Digital Commons Network^™

Review Of Super-Cannes, By J. G. Ballard, Liam Thomas Mcnamara

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of Popaganda: The Art Of Subversion, By Ron English, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of After The City, By Lars Larup, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of State And Main, By David Mamet, Shaun Ferguson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Review Of Power, Politics, And Culture: Interviews With Edward Said, By Edward Said, Susan Muaddi Darraj

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

The Mind Museum: Rudolf Schwarzkogler And The Vienna Actionists, Philip Barnes

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Sixth paragraph]

In the following essay I discuss the Austrian artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler. I have enjoyed the process of ferreting out articles and references to him, although these are seemingly as scarce as his own artistic output. Schwarzkogler spent just 2 years staging performance-actions in his apartment in the 1960s. These methodically photographed scenes involved sliced fish, bandages, light bulbs, razor blades, foodstuffs and surgical apparatus, all manipulated by anonymous figures. The photographs, works of art in their own right, have since toured internationally. Schwarzkogler was the least outgoing of a group called the Viennese Actionists, whose orgiastic, bloody Happenings …

Being-There And Being-From-Elsewhere: An Existential-Analytic Of Exile, Farhang Erfani

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragrap]

I find myself in an unsettling position, as I do not know where to begin to talk about a philosophically neglected topic: exile. I cannot hide behind the famous names of the tradition; I cannot speak through them about exile in order to make my inquiry sound more legitimate since most of them did not address the topic. Isn't it interesting though that my inability to know where to start and the lack of legitimacy that I feel are in themselves two typical symptoms of the exiled? In all fairness, exile has become a buzzword and is fashionable …

Remembering Dehlie: A Chrono-Topo-Graphy Of Imagination, Subhash Jaireth

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In a few weeks I shall be going to India to see my daughter. This will be our first meeting after she went back to India with her mother five years ago. She is fifteen now, and, in a way, a complete stranger to me. You don't know me, she tells me often on the phone, Neither do I know you. The little girl whom you carried on your shoulders and played hopscotch with, is nothing but a shadow. Come and see what has become of me. I have made up my mind to go but I know …

The Cyborgian Self: Toward A Critical Social Theory Of Cyberspace, Michael Ian Borer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Contemporary social theory currently remains at a virtual standstill, quivering over the decision to radically leave the past behind or to continue within the historical narrative of the Enlightenment. Postmodern social theorists, advocating the position that we have, in fact, entered a new historical epoch, pose serious challenges to our perception of modernity and cultural identity. As an influential strategy that has infiltrated both the humanities and the social sciences for more than thirty years, postmodernism can no longer be dismissed as merely a fad or trend. In a world where the use of complex, and often mobile, …

Solaris, America, Disneyworld And Cyberspace: Salman Rushdie's Fairy-Tale Utopianism In Fury, Justyna Deszcz

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In this paper, I discuss the figure of professor Malik Solanka, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's latest novel, Fury (2001), and his attempts at constructing a fairy tale utopia as a means of establishing his identity. I try to elucidate this problem referring to the concepts of the fairy tale utopian as formulated by J. R. R. Tolkien, Ernst Bloch, and Jack Zipes, as their propositions can be regarded as the most effective exponents of the utopian imagination and seem very applicable to Rushdie's utopian attempts. On the basis of such a reading, I also reflect on the …

Rich Earth Below The Sand' And The Origins Of The Thames Embankments, Stuart Oliver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

This essay explores the designing of the Thames embankments that were built between 1866 and 1874 for the Metropolitan Board of Works. In particular it concentrates on the origins of what might be called the production of the conditions of production of the embankments. By looking at the motivation of those advocating embanking as a means of exerting literal and figurative control over the river, and the ways in which society influenced such advocacy and determined its effectiveness, the essay explores modernity's construction of a regulated natural in the context of an analysis that is sensitive to the …

Review Of This American Life, Episode 110, Five Ways To Map The World, Michael Cumberland

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Supposing A Space: The Detecting Subject In Paul Auster’S City Of Glass, Richard Swope

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Lifeworlds [On Wendy Kirkup's Echo], Renee Baert

