Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Representing Postmodern Marginality In Three Documentary Films, Robert Leblanc

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Representing Postmodern Marginality in Three Documentary Films" Robert LeBlanc traces the emergence of new epistemologies of documentary film experience within the cases of three recent films that explore the subject's experience of marginality as central to its constitution as subject. These films -- by Marlon Riggs, Chad Friedrichs, and Jessica Yu -- explore the crises of self-representation engaged by their documentary subjects as these subjects seek to define themselves despite -- and yet through -- their experiences of marginal status, while avoiding a reinforcement of that status that could arise through its continued placement into narrative. The …

The Meaning Of Myth In Ulysses And The Magic Mountain, Susan V. Scaff

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Meaning of Myth in Ulysses and The Magic Mountain" Susan V. Scaff discusses the proposition that Joyce and Mann combine in their novels myth and history and contradicts Joseph Frank's influential early view that modernist writers avoid history in favor of myth and the more recent verdict of Hayden White that this evasion amounts to an abrogation of civic responsibility mirroring fascism. Mann and Joyce recoil from the horrors of history while exploring the recovery of myth as amelioration. They realize that myths may lose their life bearing quality, and they portray a disoriented Europe lacking …

Images Of Liminality In Book Vi Of The Aeneid, Pouneh Saeedi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Images of Liminality in Book VI of The Aeneid" Pouneh Saeedi discusses the concept of "liminality" in Virgil's The Aeneid and its potential in defying designated boundaries. The concept of liminality undercuts binarisms such as those separating winners and losers as well as heroes and monsters. In addition, an investigation of liminality as a zone of constant becoming continues to shed light on a vast array of new transitions. Aeneas's future success in the construction of a new empire and the rebuilding of a Roman nation, to a large extent, is indebted to his having ventured onto …

Rewriting Space In Ruiz De Burton's Who Would Have Thought It?, Bernadine M. Hernandez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Rewriting Space in Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It?" Bernadine M. Hernandez analyses María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's text in the context of Mexican American and US-American literary history. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848, the place where Mexicanos lived became contested space and land of these Native subjects were conquered, penetrated, and colonized without the hope of regaining power or agency over land, status, or space. This newly deemed "opened" space was reconstructed via a literary legal document written to benefit Anglo Americans. Language is tied to the historical process …

The Practice Of Pr And The Canterbury Pilgrims, Jay Ruud, Stacey M. Jones

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The Practice of PR and the Canterbury Pilgrims" Jay Ruud and Stacey Jones argue that the concepts of relationship management discussed by public relations scholars can be applied to the study of literary characters, specifically here to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Wife of Bath, and The Pardoner. Essentially, what PR scholars call the expression of communal relationship values in the Wife's performance is rewarded, while behaviors like the Pardoner's that focus merely on a zero-sum win-lose relationship are punished. The Pardoner is competitive in all phases of his performance, and consistently demonstrates a win-lose mentality in his …

Nature Vs. Civilization: A Review Article Of Films By Luhrmann, Vera Zubarev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Comparative Analysis Of Advertising Value Appeals Reflected In U.S. And Chinese Women's Fashion Print Advertisements., Yi Lin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Analyzing 549 advertisements in Chinese and U.S. women's fashion magazines, this research studies the role of western culture in reshaping Chinese cultural values in terms of modernity, tradition, individualism, and collectivism as well as in the use of western fashion models and language. Results indicate that there is no statistical difference in individualistic and modernity values between U.S. and Chinese print ads in women's fashion magazines. In 1 of the product characteristics, shared products, collectivism values in Chinese ads are not found more than those in U.S. ads as it is assumed. In addition, almost half of the Chinese ads …

A Case Study Analysis Of Organizational Crisis Communication During Hurricane Katrina, Rebecca Nell Woodrick

Dissertations

This study analyzed an educational organization's crisis communication with its employees regarding the devastation caused to the organization and to employees by hurricane Katrina in 2005. This study drew upon literature regarding communication in crisis and in particular, natural disaster crisis, to ascertain to what degree employees felt the organization engaged in characteristics of High Reliability Organizations. A case study approach employing both qualitative and quantitative data was utilized.

The data revealed that the organization was perceived by employees has having adequately communicated before and after Katrina. Data further revealed that the organization engages in behaviors consistent with practices of …

Totally Devoted: Developing A Holistic Spiritual Formation Course For Western Christian College, Stanley N. Helton

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reports research results from a learning community composed of faculty, support staff, ministry leaders, and students who collaborated in a professor’s development of a new course proposal in Christian spiritual formation at Western Christian College in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. The professor used qualitative research methods in the analysis and evaluation of the data produced by the group. The outcome of the project was ethnographic data that informed the creation of the course proposal that included new course application, course syllabus with course schedule, planned activities, bibliography, initial classroom assignments, and initial assessment tools.

