American Studies Commons^™

"I Have Thought Proper To Inform The World": Reading Unconventional Testaments Of 18th-Century New England Women, Elyssa Tardif

Open Access Dissertations

Early New England women chose to pass down what they owned and valued: clothing, cupboards, pewter dishes, commonplace books, etc. But some women passed down something more: a written testament, which sought to shape public opinion in colonial New England. A "testament" usefully suggests a text that both serves as a witness to lived experience as well as the means by which the individual herself can frame the narrative for those who come after. This project aims to examine not only written records but also their audience: who were the heirs to these testaments and how were the records preserved …

Selected Bibliography For Work In Reading, Literacy, And Pedagogy, Geert Vandermeersche, Kris Rutten, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Video Games And Citizenship, Jeroen Bourgonjon, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Video Games and Citizenship" Jeroen Bourgonjon and Ronald Soetaert argue that digitization problematizes and broadens our perspective on culture and popular media and that this has important ramifications for our understanding of citizenship. Bourgonjon and Soetaert respond to the call of Gert Biesta for the contextualized study of young people's practices by exploring a particular aspect of digitization that affects young people, namely video games. They explore the new social spaces which emerge in video game culture and how these spaces relate to community building and citizenship. Bourgonjon and Soetaert also examine whether these social spaces can …

Rhetorical Analysis Of Literary Culture In Social Reading Platforms, Joachim Vlieghe, Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Culture in Social Reading Platforms" Joachim Vlieghe and Kris Rutten present a case study of the discourse surrounding literary phenomena that are emerging within social media. The case study is part of a methodological exploration within literacy studies whereby the social media's transformative effects on literary literacies are studied by focusing on language as symbolic and situated action. Vlieghe and Rutten have identified unique social reading platforms based on a prolonged study of the social media environment. The analysis of the developers' discourse on social reading platforms shows how developers are formulating new …

Introduction To Literacy And Society, Culture, Media And Education, Kris Rutten, Geert Vandermeersche

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Literature, Digital Humanities, And The Age Of The Encyclopedia, Gunther Martens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literature, Digital Humanities, and the Age of the Encyclopedia" Gunther Martens takes his cue from Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities in order to discuss the way in which literature relates to new developments in technology. Martens argues that it is useful to situate some of the fears accompanying literature's renewed (and debated) exposure to media and technology against the background of a similar discussions earlier: the historical perspective allows to identify and link three specific discourses underpinning the debate, namely: education, rhetoric, and the concept of the encyclopedia. The encyclopedia and encyclopedic literature comprise and …

Using New Media In Teaching Greek Roma Students, Fenia Frangoulidou

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Using New Media in Teaching Greek Roma Students" Fenia Frangoulidou discusses the use of media material as a supplementary teaching tool in a Roma classroom. Since 2011, Aristotle University has been running a European Union funded project that deals with a wide range of supportive measures for Roma students. Sociologists, social workers, and educators are the primary participants responsible for its implementation. In her study Frangoulidou discusses gender relations and racism and presents an analysis of the participation and interaction of six high school students in a mixed class of twenty-eight students. The purpose of the study …

About The Destruction, Continuation, And Transformation Of Art, Frank Maet

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "About the Destruction, Continuation, and Transformation of Art" Maet offers an answer to the question raised by Arthur C. Danto's thesis how to discern art from non-art? Maet considers art from the perspective of a technologically mediated reality and he distinguishes three different views on contemporary visual art: the destruction, the continuation, and the transformation of art. Maet considers these three artistic views as different strategies to deal with our current technological condition and evaluates the merits of each of them. He argues that our thoroughly designed reality turns the strategy of artistic destruction into a dangerous …

Perspectives On Literary Reading And Book Culture, Geert Vandermeersche, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Perspectives on Literary Reading and Book Culture" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert provide a narrative framework for analyzing literary scholars' argumentation in the debate on literature and the humanities. Starting from MacIntyre's narrative description of epistemic "crises" they analyze the stories authors construct and the positions they take and ascribe to others within larger developing (grand) narratives on the value and function of literary reading. Both traditional narratives and new alternative (i.e., enlarged) narratives are discussed in how they set up and frame the argument and how they create dichotomies.

Reading, Literacy, And Education, Mikko Lehtonen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reading, Literacy, and Education" Mikko Lehtonen outlines a contextual approach to literacy. He asks how the changing relations of culture and economy, transformation of nation states and national cultures and changing notions concerning affect and cognition, transform notions of literacy and reading. Relying on the results of a recent Finnish research project on new reading communities and new ways of reading, Lehtonen highlights substantial continuities in the reading habits of the so called Google generation when compared to other generations of readers. Print media is not, however, connected self-evidently to cognitive reading among the said generation. Lehtonen …

Rhetoric, Citizenship, And Cultural Literacy, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Cultural Literacy" Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert start from concerns in contemporary educational debates about a growing lack of civic literacy. These complaints are raised both in the public sphere, in institutions of pedagogy, and in scholarship about the form, content, and function of civic literacy and civic education. Although there is an ongoing debate about the alleged decrease of political interest and the current state of civic literacy, it is clear that civic education has become an important focus of different governmental initiatives. Rutten and Soetaert aim to move away from a straightforward …

