Communication Commons^™

Thematizing The Subject From Gothicism To Late Romanticism, Slobodan Sucur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Thematizing the Subject from Gothicism to Late Romanticism," Slobodan Sucur takes Habermas's suggestion that "modern art reveals its essence in Romanticism; and absolute inwardness determines the form and content of Romantic art" and offers an analysis of a spectrum of primary texts in relation to the statement. The texts analysed range from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Odoyevsky’s Russian Nights. The texts are analyzed in chronological fashion, in an attempt to see how the thematization of the subject shifts as the Early Gothic novel (Walpole, Radcliffe) develops into High Romanticism (Hoffmann, Maturin) and finally into Late Romanticism (Poe, …

Is It Time To Return To The Author? Between Omniscient Narrator And Interior Monologue, José Saramago

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nobel laureate of 1998 José Saramago, in his essay "Is It Time to Return to the Author? Between Omniscient Narrator and Interior Monologue" (trans. from the Portuguese and French by Roumiana Deltcheva), presents a short yet passionate treatise in defense of the "author" both as an individual and as a writer. For Saramago, the literary text as such exists because of the author, his or her thoughts, perceptions, and emotions, which in turn are reflections of the author's external environment and inner world. Saramago goes further to suggest that the reader's attraction to the literary narrative goes beyond the mere …

Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian And His Novel Soul Mountain, Mabel Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian and his Novel Soul Mountain," Mabel Lee introduces Gao Xingjian, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature of 2000. Lee is the translator of several of Gao's works from the Chinese into English, including the Nobel's main text of reference, Soul Mountain (first published in Chinese in 1990). Lee's article combines descriptions of Gao's biographical background and its relevance to his work and writing with a brief analysis of literary aspects of Gao's work based on tenets of the comparative literary and cultural studies approach. As is evident in Gao's texts, …

Analyzing East/West Power Politics In Comparative Cultural Studies, William H. Thornton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Analyzing East/West Power Politics in Comparative Cultural Studies," William H. Thornton acknowledges culture as a central force on the geopolitical map and undertakes at once to preserve the strategic potency of political realism and to move beyond the "billiard ball" externality of both neo- and traditional realisms. Although Huntington and Fukuyama are taken seriously on the question of East/West power politics, Thornton develops a world view by grounding balance-of-power politics in national and local (not just civilizational) social reality. Further, Thornton argues against external democratic teleologies both Huntington and Fukuyama have imposed on the cultural Other. The …

The Hazard Of Hidden Interactions: A Reanalysis Of Designs In Reaction-Time Studies On Metaphor, Johan F. Hoorn

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The Hazard of Hidden Interactions: A Reanalysis of Designs in Reaction-Time Studies on Metaphor," Johan F. Hoorn argues that research designs in empirical literature and the psychology of aesthetics often include unanalyzed factors. The nature of these factors may be linguistic such as word frequency or lexical ambiguity or technical such as presentation order, repeated measures, etc. By not correctly analyzing an experiment, higher-order interactions may go unnoticed, while interfering with results. Hoorn reviews a sample of reaction-time experiments on metaphors, some of which are considered key studies in the area. Because the quality of an argument …

Comparative Spaces And Seeing Seduction And Horror In Bataille, Benton Jay Komins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Comparative Spaces and Seeing Seduction and Horror in Bataille," Benton Jay Komins explores Bataille's preoccupation with "seeing": The eye holds a preeminently ambiguous position in Georges Bataille's universe of enucleated priests and scatological window scenes. Komins' comparative examination presents several aspects of Bataille's eyes: Existing between fascination and revulsion, this most Bataillean organ moves between subjective vision and objective blindness. The eye both captures and is captured in episodes of seductive horror. Through the denigration of vision, Bataille's dethroned eye exceeds the confines of visuality. Bataille develops an extraordinary notion of ocularity -- as a metaphor, action, …

Women Writing World War One: A Review Article Of New Work By Higonnet, Ouditt, And Tylee, Turner, And Cardinal, Katharine Rodier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

East And West Comparative Literature And Culture: A Review Article Of New Work By Lee And Collected Volumes By Lee And Syrokomla-Stefanowska, Xiaoyi Zhou

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism To Systems Theory, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "On Literariness: From Post-Structuralism to Systems Theory," Marko Juvan argues that the question of literariness concerns the very identity and social existence of not only literature per se but of literary theory as a discipline. A literary theorist is not only an observer of literature; he/she is also a participant who -- at least indirectly, via the a priori systems of science and education -- is engaged in constructing both the notion and the practice of literature as well as the study of literature. Literariness is neither an invariant cluster of "objectively" distinctive properties of all texts …

Bakhtin, Genre Formation, And The Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes As Memory Schemata, Bart Keunen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes as Memory Schemata," Bart Keunen proposes a new reading of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope. Bakhtin is widely taken to be a pioneer of genological thinking, but one of his key concepts -- the chronotope -- is still subject to highly divergent interpretations. Moreover, the epistemological implications of his genology have not yet been fully realized. In this article, a methodological grounding in schema theory is proposed. Bakhtin's concept can be used to study the way in which literary communication functions through what the psychologist Frederic Bartlett first called …

