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Fixations/Solutions, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When the idea of this issue’s theme came to me, I was standing in a crowd of my peers, members of my generation, listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. As with all concerts, the performers left the stage to signal their eventual encore, and when they returned, they returned with the announcement that the U.S. military had begun its bombing, and formal invasion, of Iraq. Whether the idea for the issue had come to me prior to this moment, or as a result of it, I am unsure; I had, however, earlier decided that the summer issue we …

War If Necessary, But Not Necessarily War': The Canadian Paradox And 'Iraqi Freedom', Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The Canadian refusal to join the U.S. led “coalition of the willing” does not mark the first time the nation has chosen not to follow its “traditional allies” into a foolish, ego-driven, imperialistic and vengeful conflict. Indeed, Canada’s record in these matters is flawless. Peter C. Newman points out that “we went along with most presidential global adventures, except the Vietnam War. The other significant time we parted company with the Yanks was over our drive to impose economic sanctions on apartheid South Africa, a policy we initiated and successfully defended despite American objections.” In fact, the objections …

Imperialism & Globalization: Lessons From Frank Herbert's Dune, Kevin Williams

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

These are the words of The Preacher (a character in Frank Herbert's Children of Dune who is simultaneously the metaphorical reincarnation of the fallen prophet, Muad'Dib, and the self-exiled Emperor, Paul Atreides) as he addresses the masses enslaved by their devotion to his messianic Empire. These words, culled from the pages of science fiction, are more than mere exposition from Herbert's narrative, they point toward several important conditions facing the political world today. These conditions concern certain failures of democracy and effects of globalization spawned, in part, by an intensification of imperialist expansion in the name of democracy.

Review Of How A Film Theory Got Lost And Other Mysteries In Cultural Studies, By Robert B. Ray, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

On T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, R. Stewart Varner

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Critical theory never died. It just assumed the façade of an academic discipline that is as spectacular as it is impotent. However, behind the façade there still lurk a few radical lunatics who, at times, may really be on to something. One such figure is Hakim Bey.

Review Of Time For Revolution, By Antonio Negri, John Conley

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

“Parent Teams” And The Everyday Interactions Of Co-Parenting In Stepfamilies, Dawn O. Braithwaite, M. Chad Mcbride, Paul Schrodt

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Family scholars have yet to explore substantially the day-to-day interactions of stepfamily systems. Our focus was on the everyday interactions of parent teams, adults who are co-parenting within different stepfamily households, describing the characteristics of their communication. Twenty-two parents, stepparents, and partners (N = 22) kept diaries for two weeks, each time they interacted with an adult in the other household. Results detail the frequency, timing, location, and length of interactions; initiator, channel, and topics; and reasons for interaction. Interactions were short, everyday encounters rather than extended, planned meetings. The majority of the interactions were via telephone, followed by …

"War If Necessary, But Not Necessarily War”: The Canadian Paradox And “Iraqi Freedom", Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

The Canadian refusal to join the U.S. led “coalition of the willing” does not mark the first time the nation has chosen not to follow its “traditional allies” into a foolish, ego-driven, imperialistic and vengeful conflict. Indeed, Canada’s record in these matters is flawless. Peter C. Newman points out that “we went along with most presidential global adventures, except the Vietnam War. The other significant time we parted company with the Yanks was over our drive to impose economic sanctions on apartheid South Africa, a policy we initiated and successfully defended despite American objections.” In fact, the objections to this …

Adventure Tales, Colonialism, And Alexander Montgomery's Australian Perspective, Christine Doran

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Adventure Tales, Colonialism, and Alexander Montgomery's Australian Perspective," Christine Doran discusses an early nineteenth-century example of Australian literature dealing with Southeast Asia. The text analysed is about Borneo, in a collection of short stories by Alexander Montgomery entitled Five-Skull Island and Other Tales of the Malay Archipelago, published in Melbourne in 1897. In the paper, Doran's focus is on Montgomery's adventure tales and she situates the texts within their literary and cultural contexts. Montgomery's writing is then analyzed in the light of postcolonial scholarship. Doran argues that in several important ways this author's work runs counter to …

Negotiating Boundaries In Divakaruni's The Mistress Of Spices And Naylor's Mama Day, Susana Vega-González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Negotiating Boundaries in Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices and Naylor's Mama Day," Susana Vega-González analyzes the intertextual connections between these two novels. In Vega-González's view, the texts discussed transcend their authors' different ethnic and ethno-cultural backgrounds and appeal to universalisms found in literature. Vega-González proposes that writing from a bi-cultural perspective, Indian American Chitra B. Divakaruni and African American Gloria Naylor share both content and stylistic features in their acclaimed novels. Their conscious effort to dissolve established boundaries as well as their ethno-cultural legacies leads these authors to a magic realistic approach, an apt means to reflect …