Integrating Social Media In Education, Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe, Pieter Verdegem

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Integrating Social Media in Education" Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe and Pieter Verdegem propose a framework in order to integrate social media literacy in an educational setting. In today's networked society students are new media users and hence the relevance in curricula to include social media literacy. Vanwynsberghe and Verdegem propose a multidimensional conceptual framework of social media literacy that includes the practical, cognitive, and affective competencies needed to deal with information of social media, to communicate with others through social media, to create content on social media, and to handle the consequences related to these three activities. On the …

Practical And Theoretical Implications Of Digitizing The Middle Ages, Roberta Capelli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Practical and Theoretical Implications of Digitalizing the Middle Ages" Roberta Capelli discusses scholarship about and the teaching of medieval culture in digital humanities. While every medieval manuscript is an individual entity, displaying a series of unique and unrepeatable material, structural and aesthetic characteristics, digital devices are able to generate only two-dimensional photographic reproductions. However, the digital medium brings about some major improvements in the study — and teaching — of medieval manuscripts because the hypertextual nature of its applications allows us to analyse simultaneously synchronic and the diachronic dynamics. From a theoretical point of view, the difference …

Diurnal And Nocturnal Avian Antipredator Behavior In Thermally Challenging Conditions, Jennie M. Carr

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Diurnal avian antipredator behavior has been the focus of much past research, yet the influence of the thermal environment on such behaviors is often overlooked. Far less is known about nocturnal avian antipredator behavior, including how these behaviors are influenced by challenging thermal environments. The first portion of my research focused on how the thermal environment influences the diurnal antipredator behavior of wintering birds while (i) exposed to high wind speeds, (ii) foraging in sunlit and shaded microhabitats, and (iii) when using thermoregulatory postures to conserve body heat. In addition to increasing convective heat loss, high wind speeds increase the …

A Matter Of Regionalism: Remembering Brandon Teena And Willa Cather At The Nebraska History Museum, Carly S. Woods, Joshua P. Ewalt, Sara J. Baker

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In 2010–2011, the Nebraska History Museum featured two temporary exhibits: “We the People: the Nebraskan Viewpoint” and “Willa Cather: A Matter of Appearances.” We argue the public memories of Brandon Teena and Willa Cather contained in the exhibits are distanced from regional politics when articulated alongside the nostalgic regionalist rhetoric of the Nebraska History Museum. Specifically, both exhibits not only discipline the memory of trans* performance within problematic material and symbolic contexts, but also place these memories within a rhetoric of regional optimism that has critical consequences for restricting counter-public formation. In performing this reading, the essay argues that critical …

Decoding Literary Aids: A Study On Issues Of The Body, Masculinity, And Self Identity In U.S. Aids Literature From 1984-2011, Alexander Shimon Abrams

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rather than waiting decades to respond, novelists of nearly every literary genre began conceptualizing the AIDS epidemic shortly after the first documented case of the virus in the United States in 1981. Writers, feeling a sense of urgency, wasted little time constructing didactic texts that differ from much historical fiction in that they were written as the tragedy they are commenting on occurred. However, AIDS literature has changed as the disease has spread well beyond the gay communities of San Francisco and New York, causing people to reexamine their longstanding beliefs on masculinity, sexuality, and body politics.

My Master's thesis …

Theoris, Jeanne. The Rebellious Life Of Mrs. Rosa Parks., Carol Shelton

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of Feminists Who Like Fashion, Margarita C. Delgado

SURGE

I’m sitting on the downtown R train one night in Manhattan, a copy of Vogue resting on my crossed legs. It is late and I am clearly unwinding peacefully as I thumb through page after glamorous page of my magazine. The train stops at Prince Street and there’s the usual flux of people in and out. Those left inside settle as the train pulls out of the station.

“Ugh. Fashion is stupid,” remarks one young man to another, both of whom are sitting diagonally from me and well within earshot. He’s watching me ignore him as I continue enjoying my …

Book Review: Mediating Moms: Mothers In Popular Culture, Kristi Branham

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ironic Appropriation Of Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls In Bulosan's The Cry And The Dedication, Robert Brown

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ironic Appropriation of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls in Bulosan's The Cry and the Dedication" Robert Brown discusses Carlos Bulosan's The Cry and the Dedication and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Brown claims that Bulosan's appropriation of For Whom borders on plagiarism and that this in part defines The Cry as a postcolonial text. Brown maintains that E. San Juan Jr.'s otherwise comprehensive introduction to The Cry ignores Hemingway's text in favor of a Filipino author, Luis Taruc, with an implicit argument that Bulosan used Taruc to make his novel a more …

