Digital Commons Network^™

The Ruse Of The Social: Human Waste And The Gated Community, Liam Mcnamara

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

One of the central problems of contemporary society is that of “the social”: how it is defined, constituted, conjured into existence, and supported. Jean Baudrillard has employed the term “the social” in his work, but it is never explicitly defined; it is best understood as a form of simulation that has sprung into existence in the absence of symbolic social relations. The social is constituted of all the phenomena that are generally studied by sociology, so is therefore ideologically conceived of as an organic structure that is waiting for analysis. The “social” is society, both as it stands …

On Steven Duncombe's Cultural Resistance Reader (2002), Adam Reed

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

While the debates over the dis/connections between theory and practice have become essentially metaphysical, it is still useful to distinguish between micro, grassroots struggles and macro, ideological political agendas. In a world in which one of the Left's (old, new and contemporary) main achievements has been to merge the micro and macro in the popular imaginary, this distinction helps one appreciate the myriad of forces affecting social change that are condensed in primarily ideological narratives. A similar perspective is called for when one turns to cultural forms of resistance, which are usually erased by political narratives or mystified …

On Bell Hooks' Feminism Is For Everybody, David Alan Sapp

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Taking a decidedly radical feminist position, bell hooks, the writing voice of Gloria Watkins, promotes the learning of feminist theory and history as essential parts of the process of self-actualization and the practice of freedom. In Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, hooks provides an overview targeted to readers new to interdisciplinary feminism. Importantly, hooks argues in strong opposition to the anti-feminist public voice in contemporary culture. In particular, she speaks to young female readers who know little about feminism, many of whom falsely assume that sexism is no longer a problem or is no longer relevant since …

A Review Of Dr. Holmberg's Work, Gary Hoppenstand

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editor's Introduction]

Dr. Carl Holmberg, a beloved member of Bowling Green State University's department of Popular Culture and father of two daughters, Lily and Erin, passed away September 29, 2002 at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio. In addition to what you will find highlighted below, Dr. Holmberg was in the process of extensive research into Japanese popular culture and was loved by the students he taught at the graduate and undergraduate level. Below, we have decided to publish a review of Carl's work by friend and colleague Dr. Gary Hoppenstand, so that the members of our community might realize …

Terra Incognita, Leslie Hill

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

To Blend In The Place You're In, But With A Mind To Do Something: The Practice Of Merging In James Dickey's To The White Sea, Casey Clabough

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In a final sortie the day before the great fire-bombing raid on Tokyo in the last months of World War II, Muldrow (his first name is purposefully never given), an American tail gunner, parachutes from his burning B-29 into the city. Protected at first by the smoke-blackened anarchy on the ground, he journeys north, away from the chaos and ruin of Tokyo, instinctively drawn toward Japan's sparsely-populated northern island of Hokkaido, a frozen, desolate sanctuary he is certain will assure his survival. With little more than a knife and a small map of Japan he makes his way …

Becoming Native, Patricia Monaghan

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

With relentless beaks, a squad of crows attacked a winter field. It was a fine fair Irish field, sweeping upwards in the pale sunlight towards a dark bulwark of rhododendrons surrounding a single gnarled oak, beneath which three ruddy cattle grazed. Welcoming this peaceable scene as an excuse to slow my journey, I parked on the verge and walked to the field's iron gate.