How Is A Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses, Johan F. Hoorn

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "How is a Genre Created? Five Combinatory Hypotheses," Johan F. Hoorn discusses that in genre theory, the creation of a genre is usually envisioned as a complex selection procedure in which several factors play an equivocal role. First, he advances that genre usually is investigated at the level of the phenomenon. For instance, questions may drawn on the effects of social status, education, or "intrinsic values" on forming a genre, on an author's decision with regard to in which genre to express his/her creativity. Second, Hoorn attempts to formulate a general mechanism that explains the forming of …

Comparative Cultural Studies And Ethnic Minority Writing Today: The Hybridities Of Marlene Nourbese Philip And Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Sabine Milz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Comparative Cultural Studies and Ethnic Minority Writing Today: The Hybridities of Marlene Nourbese Philip and Emine Sevgi Özdamar," Sabine Milz examines and compares strategies with which the Caribbean-Canadian woman writer Marlene Nourbese Philip and the Turkish-German woman writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar "de-colonise" ethnocentric Canadian and German discourse respectively and thus create their own spaces of hybridity. She argues that both Philip's and Özdamar's writings -- by going beyond cultural-national categories and boundaries -- display vital stimuli for multi-cultural and inter-national dialogue in a manner that facilitates cultural co-existence in spaces of hybridity. Responding to this stimulus, Milz's …

The Culture Of Using Animals In Literature And The Case Of José Emilio Pacheco, Randy Malamud

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The Culture of Using Animals in Literature and the Case of José Emilio Pacheco," Randy Malamud argues that the animal poetry of Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco, compiled in his 1985 collection Album de zoología (trans. 1993 by Margaret Sayers Peden as An Ark for the Next Millennium) embodies a vast literary account of a range of animals. This book represents one of the most extensive treatments of animals by any modern poet, and one of the most sensitive and ambitious attempts to craft a discourse that facilitates an approach to animals on their own terms -- …

Word, Image, And Sound From Comparative Points Of View: A Review Article Of New Work By Joret And Remael, Lieven Tack

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

[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 …

Digital Photojournalism, Yasmine Abdou Salem

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Younger And Older Adults’ Schematic Representations Of Intergenerational Communication, Jake Harwood, Jordan Mckee, Mei-Chen Lee

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The current paper examines younger and older adults’ cognitive representations of intergenerational conversations. In interviews, younger and older adults were asked to imagine various types of conversations with older and younger targets. They were prompted to provide a wide variety of information about the targets and the conversations. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed to uncover types of conversations commonly reported. Through a combination of coding and hierarchical cluster analysis, a hierarchical arrangement of types of conversations emerged in younger and older adults’ descriptions. Each of the types is described in detail. In a second study, exemplars of each type …

Experiencing Texts And Cultures: A Review Article Of New Work Edited By Nemesio And Tötösy And Sywenky, Fedora Giordano

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Cultural Politics, Rhetoric, And The Essay: A Comparison Of Emerson And Rodó, Sophia Mcclennen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Cultural Politics, Rhetoric, and the Essay: A Comparison of Emerson and Rodó," Sophia McClennen compares two essays which have been central to debates over "American" cultural identity. Her work is a detailed comparison of the persuasive language used in "The American Scholar" by Ralph Waldo Emerson and "Ariel" by José Enrique Rodó. She focuses on the specific ways that the rhetoric of the persuasive essay binds Emerson and Rodó to a literary tradition and consequently impedes each author's ability to construct a liberated culture. She also demonstrates how the comparative method is a useful tool for analyzing …

Gender And Modernity In The Work Of Hesse And Kazantzakis, Evi Petropoulou

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Evi Petropoulou discusses in her article, "Gender and Modernity in the Work of Hesse and Kazantzakis," selected basic tendencies of the modern European novel, in this case pertaining to gender identity and she exemplifies her postulates with an analysis of texts by Hermann Hesse and Nikos Kazantzakis. She examines the mainly male dominated literary discourse in the work of these authors in light of their theoretical indebtedness to the thought of Nietzsche and Hegel. The study offers new insight into literary representations of gender relations in modernity and how Hesse and Kazantzakis define identity, the self, and otherness.

