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Full-Text Articles in Critical and Cultural Studies

Reality Tv, Faking It, And The Transformation Of Personal Identity, Joanne Morreale Jun 2005

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 …


Political Deliberation And E-Participation In Policy-Making, Rebecca J. Romsdahl Jun 2005

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 …


Wrestling And Popular Culture, Dalbir S. Sehmby Mar 2002

Wrestling And Popular Culture, Dalbir S. Sehmby

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Wrestling and Popular Culture" Dalbir S. Sehmby investigates a phenomenon of television culture. Wrestling has been for a long time now a main feature of television with a sizable audience. However, scholars in popular culture, audience studies, or television studies have paid little attention to this phenomenon and Dalbir argues that the study of wrestling in popular culture ought to be of interest to scholars of culture. In his discussion, Dalbir addresses notions of high art versus low art along with notions of high television versus low television. He continues with a discussion of the recent history …


Courting Desire And The (Al)Lure Of David E. Kelley's Ally Mcbeal, Kathleen Kelly Baum Mar 2002

Courting Desire And The (Al)Lure Of David E. Kelley's Ally Mcbeal, Kathleen Kelly Baum

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article"Courting Desire and the (Al)lure of David E. Kelley's Ally McBeal" Kathleen Kelly Baum compares the tropes of desire and the law in David E. Kelley's television series Ally McBeal with similar motifs extracted from Lacanian theory. In her study, Baum explores the psychological and social implications of thematic characterizations and situations from the television series' five seasons by engaging Lacan's premise that subjective identity results from an economic relation between self and other -- a relation that is continuously mediated by symbolization and governed by social mores and cultural imperatives. In addition, Baum traces ways in which …


A Study Of The Effect Of Reception Of Works Of Art Through An Interactive Cd-Rom, László Halász, Károly Hantos, Balázs Faa Sep 2001

A Study Of The Effect Of Reception Of Works Of Art Through An Interactive Cd-Rom, László Halász, Károly Hantos, Balázs Faa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, "A Study of the Effect of Reception of Works of Art through an Interactive CD-ROM," Halász, Hantos, and Faa collected data on the aesthetic impact of art objects through multimedia. They constructed a CD-ROM out of various images, sounds and text. Items were offered to 135 secondary school subjects in the framework of directed interactive polychrome variations. The effect was studied partly by measuring viewing (reading) times for each item, and partly by semantic differential and attitude scales. The data for viewing time and phases, and of items of the semantic differential and attitude scales were analyzed …


The Socio-Cultural Function Of Media In Nineteenth-Century Latin America, Annette Paatz Jun 2001

The Socio-Cultural Function Of Media In Nineteenth-Century Latin America, Annette Paatz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "The Socio-Cultural Function of Media in Nineteenth-Century Latin America," Annette Paatz explores the function of the review genre in the context of Latin American nation building. Paatz focuses, on the one hand, on the genre's nationalist purposes and, on the other, on the appropriateness for intercultural communication. Drawing on the concept of mediated communication as social practice in the context of media cultural studies, Paatz analyses the reviews as representations of nineteenth-century Latin America's negotiations of transatlantic and thus intercultural relationships. She highlights the pragmatic ways in which Latin America utilized European media products in order to …


The New Knowledge Management And Online Research And Publishing In The Humanities, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek Mar 2001

The New Knowledge Management And Online Research And Publishing In The Humanities, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The New Knowledge Management and Online Research and Publishing in the Humanities," Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses the problematics of new media scholarship and technology and online publishing in the humanities today. He argues that while there are legitimate questions about scholarly material in the humanities online, the reality is that most undergraduate as well as graduate students today use the web for at least the initial stages of their research. In order to increase the quality of content of scholarship on the world wide web, scholars in the humanities ought to get involved with new media …


Cyberpunk, Technoculture, And The Post-Biological Self, Ollivier Dyens Mar 2000

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 …