Writing Identity Into Space: The Relationship Between Ethnography, Autobiography, And Space In Bronislaw Malinowski's A Diary In The Strict Sense Of The Term And Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, Lawrence Phillips

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From a number of disciplinary perspectives autobiography has always presented a challenge to more or less discrete modes of reading and evaluating the text. To read autobiography as a literary text is to suppress its close relationship to the writer, however fictionalised and evasive the writing subject might be about a textual identity so closely related to his or her public persona. On the other hand, to read it as history or a documentary presentation of a life is to fail to acknowledge the heavy use of literary techniques and imbedded subjectivity that makes autobiography what it is. …

Ideology And Public Sphere: A Preliminary Bibliography, Giorgio Bertellini, C. Paul Sellors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Bibliography accompanies Bertellini & Sellors article Breaking the Mimetic Contract: Notes on Ideology, Intersubjectivity, and Film Theory

Navigating The Starless Night: Strategies For Understanding Autobiogeography, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Ancient mapmakers relied upon the presence of celestial bodies for their conceptualization of the world, for their external knowledge-making tools, as if a far-off body could help to make sense of our terrestrial life/as if it couldn't. Cosmology, as a practice, relied on the construction of an external body of knowledge that the local meaning-maker could situate him- or herself into, and more broadly, their entire society and culture -- the interior is determined by its relationship to the exterior (or the exteriorized). For the ancient Greeks then, the font of Western culture, this cosmology works at once …

Autobiography And Geography: A Self-Arranging Question, Frédéric Regard

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The border between fiction and truth in autobiography has been the subject of numerous investigations, yet the question of what we might call the assignations to residence of the author remains largely ignored. Critics have written abundantly about autobiography in its relation to the origin of the author as living personality with his own story, but never truly treated the idea of the spatial modalities, the layout, of the author's writing self. In his relatively unknown 1967 article On Other Places, Michel Foucault, then on assignment in Tunis, saw in this thematic situation the stage of a …

Processes Of Embodiment And Spatialization In The Writings Of Paul Auster, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Processes of embodiment and the spatialization of interior categories such as thought and memory are defining characteristics of Paul Auster's novels, essays, and poetry, and a brief survey of these aspects can offer a new perspective on Auster's oeuvre as an organic whole. It is the underlying assumption of this paper that the transformation of interior into exterior constitutes a specific instance of the transpositional processes discussed therein. Within the theoretical framework of cultural studies -- as opposed to the more narrowly defined literary studies -- such transformations can be regarded as processes of embodiment, that is to …

Framing Intelligibility, Identity And Selfhood: A Reconsideration Of Spatio-Temporal Models, Sally Munt

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The relationship between intelligibility and identity over the past thirty years has largely been approached through the linguistic construct of the subject. Proposing that our subjectivities be theoretically comprehended (made intelligible) as discursive effects is now common sense. Poststructuralism, following particularly Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, has ensured that the subject is a cardinal category of contemporary thought; in any number of disciplines, it is one of the first concepts we teach to our undergraduates. But are we best served by continuing to insist on the intellectual primacy of the subject, formulated as it has been …

On Public Culture 12.3: Special Issue On Cosmopolitanism (2000), Dorothy Barenscott

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For those engaged in any dimension of the vastly complex and highly contentious network of ideas, theories, and interdisciplinary projects under the rubric Cultural Studies, <> is a valuable, if not essential, journal. Since its inception some fourteen years ago, <> has maintained its mandate of intervention, creating a valuable and much needed space to publish politically charged and critically engaged work, often by unknown and marginalized scholars. Today these names read like a virtual who's who of the cultural studies world -- Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Jurgen Habermas, Michael Taussig, Dipesh Chakrabarty to name but a few. This of …

Activist Desire, Cultural Criticism, And The Situationist International, David Banash

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In the world of Anglo-American criticism, Situationism was once the province of hip theorists, progressive art historians, and a few scattered Marxists. No more, for the nineties saw Situationism come from obscure movement to the defiant avant of our cultural-critical-garde. Not only has the past decade seen the publication of a dozen books, countless articles, dissertations, and both academic and activist web-sites, the Situationists have moved right into the main line of pop-culture. Situationist graffiti turns up as the epigraph for gen-xer Elizabeth Wurtzel's Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1988), and, with Rolling Stone darling Greil Marcus's …

The Children Overboard Event: Constructing The Family And Nation Through Representations Of The Other, Kate Slattery

