American Studies Commons^™

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

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

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.

Professional Wrestling: From Sport To Sports Entertainment, Ryan Diesem

Honors Capstones

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

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 …

Innovating Superheroes, Alvise Mattozzi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Introduction]

Superhero comics have changed. They have passed through a Golden Age and Silver Age, they have been transformed, cancelled, revived, killed, deconstructed, reconstructed, revisited, etc. My aim is to account for part of these changes and show how superhero comics have been innovated. In order to track these changes I chose to compare different versions of a few DC Comics series, such as Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Shade, that had been cancelled and then revived and are known to have introduced relevant changes between the earliest and the subsequent versions.

Before tackling the series mentioned, I …

Silent No More: The Voice Of A Farm Worker Press, 1964–1975, Carlos R. Guerrero

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The dissertation critically examines the content of El Malcriado , a movement newspaper published by the Farm Worker Press in Delano, California between 1964 and 1975. El Malcriado resulted from the efforts of people attempting to create a cultural space to challenge and reconstruct the asymmetrical relations of power between farm workers and California agribusiness. Within the pages of the newspaper, its articles, cartoons, featured news stories, and editorials convey a narrative that points to the struggle of defining a farm worker position in opposition to the status quo of California agribusiness.

A discourse content analysis of the newspaper between …

Everybody's Magazine, Janet Butler Munch

Publications and Research

This article gives an overview on Everybody's Magazine (1899-1928) which focused on American society, and helped shape public opinion through investigative reporting and muckraking thereby stimulating reforms of societal problems. The magazine also made fine literature available to the masses, attracting the best writers of the day.

Review Of Ruthless Democracy, By Timothy B. Powell, Matthew Wolf-Myer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Harper & Brothers’ Family And School District Libraries, 1830-1846., Robert S. Freeman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

In the 1830s, at the dawn of mass-market publishing, J. & J. Harper of New York began publishing several libraries, including Harper’s Family Library and Harper’s School District Library. A “library” in this sense is a series or set of uniformly bound and uniformly priced books issued by the same publisher. A leading publisher and a major force in the broad religious and social reform movements of the period, the Harper brothers helped to shape education in American homes and schools. As Methodists they were advocates of reading for moral improvement. As innovative publishers, they made full use of the …

Mechanical Angel: Carolyn Forché And The Material Projection Of Messianic History, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The work of Carolyn Forché has always retained a political edge, with works such as the exploration of her Czech background in Gathering the Tribes (1976) and her account of visits to El Salvador in The Country Between Us (1981). Forché has been one of the leading poets who, in her own words, has combatted the self-censorship operative among American poets and writers that seemed to preclude writing about...historical events when those events were still unsafe (qtd. in Stein 147). Her third book of poems The Angel of History (published 13 years later), however, represents a new turn …

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

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Why Do They Strike Us?, James Polchin

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Over the past two years since the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie Wyoming, the circumstances of his death have held a symbolic place in the story of violence against gay men and lesbians nationally. University of Wyoming Professor Beth Loffreda's book Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder is on the "Lambda Book Report" best-sellers list and MTV has recently premiered "Anatomy of a Hate Crime: The Matthew Shepard Story" that dramatized the events of October 6th, 1998. The telling and retelling of Shepard's murder in both academic books and popular culture suggests …

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

Bookshelf

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

This State Has "Boundries" (Sic), But No Focus: A Review, Richard Defoe

E-JASL: Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship (1999-2009, Volumes 1-10)

Review of Louisiana Biographical Dictionary: People of all Times and Places Who Have Been Important to the History and Life of the State. Somerset Publishers, St. Clair Shores, MI, 1999. $87.50.

Review:

Somerset Publishers produce biographical dictionaries of some of these United States. The Louisiana volume does not instill confidence in their efforts. Sloppy printing, sloppy proof-reading and sloppy and turgid writing are just the beginning of the problems with this book – the title of this review features one of their glaring spelling errors from the foreword.

But the major problem with this book seems to be focus, …

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 74, No. 52, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news.

• Karen, Mattias. Complainant: I Felt Dirty – Wayne Jones, Sexual Harassment, Lawsuits
• Hutchins, Chris. Baptized In Beer – Banshee
• Harper, Molly. General Education Changing
• Back, Shannon. Mayor Seeks Investigation of Commissioners – Eldon Renaud, Sandy Jones, Joe Denning
• Karen, Mattias. Harassment Documents Released – Wayne Jones
• Wilkins, Erin. Pearce-Ford Tower Shower Arrest Imminent – Housing & Residence Life, Peeping Toms
• Swath of Scandal – Student Government Association, Elections
• Tabor, Chris. Editorial Cartoon Student Government Association Nasty Campaigns
• Emly, Karri. Make Time for Kindness, Compassion
• Matheis, Joe. Candidate Thanks Blacks …

Revisiting The Recordings Of Wars Past: Remembering The Documentary Trilogy Of John Huston, Gary Edgerton

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Gary Edgerton's contribtution to "Studlar, Gaylyn, David Desser, and John Huston. Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993."

