Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity And Intellectual Property In Digital Environments, Justin A. Lewis

Writing Program – Dissertations

The Piratical Ethos: Textual Activity and Intellectual Property in Digital Environments examines the definition, function, and application of intellectual property in contexts of electronically mediated social production. With a focus on immaterial production - or the forms of coordinated social activity employed to produce knowledge and information in the networked information economy - this project ultimately aims to demonstrate how current intellectual property paradigms must be rearticulated for an age of digital (re)production. By considering the themes of "Piracy", "Intellectual Property", and "Distributed Social Production" this dissertation provides an overview of the current state of peer production and intellectual property …

To The Jew First: A Socio-Historical And Biblical-Theological Analysis Of The Pauline Teaching Of `Election' In Light Of Second Temple Jewish Patterns Of Thought, Anthony Thornhill

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Paul's "doctrine" of election has remained a controversial and enigmatic topic for centuries. Few studies, however, have approached Paul's doctrine through the context of Second Temple Judaism. This study examines Paul's view of election through the lens of Second Temple Jewish texts written prior to 70 CE. In doing so, it is argued that the best framework through which to view Paul's discussion of election is through a primarily corporate model of election. While such a model is rooted in Judaism, Paul departs from his Jewish contemporaries in arguing that the locus of election is in God's Messiah, Jesus.

The Residual Resistance Of The Individual Within The Rhizomatic Hegemony Of The Internet, Emma Katherine Wolfe

English Theses & Dissertations

Networked cyborgs that exist within the non-hierarchical rhizomatic network of the Internet risk losing the concept of their individuality as our identity becomes less important than the group. However, if the rhizomatic network is thought of as a hegemony that exists on the Internet, we can resist this through the residual notion of individual identity. Since cyborgs must perform in order to exist on the rhizomatic network, they can become aware of and perform their individuality through awareness of the computer medium. There are three methods for networked cyborgs to assert their individuality discussed in this thesis.

The first is …

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.

Crossed Boundaries In Musical Culture Between Asia And The West, Kheng K. Koay, Mikel Ledee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Crossed Boundaries in Musical Culture between Asia and the West" Kheng K. Koay and Mikel LeDee examine Tony Prabowo's Pasar Loak (Flea Market) for soprano and percussions and Chinary Ung's Grand Alap (A Window in the Sky). Composers Prabowo and Ung adopt modernist techniques from Western and traditional Asian music cultures in their compositions. Koay and LeDee explore aspects which broaden the presentation of sound in the two selected compositions and the background influences of Western and Asian music on the two composers. Prabowo and Ung absorb new experiences and embrace music that excites them and Prabowo, …

Eng And The Entertainment Film In The People's Republic Of China, Munib Rezaie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Eng and the Entertainment Film in the People's Republic of China" Munib Rezaie discusses the rise of film as entertainment in the People's Republic of China with a focus on the accomplishments director Dayyan Eng, known in China as Shixian Wu. Rezaie briefly reviews the changing definitions and views towards film as entertainment in the PRC as well as some relevant changes in regulation and policy within the industry itself that largely stem from the ongoing process of globalization and China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Within this new cinematic landscape, Rezaie argues that Eng should …

Globalization And Theater Spectacles In Asia, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Globalization and Theater Spectacles in Asia" I-Chun Wang discusses how performance is an integral part of cultural discourse: in industrially advanced Asian nations governments started to examine the relationship between cultural discourse and popular culture, cultural identity and tourist attractions and artists have become prominent participants in this development in particular with regard to theater performance, an activity with old traditions in Asian cultures. With the uptake of technology and in some cases Western innovation, Asian theater performance not only became an important part of social and cultural discourse, it rejuvenated itself. Wang posits that Asian theater …

Hollywood And Shanghai Cinema In The 1930s, Adrian Song Xiang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

I In his article "Hollywood and Shanghai Cinema in the 1930s" Adrian Song Xiang argues that Hollywood films provided a repertoire of images Chinese filmmakers of the 1930s adapted to their films. Xiang analyses Yu Sun's (孙瑜) 1932 film 野玫瑰 (Wild Rose), whose leading female character Xiaofeng was adapted from Hollywood actress Mary Pickford's iconic rambunctious teenager screen persona, particularly from the 1922 film Tess of the Storm Country. The modernist connotations of Tess' teenage girl character were changed in the process to meet Chinese cultural and political needs. Xiang's analysis suggests an adjustment in the history of early …

Re-Defining South Korean Scholarship And Education Within The Context Of Globalization, Simon C. Estok

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Re-defining South Korean Scholarship and Education within the Context of Globalization" Simon C. Estok discusses effects of globalization on the educational and scholarly goals and realities of Korea. Estok argues that although the transformational impacts of globalization in terms of sports, entertainment, politics, and business in Korea are visible, efforts to produce more globally visible Korean scholarship have been ineffective and counter-productive. Estok shows that the imagined dangers to Korean nationhood are rooted in fears of invasion which have strong historical and contemporary justification. Colonized for a third of the twentieth century, Korea in the twenty-first century …

Intermarried Couples And "Multiculturalism" In Japan, Kaori Mori Want

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Intermarried Couples and 'Multiculturalism' in Japan" Kaori Mori Want discusses why hyphenated names for the children of intermarried children are important for the achievement of multiculturalism in Japan in an era of globalization. In Japan the number of people who marry interracially or inter-ethnically is increasing, but changes to naming practices must occur for Japan to become a multicultural society. Intermarriage is not a reliable indicator of the maturity of multiculturalism. Foreign residents who have intermarried in Japan do not have the rights of Japanese, such as those of voting, social welfare, education, and so on. This …