Theses : Honours

This thesis presents a selection of representations of the Children Overboard event of October 7, 2001, sourced from the Australian government and print news media. Employing an interpretative and critical discourse approach, I explore how the event could be seen to define the physical and cultural boundaries of the Australian nation. In particular I explore how a threat to nation is articulated. From my analysis of the representations, I identify a rhetoric of the 'Other' set within the discursive spaces of family and nation. These discourses circulated within the Children Overboard event are pursued in this thesis in terms of …

“Married Widowhood”: Maintaining Couplehood When One Spouse Is Living In A Nursing Home, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

When a marital partner moves to a nursing home, how do community-dwelling spouses, labeled “married widows,” adapt and cope with changes in the relationship and their own marital roles? The first goal of this study was to explore the role additions and deletions for community-based wives whose husbands moved to a nursing home. The second goal was to examine how these women discursively represent their own self-identity and the relationship they have with their husband who is living in a nursing home. Data were drawn from in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 21 wives whose husbands resided in a nursing home. A …

Modern Arabic Film : A Study Of Selected Works Of New Arab Expressionist Filmmakers, Mohamed Masoud Elmasmari

Student Works (2000-2009)

Film reached the major cities of the Arab world within a matter of months of the first film showing in Paris, London, and New York, so the history of film exhibition and to some extent film production in virtually as long in the Arab world as in the West. The experience of the last thirty years has shown situation to be of enormous creative potential for an artist. In this study, attention is paid to the achievements of just a handful of notable filmmakers of the New Arab Cinema, even this choice is limited but not random, for all the …

Ezra Pound's Comparative Poetics, Naikan Tao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Ezra Pound's Comparative Poetics," Naikan Tao concentrates on Pound's theories regarding comparison and examines the significance of his comparative studies to the formulation of his poetics, an aspect that has not been sufficiently investigated. On the basis of Pound's work, Tao observes that the conception of comparison Pound shaped through his comparative studies is the internal principle that governs the presentation of details and particulars, the method Pound advocated as a reader-oriented approach to truth and as an efficient, self-reliant means to avoid others' generalization and discursive presentation. Pound's view of comparison as an epistemological norm -- …

Western Culture And The Ambiguous Legacies Of The Pig, Benton Jay Komins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Western Culture and the Ambiguous Legacies of the Pig," Benton Jay Komins provides a cultural lineage of the pig by the example and reading of Piggies by the Beatles. Komins observes that Piggies enacts the possibilities of the ubiquitous pig in Western culture by juxtaposing swinish antics with interpretations of limitation and heartbreak thereby forcing listeners to blur the distinctions between struggle, unrequited love, and boorishness. Komins continues his discussion by locating this juxtaposition within the Western pantheon of real, metaphorical, and imaginary animals, where the pig is noted to have obsessively endured. Komins argues that through …

Aimé Césaire And Gestures Toward The Universal, Gary Leising

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Aimé Césaire and Gestures toward the Universal," Gary Leising argues that Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land presents a speaker struggling with his own identity, torn between a double consciousness of his black African heritage and his French-European education. This dichotomy appears in the poem in terms of his perceptions of his ancestry as well as in symbols of the masculine and feminine in the surrounding landscape. For the speaker, the African appears as the "real" around him, while the European is an "absent presence," and he confronts the two at the poem's climax, …

(Post)Feminism, Transnationalism, The Maternal Body, And Michèle Roberts, Ayako Mizuo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "(Post)Feminism, Transnationalism, the Maternal Body, and Michèle Roberts," Ayako Mizuo argues that the question and problematics of feminism have diversified over the last few decades. Diverse and competing voices have been, nonetheless, incorporated into the paradigm of an equality and difference sexual dichotomy. Further, recent discussions about feminism suggest the problematization of gender differences. Consequently, exponents of postfeminism are compelled to ask what comes next? Mizuo urges that the issue of the tangibility of the body acquires a particular relevance within this context and that thus the ultimate question is how the site of the maternal body …