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Cabbagetown: (Re) Placing Identity, Jeremy W. Crampton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Cabbagetown is one of Atlanta's oldest industrial settlements, built for employees of the South's first cotton processing mill in 1881 during the heyday of southeastern textile mills. Today its identity and sense of place is highly contested. Originally a white working class community oriented around the mill, today it is undergoing gentrification -- the mill has been converted into gated lofts, and there are few long-term residents still left. Remarkably, the neighborhood is still distinct and unusual. It's almost as if a sense of history has settled into the neighborhood's bones and imbued its new residents with a …

Review Of Bomb The Surburbs, William Uspki Wimsatt, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Reconstructing Year One, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Two years ago, Reconstruction was in the air, a shiftless idea about what academic publishing might become. We were discomforted by what we saw as potential being shaped by those whose potential had already been realized, and depressed by the conservatism and stodginess which told us that the paths to knowledge had already been blazed by years of academic tradition. An academic environment of blazing rhetoric and high-mindedness told us that we should change the world and question authority, teasing us with buzzwords and catchphrases like community, differánce, heterotopia, and scholarly communities, but all the while telling us …

Derrida's Detour, Barbara Mella

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Sixth paragraph]

So my main topic is a word. Detour. This word leads me astray towards other words that share with it a certain movement, or a tendency to movement, or something else, which I will try to uncover. I want to talk about ellipsis, about circles and about différance. Yes, of course these words are related to Jacques Derrida, as words tend to (related also in the sense of a relation through kinship). I am going to start with the essay La différance in the book Margins of Philosophy (1882). Reading it, I noticed detour, which caught my eye. …

Rorty's Complicit American Neo-Pragmatism, Haidar Eid

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Despite the obvious French origin of poststructuralism, its paradigmatic resonance can be found in the American philosophical scene, an essential part of which is Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism -- the theoretical basis of American (post)modernism. However, different from poststructuralism's apparent antagonism to the authoritarian establishments, Rorty adopts the Derridean poststructuralist motifs of the decentering of the subject, and the disappearance of meaning and truth in order to defend the establishment -- or rather, the status quo.

Review Of Reading Karl Marx, By Rainer Ganahl, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

On Guillermo Gomez-Peña's El Mexterminator And Cyber Vato, Michael Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

While attending Bowling Green State University in 1997 I had an experience that changed my worldview. I was a teaching assistant in the Popular Culture department and part of my responsibilities included teaching Introduction to Popular Culture (POPC 100) and Introduction to Mass Media (POPC 165). I had been struggling to engage my students in examining the way in which social reality is represented to them through popular entertainments [2]. The majority of my students were white, middle class students from the surrounding Northern regions of Ohio. My students were well-versed in the ongoing controversy over whether or …

Review Of Up, By Peter Gabriel, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Edu 2022 : Teaching And Learning With Technology In Classrooms, Secondary Education And Foundations

Approved Course Proposals

No abstract provided.

Eiu 4194g : Leadership: Theory And Practice, Honors, Political Science

Approved Course Proposals

No abstract provided.

Eiu 4192g : Film And Contemporary Society, Honors, English

Approved Course Proposals

No abstract provided.

Eiu 4160g : Personal Finance Investments, Business

Approved Course Proposals

No abstract provided.

Flg 4751 : German For Reading Knowledge I, Foreign Languages

Approved Course Proposals

No abstract provided.

Passaic Boys Are Hell: Robert Smithson's Tag As Temporal And Spatial Marker Of The Geographical Self, Felicity Colman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Robert Smithson seductively created stories about his activities as an artist with attention to his duration; his time of existence. Born in 1938 in the New Jersey suburb of Passaic, Smithson lived in the New Jersey suburbs of Rutherford and Clifton with his family until 1957 when he moved to live in downtown Manhattan, New York (Hobbs 1981, 231-232; Tsai 1991, 6). Smithson's adult life was undeniably shaped by his Pascalian/Sopranos awareness of engaging the circumference by which to navigate the centre of everyday life. In 1972 Smithson described New Jersey as: a kind of destroyed California, …

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 …