On The Jazz Musician's Love/Hate Relationship With The Audience, Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

An assistant professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, Bertram D. Ashe discusses how the intersection of an African American cool style with a black vernacular tradition and multi-racial audiences complicates audience-performer relations. In the vernacular tradition, performers play not "to" but "with" an audience, drawing on the call-response patterns that characterize the black aesthetic. Ashe notes that the vernacular tradition is not racial but cultural, and class can be as important a marker as race in determining audience expectations. Differing cultural backgrounds create, in Ashe's words, "competing realities," distinct sets of expectations that can shape a …

An Activist's Guide To Lesbian History: A Companion To The Video Not Just Passing Through, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

This guide, designed to accompany the video Not Just Passing Through, contains guidelines for conducting oral history, forms for donating material to mainstream and community based archives, and lessons for engaging lesbian history with activism.

Film Language And The Persistence Of Racial Stereotyping In The Last Of The Mohicans (1992), Gary Edgerton

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Gary Edgerton's contribution to the Journal of Contemporary Thought, Vol. 7.

Gloria Patri, Gender, And The Gulf War: A Conversation With Mary Kelly, James Castonguay, Amelie Hastie, Lynne Joyrich, Christopher Lane, Kathleen Woodward

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Mary Kelly's gallery size installation, entitled Gloria Patri, was first shown at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University in 1992. Gloria Patri focuses on the issues of heroism, mastery, and war within the context of a pathologized masculinity; that is, on the identification by both men and women with masculine ideals of mastery, domination, and control, and their simultaneous physical and psychological collapse. This crisis of masculine mastery is set against the backdrop of the Persian Gulf War.

Robert Frost And Maya Angelou: Poet-As-Rhetor In The Presidential Inauguration: Textual Symbols And The Symbol Of Enactment, Donna M. Witmer

Masters Theses

This criticism uses an organic approach to examine the rhetorical properties of Frost's and Angelou's inaugural poems and their individual enactments respective of the constraints and exigencies in the Presidential inaugurations of Kennedy and Clinton. Apparently responding to the constraints of television's sound bite as well as to exigencies of the traditional inauguration and the need to serve a new generation and a culturally diverse population, the Clinton Administration combined the poetic form, used to heighten an emotional response, with an enactment as a synecdochic symbol, used to assert sociopolitical ideology.

Women's Communication In Country Music, Heather Elizabeth Yarbrough

Masters Theses

The lyrical content of female performed country songs was evaluated in this study. Female soloist performer's songs ranking in the top hits of each year between 1950 and 1989 were examined. After indepth research into the history of country music and the female role in country music, several songs performed by females and listed as hits between the years 1950 and 1989 were analyzed. The characteristic found in most female songs was relationships with men and family and how women react to the positive and negative aspects of these relationship.

Omnibus: Precursor Of Modern Television, Mary Beth Hinton

The Courier

"Omnibus" was, to use an expression current during the Golden Age of Television, a "window on the world", through which art, drama, music, dance, history, literature, science and technology, as well as athletics and comedy were brought into American homes by the gentlemanly and articulate host, Alistair Cooke. Between 1952 and 1961, "Omnibus", in seeking new ways to inform and to uplift, expanded the repertoire of television and stimulated the American public's appetite for 'cultural' programming.

In the early 1960s, Syracuse University unexpectedly acquired kinescope recordings of the "Omnibus" television series' first two seasons: 1952-53 and 1953-54. After the Ford …

Spindrift Gazes, Ronald Charles Kurtenbach

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Spindrift Gazes is a collection of short stories that thematically relate to how human dignity is engendered and how that sense of dignity is challenged, undercut, and regained. These fictional constructions are particularly concerned with issues of transformation, how and why change takes place. Of particular emphasis is how differing kinds of human relationships are instrumental in the nature of those changes. Of fundamental concern is to give fictional form to human rights issues.

Advisor: Judith Slater

To Tell The Truth: The Lesbian Herstory Archives: Chronicling A People And Fighting Invisibility Since 1974, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

A portrait of the Lesbian Herstory Archives by a volunteer, describing the archive in its original home in Joan Nestle's Upper West Side New York City apartment that she shared with Mabel Hampton. Originally published in Out/Week Magazine.

Ua12/2/1 Magazine, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Special magazine edition of the College Heights Herald featuring:

• Poore, Chirs & Rob McCracken. It’s A Family Affair – Jack Harbaugh
• Hart, John & Andy Lyons. Addiction: Research Shows Chemical Imbalance in Users’ Brains
• Chatin, John. Film Brings Deadly Legend Alive – Ron Schidknect, Legend of the Pope Lick Monster
• Tsimekles, Diane. Hatcher, Rob. Picasso’s: A Room for Bands to Grow In