Language, Vagueness, And Social Communication, Colin B. Grant

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Language, Vagueness, and Social Communication," Colin B. Grant adopts an interdisciplinary approach to an interrelated complex of language, communication, and society. Grant operates with a modified concept of vagueness as a pragmatic property and attempts to establish a link between pragmatic vagueness and contingency in communication. This communicative contingency takes the form of improbabilities (entropy). Grant observes that the challenge lies in modelling communication as porous networks which nonetheless enable society to function. In this sense, contingency in communication must not be confused with arbitrariness just as cognitive closure cannot be confused with solipsism. This line of …

Entropy In Pynchon's "Entropy" And Lefebvre's The Production Of Space, Jason Snart

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Entropy in Pynchon's 'Entropy' and Lefebvre's The Production of Space," Jason Snart examines Thomas Pynchon's short story "Entropy" for the ways in which it deals with the kinds of disorder(s) associated with entropy as a thermodynamic and informational concept. Those concepts are installed as a framework within which to consider cultural studies work like Henri Lefebfre's thought in his The Production of Space and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems theory and themodynamics: disorder is rendered not as confusion, but rather as a state of potential energy and productivity and Lefebvre's and Bertalanffy's concepts serve to show how …

Comparatist Postcolonial Studies: A Review Article Of Books By Coundouriotis, Matthews Green, Yeager, And Gould, Vautier, And Canadian Literature, Angeline O’Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Inside Unlv, Betty Blodgett, Tom Flagg, Diane Russell

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

Bending The Rules Of “Professional” Display: Emotional Improvisation In Caregiver Performances, Jayne M. Morgan, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Organizational norms of emotional expression are open to negotiation through improvised performances, as employees may bend or break emotion rules to gain more leeway in expressiveness and participate in the development of their own role identities in the workplace. In this ethnographic study, a dramaturgical perspective is used to analyze the processes and outcomes of emotional improvisation as observed among nurses, technicians, and physicians in a cardiac care center. It was found that the emphasis on maintaining a “professional” appearance in caregiving largely constrains actors to perform along their scripted roles. Results are discussed in terms of practical implications for …

Geek Culture: An Annotated Interdisciplinary Bibliography, William L. Svitavsky

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In recent years, there have been numerous studies on science fiction fans, role-playing games, comic book fans, and the culture of those strongly interested in computers. When a study profiles a group engaged in one of these activities, it is not unusual for the group's participation in the other activities to be mentioned as well. In popular culture (as opposed to studies of popular culture), this overlap has been recognized all along. Each of these groups has been ridiculed as geeks or nerds, and each has subverted those terms into proud self-identification. In his work on media fandom, …

2001 Presidential Address: Do More With More, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

As I have listened to, and recently reread the addresses of our WSCA Presidents, I have been moved and challenged by their words and their wisdom. And their speeches are challenging. They have exhorted us to embrace quality discourse, to welcome change, to maintain the centrality of communication in the university of the 21st century, and to avoid becoming out-of-touch whiners. I wondered, what can I add to their words in my own address?

Over this past year, I have thought about my life as a communication professor. How are my times similar and different from those who have come …

Exploring The Emergent Identities Of Future Physicians: Toward An Understanding Of The Ideological Socialization Of Osteopathic Medical Students, Lynn M. Harter, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This project brings contextual factors to the forefront of socialization research by investigating how medical ideology relates to the formation of the identities of students of osteopathic medicine. In particular, we investigate their attitudes toward, the role of communication in, and the expression of emotion in health care delivery. Through in-depth interviews with students about their vocational development experiences, we began exploring their emergent identities as future practitioners of osteopathic medicine. Three themes emerged from a constant comparative analysis of data, including (a) selecting osteopathic medicine, (b) encountering osteopathy, and (c) students’ emergent identities. These themes, and their respective subthemes, …