Parasocial Relationships With Celebrities: An Illusion Of Intimacy With Mediated Friends, Amanda R. Laken

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This research looked at parasocial interactions among college students. The study looked at the differences in gender and parasocial interaction, ethnicity/race and parasocial interaction, and the type of entertainment the celebrity was in and parasocial interaction. The research looked at celebrities as themselves and not as the characters they play as previous studies have. The research consisted of a revised parasocial interaction scale along with basic demographic questions. Although there have been studies examining levels of worship among different celebrities, they have been no correlations or differences stated concerning parasocial interactions. In addition, there has been no previous research stating …

Is Disney Surfing The Third Wave? A Study Of The Pervasiveness Of The Third Wave Of Feminism In Disney's Female Protagonists, Emily S. Ellington

Senior Honors Theses

It is important to understand factors that have influenced Generation Y’s view of womanhood. One way to do this is to analyze third wave feminist messages portrayed by Disney, the media powerhouse. In order to determine if Disney reflects feminist values, the third wave themes portrayed in The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1999) are examined. It is concluded that Disney portrays the feminist values of independence and multiculturalism; however, the films are set within patriarchal societies and portray women to be domestic. Ultimately, Disney portrays four messages about womanhood: Women are equal …

Women’S Rhetorical Agency In The American West: The New Penelope, Casey Ryan Kelly

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This essay theorizes women’s rhetorical agency in the nineteenth-century American West. Contrast between fluid gender norms in frontier life and the Cult of True Womanhood highlights how agency is confined by materiality. Agency is the capacity to recognize and act in moments when material structures are vulnerable to resignification. I offer an analysis of Frances Fuller Victor’s novella The New Penelope to demonstrate how pioneer women writers reinvented womanhood in light of socioeconomic changes.

Burning Mississippi Into Memory? Cinematic Amnesia As A Resource For Remembering Civil Rights, Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The 1988 film Mississippi Burning drew extensive criticism for its misleading portrayal of the FBI’s investigation of three murdered civil rights activists in 1964. As critics noted, the film ignored the role of Black activists who struggled for racial justice even as it graphically depicted the violence that activists and other Blacks faced during the civil rights era. This movie’s selective depiction of events surrounding the activists’ deaths constituted the film as a site of cinematic amnesia, a form of public remembrance that provokes controversy over how events ought to be remembered. An analysis of the film and its ensuing …

Exile, Homeland, And Milieu In The Oral Lore Of Carpatho-Russian Jews, Ilana Rosen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Exile, Homeland, and Milieu in the Oral Lore of Carpatho-Russian Jews" Ilana Rosen analyzes oral narratives of Central and East European Jewish communities. The Jewish people have spent most of their lifetime outside their promised land. Accordingly, their ethos, as reflected by holy teachings, expresses a yearning for a return to the holy land by divine agency once the nation is purified of its sins. In modern times, with the rise of nationalism, this creed changed into activist political Zionism, although traditional and conservative religious circles resisted this change. In the oral narratives of Central and East …

Visions Of Catastrophe In The Poetry Of Miklós Radnóti, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Visions of Catastrophe in the Poetry of Miklós Radnóti" Zsuzsanna Ozsváth proposes that the poet's work shows an evolution of a set of visionary images auguring the Holocaust. This development followed on the heels of the poet's earlier interest in the socialist, populist, and left-oriented movements and ideas that drove a number of Hungarian artists and young intellectuals of the time. Immersed in social-cultural activities during his university years in Szeged (1930-35), Radnóti underwent a significant change when he moved back to Budapest. He recognized the threat posed by the Third Reich and watched with great consternation …

Introduction To New Work In Holocaust Studies, Louise O. Vasvári, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Introduction To And Bibliography Of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing In English, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her "Introduction to and Bibliography of Central European Women's Holocaust Life Writing in English," Louise O. Vasvári discusses aspects and perspectives of women's life writing, including her criteria of selection, the problematics of sourcing, issues of translation, and processes of publication. While the authors listed in the bibliography are overwhelmingly Jewish and from Central and East Europe, there are works listed by others whose experiences also offer important testimony not only on the camps but also on other aspects of the Holocaust. The bibliography suggests that women have written as much and, especially during the last decades, more than …

"Ideologically Incorrect" Responses To The Holocaust By Three Israeli Women Writers, Rachel Feldhay Brenner

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "'Ideologically Incorrect' Responses to the Holocaust by Three Israeli Women Writers" Rachel Feldhay Brenner examines the departure from the accepted literary response to the Holocaust in the works of three Israeli women writers: the play Lady of the Castle (1954) by Lea Goldberg (1911-1970), Ruth Almog's (1936-) novel Exile (1971), and Shulamith Hareven's (1930-2003) short stories "The Witness" and "Twilight" (1980). While the writers recognized the historical bonds of the European destruction and the Zionist Jewish revival, their literary responses deviated from the mainstream which tended to concur with contemporaneous ideological positions. Feldhay Brenner begins with a …

