Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Nation, Heritage, And Hospitality In Britain After Thatcher, Ryan S. Trimm

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Nation, Heritage, and Hospitality in Britain after Thatcher," Ryan S. Trimm examines the trope of cultural inheritance in postimperial Britain. "Heritage," an ubiquitous term in 1980s Britain, circulates largely as a conservative concept, an imagined bequest that works to exclude groups such as minorities who are disinherited putatively by not being part of the past and conceived as handing down some legacy. Such seems to be precisely the way heritage functioned under Margaret Thatcher's heritage politics, a collection of policies that associated icons such as the country house with the nation itself. However, although appeals to heritage …

Tracing Chinese Gay Cinema 1993-2002, Lan Dong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Lan Dong explores in her paper, "Tracing Chinese Gay Cinema 1993-2002" the recent landscape of Chinese gay cinema through discussing the following three feature films: Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993), Zhang Yuan's East Palace, West Palace (1996), and Stanley Kwan's Lan Yu (2001). The grouping derives from the concern that they all set their stories in Beijing. Using the capital city as a cultural background, the films display how queer is perceived in China from the 1920s to the end of the 1990s. All three storylines portray the characters' struggle to recognize their particular identity as gay men. In …

Reality Tv, Faking It, And The Transformation Of Personal Identity, Joanne Morreale

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Reality TV, Faking It, and the Transformation of Personal Identity," Joanne Morreale examines the hybrid makeover, game, and reality TV show Faking It as a cultural form that portrays the transformation of personal identity through performance. Morreale argues that the contents and performance of the show intensify the link between consumer culture and the fabrication of identity by teaching that fulfillment comes from becoming, rather than having, a commodity. In the show, participants learn to perform new selves that are perceived as "better." Faking It thus puts on display the processes of fabrication whereby the self is …

But... Can The Subaltern Sing?, Rebecca Romanow

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "But... Can the Subaltern Sing?," Rebecca Romanow discusses the dominance of the English language in rock music and the cultural values and global power that are exerted through the exportation of rock by American and British bands. Further, she explores the question of the ways in which this music represents an area of popular culture where the voices of the non-English speaking and the non-Western are silenced. Salman Rushdie, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, complains that rock music "is precisely one of those viruses with which the almighty West has infected the East, one of the …

Dust And The Avant-Garde, Jake Kennedy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Dust and the Avant-Garde," Jake Kennedy presents an interdisciplinary exploration of experimental modernism in the work of visual artist Marcel Duchamp and writer Gertrude Stein. Kennedy focuses on the strange presence of dust in the work of these two artists and argues that as an abject object -- it is literally the unwanted of domestic space -- the idea of dust engages radically modernism on a material level. Dust is also the unwanted of modernity itself, as it represents a potentially subversive sister-part to urban, masculine modernity's valorisation of machinery, glass, and steel. Transmuted into the metaphysical …

Introduction To New Papers In American Cultural Studies, Joanne Morreale, P. David Marshall

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Selected Bibliography Of Scholarship In (Comparative) Cultural Studies And Popular Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Yilin Liao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Political Deliberation And E-Participation In Policy-Making, Rebecca J. Romsdahl

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Political Deliberation and E-Participation in Policy-Making," Rebecca J. Romsdahl proposes that the internet has now become a valuable medium for information dissemination and long distance communication; it is also gaining attention as a potential tool for political deliberation. Public participation has been a long-standing tradition in American democracy but most scholars today believe it needs a revival. Some of these scholars believe that e-participation in policy-making could help revitalize political discussion between citizens and government and promote greater participation by disenfranchised groups. Whether this would lead to greater opportunities for true deliberation on political issues and not …

Harry Potter And The Susceptible Child Audience, Kara Lynn Andersen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Kara Lynn Andersen, in her paper "Harry Potter and the Susceptible Child Audience," argues for a rethinking of assumptions of child audiences as passive readers and viewers through an analysis of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Andersen argues that instead of categorizing children as passive and homogenous subjects of analysis, they should instead be incorporated as participants in the discourse about children's books and films. Although frequently figured as especially susceptible to the affects of advertising and other media, young Harry Potter fans are particularly visible as not only consumers of the texts, but creators of new texts. Using work done …

Cnning And Showdown: Iraq: News, New Media, And Popular Culture, G. Kim Blank

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Kim Blank's CNNing and Showdown Iraq, too, provides an innovative model for the interaction and mutual transfusion of case study and the work of theorizing. Although the backdrop to Blank's essay is CNN's cultural significance and the programming it ran under the SHOWDOWN: Iraq banner, it repeatedly returns to the busy intersection of media, technology, popular culture, and mass culture. Characterized by its author as restless, the piece strategically employs a non-linear discursive strategy deliberately mimicking the practices of channel surfing and the constant interruption of the commercial break. It re-contextualizes, in other words, the critical perspective by re-inventing it …