Corpi, Murakami, And Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction, Cathy Steblyk

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Corpi, Murakami, and Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction," Cathy Steblyk discusses comparatively texts by contemporary detective fiction writers, one an ethnic-minority US-American and the other Japanese. Steblyk proposes that in detective fiction since the late 1980s, morally or ethically contestable sites of history have been given a postmortem by contemporary authors who are interested in restoring the lost parts of cultural histories. Detective fictions by feminist US-Chicana author Lucha Corpi and Japanese writer Murakami Haruki show how recent fiction from around the globe uses the hardboiled genre for the purposes of exploring past injustices and offering revisionist histories. The …

Teaching Merchant-Class Virtues With Chushingura And The London Merchant, David S. Escoffery

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Teaching Merchant-Class Virtues with Chushingura and The London Merchant," David S. Escoffery examines the different styles of teaching merchant-class virtues in eighteenth-century Japan and England through an analysis of the classical Japanese play Chushingura and the didactic British play The London Merchant. He holds that in both Europe and Japan, the eighteenth century saw the rise of a whole new class, the middle class, to either economic or social power or both. That century was also a didactic age for the theatre. For the first time, the audience could see characters from the new merchant class on …

Science, Sexuality, And The Novels Of Huxley And Houellebecq, Angela C. Holzer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Science, Sexuality, and the Novels of Huxley and Houellebecq," Angela C. Holzer begins with an introduction to recent discourse about contemporary culture by Francis Fukuyama, notably in his book Our Posthuman Future (2001). Next, Holzer introduces twentieth-century literary representations of genetic engineering. Focusing on Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and on Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires (1998), Holzer discusses differences in "utopian" literature when linked to metaphysical aspects of reproduction and that are owing to changes in the life sciences and medicine. Further, Holzer explores the implications for poetics resulting from scientific developments and relates Houellebecq's perspectives to …

Professional Wrestling: From Sport To Sports Entertainment, Ryan Diesem

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

A Symbolic Interactionist Study Of Teenagers' Fashionable Dress In Hsimenting, Taipei, Taiwan, Mei-Hsueh Hung

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Caudill College of Humanities at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Mei-Hsueh Hung on May 7, 2003.

College Students' Media Consumption And Their Voting Habits, Peggy Anne Prudhomme

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Mobile Technologies And Boundaryless Spaces: Slavish Lifestyles, Seductive Meanderings, Or Creative Empowerment?, Nikhilesh Dholakia, Detlev Zwick

College of Business Faculty Publications

According to the instrumental theory of technology, mobile technologies - what McLuhan's refers to as electronic prostheses - promise opportunities for greater freedom, creativity, leisure, and productivity by enhancing organic bodily functions. Correspondingly, as (Cavallaro, 2000) would argue, objects such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable physiotherapy units, laptops, and portable stereos - to name just a few - seem to impart a sense of solidity to consumers' lives. Just like prostheses, they are inserted into our everyday lives, helping our "inadequate" bodies along in fulfilling practical tasks. Phenomenologically, these kinds of mobile technologies supposedly support the subject's …

Burn This Journal, Davin Heckman, Sarah Hildebrandt, R. Stewart Varner, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editor introduction]

Originally published in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies (1.1), our manifesto appears for its first time online, in its entirety, here (earlier pieces of it appeared in earlier editorials). In so doing, we hope to continue the discussion that it grew out of in a public forum, and to ask our readership to participate as well -- a new manifesto should be written annually. Because Reconstruction is meant to be an organic enterprise, we ask readers to interrogate the efficacy and plausibility of the material herein: What must be changed, and what must be added/subtracted in order …

Paratextuality And Economic Disavowal In Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, Sarah Brouillette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Dave Eggers' recent novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), concerns two friends who suddenly stumble upon a lot of money, feel guilty about it, and travel around the world trying to give it away. Like almost all of what Eggers is involved in producing, Velocity is profoundly self-justifying. In fact, if we follow Gerard Genette's model and understand a work's paratexts to be all the physical and social texts that attend its existence, controlling its dissemination and reception, then Velocity thematizes paratextuality and practices it, as a text about Eggers' career and his overriding concern with the …