The Myth Of Nothing In Classics And Asian Indigenous Films, Sheng-Mei Ma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Myth of Nothing in Classics and Asian Indigenous Films" Sheng-mei Ma discusses how the desert and the permafrost region are terra incognita, except nomads and Indigenous peoples. Given the extreme conditions of these forbidding places, Western modernity sees its own shadow cast on such black holes on earth. Since the 1960s, classic Hollywood or art house films by David Lean, Akira Kurosawa, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Anthony Minghella, and Sergei Bodrov romanticize and/or mythologize what is perceived as modernity's mirror image. Indie films in recent decades, particularly by Asian Indigenous filmmakers Byambasuren Davaa, Zacharias Kunuk, and Khyentse …

Us-American Protestant Missionaries And Translation In China 1894-1911, Mingyu Lu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "US-American Protestant Missionaries and Translation in China 1894-1911" Mingyu Lu discusses impact of and surrounding atmosphere between Protestant missionaries and Chinese intellectuals in translating Western texts. During the national crisis in 1894-1911, Protestant missionaries and Chinese intellectuals co-translated a large number of Western texts and adjusted their translations with regard to content and objectives. While the missionaries and their Chinese co-translators held different views towards the mapping of learning specifically towards Western learning, Chinese learning, and Christian messages, the translations were of significant impact in the period discussed. Lu argues that under the appeal of national renewal, …

Shimoda's Program For Japanese And Chinese Women's Education, Mamiko Suzuki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Shimoda Program for Japanese and Chinese Women's Education" Mamiko Suzuki discusses Western developments as a facet of educational curricula in Japan in the early twentieth century. When in the early 1900s a number of elite Chinese women traveled to Tokyo — for most, their first time abroad — to receive a modern education, it was at Jissen Women's Academy, which was the first to enroll female Chinese students in Tokyo and thus a crucial site for the development of a modern pan-Asian female identity. A central figure in the popularization of women's education and household and hygiene …

Rethinking Theatrical Images Of The New Woman In China's Republican Era, Li Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Rethinking Theatrical Images of the New Woman in China's Republican Era" Li Guo analyses the multivalent representations of the New Woman and posits that they encompass a broad array of blended feminine identities following the introduction of Western literary and cultural trends into Chinese culture. The tensions between ideological discourses about nation, gender, and politics as revealed in the plays of the republican period reveal the many underlying cultural paradigms and the processes in which dramatists Sinicized foreign models of the New Woman to appeal to their domestic audiences. Guo explores how the playwrights' gendered viewpoints contribute …

Introduction To Asian Culture(S) And Globalization, I-Chun Wang, Li Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Sinologism, The Western World View, And The Chinese Perspective, Ming Dong Gu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Sinologism, the Western World View, and the Chinese Perspective" Ming Dong Gu discusses how the West formulated its ways of observing China and how the rest of the world and the Chinese themselves view Chinese culture through the Western lens. Gu discusses the thought of selected scholars in Western history who have contributed to the formation of Sinologism and explores the motivation, logic, rationale, epistemology, methodology, and characteristics of the West's long-term endeavor to incorporate China into the Western-centered world system.

Shen And Cinema In 1930s Shanghai, Ling Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Shen and Cinema in 1930s Shanghai" Ling Zhang analyzes the film十字街頭 (1937) (Crossroads) in relation to the influence from foreign film practice and concepts from Hollywood and Soviet cinema in 1930s Shanghai. By an analysis of the film's cinematic style, Zhang explores the transcultural and transmedial possibilities and potentials in the context of film and film culture in the 1930s and the unruly energy and unique aesthetic characteristics embedded in the process of creative mimesis and transplantation. While in the 1930s Chinese cinema had an ambivalent and paradoxical attitude to US-American and Soviet films, Chinese filmmaker …

Transnational Socialist Imaginary And The Proletarian Woman In China, Anup Grewal

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Transnational Socialist Imaginary and the Proletarian Woman in China" Anup Grewal discusses 1930s Shanghai and representations of the proletarian woman in relation to the intellectual New Woman and the fashionable Modern Girl. Grewal considers the concept of the proletarian woman in socialist culture first within the context of a local and global field of contending modernist visions of femininity, class, and the city. Next, Grewal analyses how the figure of the Chinese proletarian woman activates a socialist transnationality through shared formal and narrative innovations of translational leftist literature and cinema. Through her analysis, Grewal suggests how the …

Singapore, State Nationalism, And The Production Of Diaspora, Cheryl Narumi Naruse

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Singapore, State Nationalism, and the Production of Diaspora" Cheryl Narumi Naruse examines The Straits Times series "Singaporean Abroad" and analyzes how conceptions of national time, space, and community are restructured by state concerns of economic survival within the era of globalization. In "Singaporean Abroad," readers find a curious amalgamation of feature writing, travel writing, and advertising about cosmopolitan, transnationally connected citizens of Singapore. Naruse shows how positive representations of overseas Singaporeans as "national heroes" reflected in the content of the series evidences efforts by the Government of Singapore to refashion cultural values and to advance beyond national …

Bibliography For The Study Of Asian Culture(S) And Globalization, Chien-Hang Liu, Li Guo, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.