On Bill V. Mullen's Afro-Orientalism, Graham Barnfield

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

For two decades Edward Said's Orientalism has occupied a significant place in how we think through the cultural relations between what we now call ‘North’ and ‘South’. Conceived in the 1970s, Said’s model mounted a challenge to readers in the west, suggesting they should unlearn what they know of the east. Despite its influence, one weakness of this approach was the underlying suggestion that orientalism was a one-way street, constituting a fixed set of perceptions or timeless discourses. In and without the Orientalist imagination, what is to be done with those in ‘the Occident’ who find themselves treated …

Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology Of Poopreport.Com, Marisol Cortez

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In engaging with the culture of filth, Marisol Cortez's Brown Meets Green: The Political Fecology of PoopReport.com questions contemporary cultural criticism's emphasis on shit's textual ambivalence. In order to avoid relapsing into either the Bakhtinian celebration of the grotesque or the too narrowly conceived Kristevan category of the abject, Cortez argues, and to find a way out of this theoretical dualism, one must rethink the very categories of filth and waste through an ecocritical reading of the scatological -- the meeting of brown and green -- performed at the confluence of ecology, cultural studies, and Marxist political economy. This perspective …

Media Discourse: Social Semiotics And The Study Of Multimodal Discourse. An Interview With Theo Van Leeuwen, Theo Van Leeuwen, Judith Reitstaetter, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

This interview article is intended to provide both an overview of the contribution Theo van Leeuwen has made to the field of semiotics and approach his work from an unconventional angle. The first aspect of our aim is covered in the form of an introduction comprised of a short biographical note, a list of recent publications and short reviews of van Leeuwen’s major works. The second aspect of what we hope to accomplish is tackled in the form of the interview itself. In this, we have tried to balance general questions – e.g. about the epistemological …

Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, And Cultures Of The Screen, Christine Scodari, Becky Mulvaney

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Christine Scodari's and Becky Mulvaney's Nothing's Gonna Give? Age, Gender, and Cultures of the Screen investigates the 2003 romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give, written and directed by Nancy Meyers as exceptional in its featuring a fifty-something woman as leading actress. Beginning with an analysis of the filmic text itself, the authors do not confine themselves to it, but go on to critically engage with its reception in both the press and academia. While the focus is thus shifted from the film to the meta- and para-texts produced in the course of its reception and promotion, the underlying questions asked …

The Agenda Setting Function Of Mass Media, Tampa, John Howard, Print Media And Public Opinion: How It All Came Together In Melbourne, Rosemary Schultz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper will explore the ways in which the rhetoric of the Australian news media – the print media of Melbourne, specifically – has the power to shape and construct public sentiment toward national issues. Specifically, the paper explores the crafting of public opinion toward asylum seekers in the country through the use of specific rhetoric in print media outlets. The paper will focus on the “Tampa” incident of August 2001 as a basis for exploring asylum seeker issues in Australia. With the Agenda Setting Function Theory of Media Communications as a research base, and through personal interviews, extensive research …

The Brazilian Telenovela "El Clon": An Analysis Of Viewers' Online Vicarious And Virtual Learning Experiences, Elizabeth Barbosa

Graduate Student Dissertations, Theses, Capstones, and Portfolios

This research involves investigating Brazilian telenovelas as a medium to disseminate knowledge about different cultures and customs. Through a qualitative content analysis this study examines messages posted in the "El Clon" telenovela-world forum with reference to the Muslim cultural theme explored by the telenovela.

The theoretical framework overarching this study is the combination of Bandura's social learning/cognitive theory and Freire's dialogical/participatory communication. In order to operationalize the study, a qualitative content analysis is undertaken utilizing the sub-dimension parasocial interaction model proposed by Sood & Rodgers (2000). The messages are analyzed in order to explore how forum participants engage in the …

Trends In Organizational Communication Research: Sustaining The Discipline, Sustaining Ourselves, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This paper began as a keynote address delivered at the 16th annual Organizational Communication Mini-Conference hosted by Western Michigan University. In it, I identify topical trends in organizational communication research, noting ways in which these trends are flexible, enduring, diverse, and problem-centered. I go on to invite current doctoral students to join us in developing these trends further. Specifically, I discuss how we might engage research in ways that sustain the vitality of the discipline as well as our own personal vitality. I conclude by offering a list of key articles that could serve as starting points in the ongoing …

Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz In Seventeenth-Century New Spain And Finding A Room Of One's Own, Deborah Weagel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Seventeenth-Century New Spain and Finding a Room of One's Own," Deborah Weagel examines the life of the seventeenth-century nun and compares her life with the ideals Virginia Woolf portrays in A Room of One's Own. Woolf asserts that in order for a woman to develop innate gifts, she needs a certain degree of financial freedom and private space in which to create. The concept of having one's own room, or space, that can be segregated from the activities of home and public life can be considered both literally and metaphorically. …