Wait Upon Ishiguro, Englishness, And Class, Mustapha Marrouchi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Wait upon Ishiguro, Englishness, and Class" Mustapha Marrouchi analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's novels with focus on the writer's interest in Japanese culture and his preoccupation with matters of class in England. Marrouchi analyzes Ishiguro's novels as located astride of East, West, and the in-between: his precise, exquisitely made stories are shadowed by absences and silences, balanced "between elegy and irony" (Rushdie) and this is so whether the speaker is the obsessive butler in The Remains of the Day or one of the demented heroes in The Unconsoled or When We Were Orphans or the Japanese, guilty or exiled, …

The Narration Of Transnational Territory In Kingston's China Men And Kim's 검은 꽃 (Black Flower), Ju Young Jin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Narration of Transnational Territory in Kingston's China Men and Kim's 검은 꽃 (Black Flower)" Ju Young Jin analyzes Maxine Hong Kingston's and Young-Ha Kim's novels both of which feature East Asian indentured workers in the U.S. and Mexico, respectively. Jin traces the way in which the transnational subjects in the two novels create a textual territory by displacing national histories in a period that has witnessed an increase in indentured workers from East Asia to American continents. Kim creates an apocryphal history of the Korean presence in the New World reimagining the forgotten past by interweaving …

Virtuality, Nationalism, And Globalization In Zhang's Hero, Ping Zhu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Virtuality, Nationalism, and Globalization in Zhang's Hero" Ping Zhu examines how Yimou Zhang's martial arts film dislodges the historical tale from its spatiotemporal context by creating virtual images, characters, narratives, and ideologies, and presents the virtual idea of tianxia (天下) (all under heaven) as an active mode of participation in the virtual global. Amidst the surge of virtuality in its cinematic space, with Hero Zhang aims to eclipse the national by a higher order: a homogenizing and harmonizing order that originates in traditional Chinese culture and that is compatible with the post-9/11 world order. However, Zhu …

Cultural Hybridization In A 1930s Taiwanese Popular Song, Mei-Wen Lee, Timothy P. Urban

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Cultural Hybridization in a 1930s Taiwanese Popular Song" Mei-Wen Lee and Timothy P. Urban present a comparison of the three different sets of lyrics used for the melody of the 1930s Taiwanese popular song, "Moonlight Sorrow": Taiwanese lyrics used by Yu-Xian Deng and Tian-Wang Chou in their 1933 arrangement, Japanese lyrics by Kurihara Hakuya from the late 1930s, and Mandarin lyrics added by Nu Chuan in the 1960s. Lee and Urban examine three orchestral settings of the "Moonlight Sorrow" melody. In the first orchestral version Japanese composer Hayakawa Masaaki uses the melody in a manner similar to …

Masereel, Lu, And The Development Of The Woodcut Picture Book (連環畫) In China, Tie Xiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Masereel, Lu, and the Development of the Woodcut Picture Book (連環畫) in China" Tie Xiao situates Chinese "continuous pictorial narratives" (lianxu tuhua) by radical woodcut artists in the 1930s within a global exchange of the visual. Further, Xiao examines woodcut artists' efforts to develop an expressive form of mass-oriented art through creative engagement with the Japanese creative print (hanga) movement and the "woodcut novels" by the Belgian graphic artist Frans Masereel. Xiao argues that central to self-produced woodcut pictorial narratives is the dilemma between the intimate and private impulse of self-expression and the …

A Need For Green: An Approach For Motivating Environmentally Sustainable Practices At The University Of Rhode Island, Mary Vidal, Alyssa Mason

Senior Honors Projects

“Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Meade

Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man details his yearlong experiment to live without creating any environmental impact. As sophomores we were inspired by Beavan’s journey but also skeptical of living a completely no-impact lifestyle as college-students. Although we were motivated to try to live sustainably, our efforts were dormant until our junior year. That year we decided that we would attempt to live up to the standards set forth by Beavan--understanding that some practices would be harder …

Schulz's Religion: Exploring Faith In The Mainstream Media Through The Peanuts Franchise, Stephen James Lind

All Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration of various theoretical and cultural issues surrounding depictions of religion and spirituality in mainstream entertainment media properties. Such portrayals cultivate particular cultural norms that dictate the conditions of public and private discourse on religion, and in this study, these issues are approached through a mixed-method study guided by the Peanuts franchise. The Peanuts franchise is a provocatively rich launching point for analysis of dominant media cultures, given its colossal success in the secular mainstream entertainment industry and its explicit references to and even affirmations of Christian theology. Throughout the study, the references to religion manifested …

A Need For Green: An Approach For Motivating Environmentally Sustainable Practices At The University Of Rhode Island, Alyssa Mason, Mary Vidal

Senior Honors Projects

“Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Meade

Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man details his yearlong experiment to live without creating any environmental impact. As sophomores we were inspired by Beavan’s journey but also skeptical of living a completely no-impact lifestyle as college-students. Although we were motivated to try to live sustainably, our efforts were dormant until our junior year. That year we decided that we would attempt to live up to the standards set forth by Beavan--understanding that some practices would be harder …

President Barack Obama And The Commencement Of A New Perspective On Epideictic Speeches, Milene Ortega Ribeiro

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Commencement speakers are typically expected to praise students and motivate them. When the commencement speaker is a President, the expectation is different. This thesis investigated the functions of epideictic address in light of the rhetorical presidency doctrine. Close textual analysis of the three most controversial commencement speeches delivered by President Barack Obama revealed that the challenge of fulfilling the expectations of a commencement address, while responding to rhetorical problems, required the President to adopt complex rhetorical strategies. The predominant strategies included humor, strategic use of rhetorical presence, and ideological identification. The President used strategies that allowed him to be the …

Review Of “Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise And Fall Of A Women’S Tradition, 1600-1900" By Jane Donawerth, Emily B. Paup

Strategic Communication Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.