Cyberpunk, Technoculture, And The Post-Biological Self, Ollivier Dyens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Ollivier Dyens presents in his article, "Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the Post-Biological Self," the argument that because of technology's intrusion in our perception and understanding of the world and because of its constant production of impossible images of the human body, today's representation of that same body must be fundamentally re-evaluated. As one can see in works of science fiction -- films and literature alike -- such as Terminator 2 or Neuromancer, the body must now be perceived as a quantum-like pattern whose form and essence depend on the human or machine observer. The human body entangled in technology wavers between …

Language And Culture In African Postcolonial Literature, Kwaku Asante-Darko

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Language and Culture in African Postcolonial Literature," Kwaku Asante-Darko offers both conceptual basis and empirical evidence in support of the fact that critical issues concerning protest, authenticity, and hybridity in African post-colonial literature have often been heavily laden with nationalist and leftist ideological encumbrances, which tended to advocate the rejection of Western standards of aesthetics. One of the literary ramifications of nationalist/anti-colonial mobilization was a racially based aesthetics which saw even the new product of literary hybridity born of cultural exchange as a mark of Western imposition and servile imitation by Africa in their literary endeavour. Asante-Darko …

Literary Space In The Works Of Josie Boyle And Jeannette Armstrong, Angeline O’Neill, Josie Boyle

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their collaborative article, Angeline O'Neill and Josie Boyle discuss the interconnection between the spoken and written word and the manipulation of literary space, here defined as a continuum characterised by different modes of intellectual production and developed in a socio-historical context. In particular, the article focuses on the work of two Indigenous women storytellers, Josie Boyle of the Western Australian Wongi people, and Jeannette Armstrong of the North American Okanagan people. O'Neill examines the movement from oral to written speech as a process by which the word is essentially "reconstituted"; a process which is utilised by these women as …

Sightseeing In Paris With Baudelaire And Breton, Benton Jay Komins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Sightseeing in Paris with Baudelaire and Breton," Benton Jay Komins discusses the tensions between Charles Baudelaire's acts of modern appropriation and André Breton's imaginative seizing of the démodé. While Breton roams the Parisian cityscape with the same aspect of creative gazing as Charles Baudelaire's nineteenth-century dandy, the objects and experiences that he privileges are different from the dandy's fashionable marvels. In texts such as Nadja passé artifacts captivate Breton. Between Baudelaire's revelling in the elegant modern possibilities of dandysme and Breton's imaginative seizing of démodé objects, something significant has occurred: Twentieth-century urbanites like Breton no longer celebrate …

Nuestro Espacio Cyber: The Internet As Expressive Space For Latina/Os In The United States, Richard Pineda

Selected Works Temporary Series

The Latina/o community is in the midst of a major demographic shift upwards- Along with this population growth, there has been an explosion of Latina,/os across the spectrum of popular culture. However, lack of access to mass-media outlets and social constructions in mainstream society pose obstacles to Latina/o freedom of expression. Meanwhile, the Internet is evolving into a powerful platform for communication and freedom of speech- By developing a stronger Latina/o presence online, it may be possible to channel the power of the Internet as a vehicle for empowerment, expression and freedom of speech.

Overcoming The Dichotomy: Cultivating Standpoints In Organizations Through Research, Debbie S. Dougherty, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Feminist standpoint theories are seldom used by researchers. One possible reason is the ongoing debate between postmodern theorists and feminine standpoint theorists. The debate has been constructed in bipolar terms such that the issues are perceived as mutually exclusive. However, bipolar assumptions are damaging to women, both in general and in organizations. We contend that feminist standpoint theories should theorize similarities, material reality, and communal agency while being sensitive to differences, multiple realities, and individual agency. A study of academic women is used to illustrate how standpoints can develop around similarities while respecting differences. Using a creative narrative, participants’ organizational …

A Critique Of Functionalist And Rhetorical Social Movement Theory: A Case Study Of China's 1989 Democracy Movement, Lia M. Veenendaal

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

Current Communication-based social movement theory provides an excellent framework for analyzing social movements at a superficial level, but it neglects to include one important aspect that influences social movements – the culture in which a social movement takes place. The dominant theories used to evaluate social movements are written with a Western, North-American bias and thus are inadequate tools for explaining social movements that occur in other cultures. This work uses a non-Western social movement – China's 1989 Democracy Movement – as a case study to demonstrate the Western bias that Communication-based social movement theory holds, as well as to …

Women Managers And Gendered Values, Diane Kay Sloan, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In this study we interviewed 30 women managers to better understand ways in which they experience gendered values and behavior in organizational leadership and their responses to those experiences. The results, based on a constant comparison, thematic analysis, indicate the emergence of surprisingly strong and similar perceptions among the 30 women that there are distinct feminine and masculine power orientations in leadership communication with corresponding sets of gendered values: (a) open/closed and (b) supportive/intimidating. Their most common responses were: (a) rejection of masculine power, (b) self-doubt and blame, (c) competence, (d) confrontation, (e) isolation, and (f) resignation. These women judge …

The Effect Of Tempo Variances On Listener's Preference, Stephen D. Boyd

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Humanities at Morehead State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Communications by Stephen D. Boyd on December 3, 1999.

Popular And Highbrow Literature: A Comparative View, Peter Swirski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Popular and Highbrow Literature: A Comparative View," Peter Swirski discusses the role and status of popular fiction in contemporary culture. Starting with the basic question, "Who needs popular fiction?," he surveys select sociological evidence and prevailing aesthetic arguments in order to take stock of the ways in which highbrow literature and popular fiction relate to each other. He begins with statistical and socio-economic data which casts a different lights on many myths prevailing in scholarship as well as in general social and cultural discourse, such as the death of the novel, the alleged decline of the reading …