An Introduction To The Work Of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate In Literature 2004, Andrea Bandhauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "An Introduction to the Work of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Laureate in Literature 2004," Andrea Bandhauer explores reactions of the press to the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek after she received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Bandhauer discusses how the extreme irritation following this announcement was frequently directed at the author's public persona rather than at her work. Against this background, Bandhauer explores the ambivalent relationship of the public towards a politically and socially engaged and outspoken public figure who in her literary work produces highly hermetical texts. As a writer, Jelinek is preoccupied with language and form …

The Arachne Myth In Oral And Written Literature, José Manuel Pedrosa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "The Arachne Myth in Oral and Written Literature," José Manuel Pedrosa explores the folktale about a person who prides himself being the most intelligent individual and whom the gods punish with a metamorphosis into spider. Pedrosa discusses similar myths in existence in modern oral traditions and in literary works such as the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Quran, and García Márquez's masterpiece Cien años de soledad. The universality of the myth is underlined by the existence of a folktale registered among the Bubi people of Equatorial Guinea. Not known about it until the twentieth century, the oral transmission …

Generic Identity And Intertextuality, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality," Marko Juvan proposes that an anti-essentialist drive -- a characteristic of recent genology -- has led postmodern scholars to the conviction that genre is but a system of differences and that its matrix cannot be deduced from a particular set of apparently similar texts. Juvan argues that the concept of intertextuality may prove advantageous to explain genre identity in a different way: genres exist and function as far as they are embedded in social practices that frame intertextual and meta-textual links/references to prototypical texts or textual series. In Juvan's view, genres are cognitive …

Modernism And The Issue Of Periodization, Leonard Orr

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization," Leonard Orr describes how literary theorists, historians, and anthology editors have put forward many conflicting models for literary periodization, while simultaneously expressing their doubts about the categories they have created. They are caught between intellectual despair and pragmatic necessity, scholarly journals and presses and academic departments imagine they are working at the cutting edge of thinking about their subjects but period concepts remain in place, even while every article focused on the subject expresses strong objections to the terms. Orr traces in his paper these problems and issues through the twentieth …

Exilic Perspectives On "Alien Nations", Sophia A. Mcclennen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sophia A. McClennen's paper, "Exilic Perspectives on 'Alien Nations'," is an excerpt from her book, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures (Purdue UP , 2004). In the paper, McClennen summarizes her theory that exile writing is inherently dialectical. Focusing on writers working in the latter part of the twentieth century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, McClennen proposes that exile literature is best understood as a series of dialectic tensions about cultural identity. Through a comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel …

Clear Channel And The Public Airwaves, Dorothy Kidd

Media Studies

No abstract provided.

Shooting Kennedy: Jfk And The Culture Of Images [Book Review], Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Forty years after his assassination, the memory of President Kennedy continues to grip the popular imagination. Recently, media and scholarly attention to the memory of John F. Kennedy has been evidenced in television documentaries and books that have recalled his presidency, his personal life, and his assassination. In Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images, David M. Lubin explores photographs of Kennedy to understand Kennedy’s popularity with the American public. Lubin, a professor of art, argues that Kennedy was significant not only for his political role as president but because he became an icon of twentieth-century postwar America. …

Muted Voices: Latinos And The 2000 Election, Richard Pineda

Selected Works Temporary Series

Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Elections. Edited by Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005; pp. ix-276. $29.95 paper.

Cultura Cyber: Commodifying Latina/O Nationalism And Rhetoric On The Internet, Richard Pineda

Selected Works Temporary Series

No abstract provided.

Coyote's Tale On The Old Oregon Trail: Challenging Cultural Memory Through Narrative At The Tamástslikt Cultural Institute, Jackson B. Miller

Faculty Publications

This essay examines the oppositional narratives presented in a Native American museum in order to explore the efficacy of narrative as both a strategy for resistance to hegemonic narratives of the settling of the West and a medium for sharing culture. The positioning of the museum visitor as co-participant in the museum’s narratives is also considered, with a particular focus on the relationships among narrator, story, and audience. Finally, the narrative of tribal life presented in the museum is evaluated for its potential as a vehicle for both cultural change and continuity.

Accent, Linguistic Discrimination, Stereotyping, And West Virginia In Film, Teresa L. O’Cassidy

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This study examines connections between accent, linguistic discrimination, and stereotyping in portrayals of West Virginia film characters. Ten films featuring West Virginia characters were examined for accent and stereotyping: The Right Stuff (Kaufman, 1983), Matewan (Sayles, 1987), Blaze (Shelton, 1989), The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), October Sky (Johnston, 1999), Hannibal (Scott, 2001), A Beautiful Mind (Howard, 2001), The Mothman Prophecies (Pellington, 2002), Wrong Turn (Schmidt, 2003), and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (Luketic, 2004). Coders were employed to score character accents. Stereotyping data was gathered by comparing portrayals with stereotypical traits associated with Appalachian and/or hillbilly characters. …

Muted Voices: Latinos And The 2000 Election, Richard Pineda

Departmental Papers (Communication)

Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Elections. Edited by Rodolfo O. de la Garza and Louis DeSipio. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005; pp. ix-276. $29.95 paper.