Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

On Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film And Stephen C. Wood And J. David Pincus's Reel Baseball: Essays And Interviews On The National Pastime, Hollywood And American Culture, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film is an indictment of the key American myth that anyone can succeed through self-reliance. Baker finds that sports films, in general, comprise a site in which the myth is represented and reproduced. Baker's focus, though presented from multiple analytical perspectives, is singular in its purpose. That said, Baker does concentrate on what he considers the four core American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Approximately ninety movies, from the silent era to the present day, provide the content of the analysis, but several are exemplary and are cited repeatedly in …

Of Technology And Apocalypse, Or Whose Independence Day?, Christopher Keep

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The scene is now familiar. The cities of the world are in ruins. The Empire State Building obliterated. The White House reduced to rubble. The remnants of humankind gather in the desert, scrounging together what remains of their air defence systems for one last effort to repulse the alien invaders. Haggard but determined, the last American President prepares to lead his motley crew of resistance fighters into the fray. He takes the hand mic, tests it once or twice, and his voice crackles over the speakers. In less than one hour, he announces, aircraft from here will join …

Review Of How A Film Theory Got Lost And Other Mysteries In Cultural Studies, By Robert B. Ray, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Harold Innis And 'The Bias Of Communication', Edward Comor

FIMS Publications

Fifty years after his death, Harold Innis remains one of the most widely cited but least understood of communication theorists. This is particularly true in relation to his concept of ‘bias’. This paper reconstructs this concept and places it in the context of Innis’ uniquely non-Marxist dialectical materialist methodology. In so doing, the author emphasizes ongoing debates concerning Innis’ work and demonstrates its utility in relation to contemporary analyses of the Internet and related developments.

Another Look At The Portrayal Of Minorities And Women In Prime-Time Television, Tellisa Amos

Dissertations and Theses

This study updates a 10-year longitudinal study investigating TV's portrayal of minorities and women on prime time television. Prior studies focused on the types of roles held by performers. This study extends prior research, examining not only the types of roles held by performers, but also networks' preference for women and minorities and the genre that most often feature women and minorities.

Data were collected for a consecutive five-week period from February 19, 1997 to March 14,1997. From this sample 40 dramas and 115 situation comedies were recorded and coded. Programming was taken from shows that aired in the Pacific …

Conjuring Post-Worthlessness: Contemporary Web Art And The Postmodern Context: Part 1, Brett Stalbaum

SWITCH

This article is part one of two of an analysis of the Jean Baudrillard's essay, "A Conjuration of Imbeciles". This essay compares the idea of art as a metaphor for French politics and the “uselessness” of contemporary art. A sense of postmodernism is drawn from that comparison and relates to contemporary art shared on the World Wide Web. Inevitable messages and meaning found in art will change, but economics and distribution continues to ground the economy on a global scale. Therefore, contemporary art represented on the web actively dates the practice of art, and the value of the practice is …

Implications Of A Feminist Narratology: Temporality, Focalization And Voice In The Films Of Julie Dash, Mona Smith And Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Jennifer Alyce Machiorlatti

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation conducts feminist narrative textual analysis of films by three independent women film-makers-of- color: Julie Dash, Mona Smith and Trinh T. Minh-ha. The research utilizes traditional cinematic narratological methods combined with a feminist perspective. Narratology is the structural/textual study of narrative organization, style and content. Feminism is a theoretical body of inquiry which lends implications of gender difference, power relationships, cinematic stereotypes, and cultural significance to textual analysis. Feminist inquiry contributes a social, cultural, ideological and historical perspective to the taxomony of a structuralist narrative methodology. By combining this contextual perspective with a topological textual method, I propose consideration …

Piedra Rodante, V. 1, No. 8, Manuel Aceves

Piedra Rodante

The work is based on early 1970s publication, Rolling Stone [magazine], and translated into spanish and was published in Mexico under the title, Piedra Rodante, by Editoriales Tribales, S.A.,v. : ill. ; 42cm.