Bibliography For Work In Holocaust Studies, Agata Anna Lisiak, Louise O. Vasvári, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Narrative Silences Between History And Memory In Schumann's Being Present: Growing Up In Hitler's Germany, Anne Rothe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Narrative Silences Between History and Memory in Schumann's Being Present: Growing Up in Hitler's Germany" Anne Rothe analyzes Willy Schumann's 1991 memoir as an instance of a growing sub-genre among autobiographical writing on the Third Reich and the Holocaust, the Hitler Youth Generation memoir. Written in English for US-American college students, the memoir constructs a reactionary counter-memory to Holocaust discourse in order to exculpate ordinary Germans like himself not only from any responsibility for but any association with nazi crimes. In order to do so, Schumann not only largely omits the Holocaust but recasts the perpetrator/victim dichotomy …

Emigrée Central European Jewish Women's Holocaust Life Writing, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Emigrée Central European Jewish Women's Holocaust Life Writing," Louise O. Vasvári analyzes voices of women survivors from a gendered perspective in order to provide insights for both Holocaust studies and gender studies. Vasvári considers whether it can be claimed that there is a specifically female style of remembering and of testifying about these traumatic experiences. Vasvári's selection includes the writings of some two dozen Central European emigrée survivors, all native speakers of Hungarian, later writing and publishing in languages of their adopted countries. The first group of women consists of adult survivors who must bear witness in …

In Memoriam Milan V. Dimić (1933-2007), Gerald Gillespie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

"Mad Laughter" In Federman's The Twofold Vibration, Menachem Feuer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "'Mad Laughter' in Federman's The Twofold Vibration" Menachem Feuer discusses one of the central questions in the debate over post-Holocaust representation with regard to comedy and laughter. Several authors and filmmakers including Mel Brooks, Lina Wertmüller, Roberto Benigni, Michael Chabon, or Jonathan Safran Foer employ comedy in work. Although the books and films of these authors and filmmakers certainly test the limits of representation through the use of comedy in post-Holocaust art, the use of "mad laughter" in the work of Raymond Federman to represent the Holocaust stands out as the most important exploration of post-Holocaust comedy …

Deranged Loners And Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames Of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973–2001, Kristen E. Hoerl, Dana L. Cloud, Sharon E. Jarvis

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

There were 7 assassination attempts on U.S. presidents between 1973 and 2001. In this article, we critically examine coverage of each attack in the New York Times and the Washington Post, describing how the coverage employs therapeutic discourse frames that position the president as vulnerable and portray the attackers as lonely and demented outsiders. Noticing contradictions in this pattern, we also identify counter-frames, including those acknowledging the political motivations of the assassins, the diminished public sphere that is a context for those actions, and the contradictions in a legal system that denies the insanity pleas of those framed so …

Figurative Language In Delbo's Auschwitz Et Après, Elizabeth Scheiber

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Figurative Language in Delbo's Auschwitz et après" Elizabeth Scheiber exeamines the use of figurative language in Charlotte Delbo's trilogy Auschwitz et après. Aucun de nous ne reviendra and shows how metaphors and symbols in the texts not only establish a means of imagining the concentration camps, but also how they create a community between author and reader. In Delbo's work, the ironic symbol of the stretcher as a means of conveying corpses gives the reader insight into the author's psyche at roll call as she witnesses the grim sight of the indignity of death in the concentrationary …

Autobiography And Fiction In Semprún's Texts, Laia Quílez Esteve, Rosa-Àuria Munté Ramos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Autobiography and Fiction in Semprún's Texts" Laia Quílez Esteve and Rosa-Àuria Munté Ramos explore aspects of narration in Jorge Semprún's literary work with regard to his experience in the concentration camp. Quílez Esteve and Munté Ramos analyze auto-novelistic mechanisms Semprún employs and reflect on the various meanings of that use by Semprún. Semprún's biographical journey is characterized by a series of experiences which would determine the form and content of his writing. The perception and experience of exile permeates Semprún's pages, the fluctuation of identities which are masked or unmasked within them, or the dissolution of the …

Introduction To Section Ii [Making Our Media: Global Initiatives Toward A Democratic Public Sphere (Vol. 1)], Dorothy Kidd

Media Studies

No abstract provided.

Volume I: Introduction [Making Our Media: Global Initiatives Toward A Democratic Public Sphere (Vol. 1)], Dorothy Kidd, C Rodríguez

Media Studies

No abstract provided.

His Final Homily: Pope John Paul Ii's Death As An Affirmation Of His Life's Message, Joesph M. Valenzano

Communication Faculty Publications

Every Sunday morning, a member of the Roman Catholic clergy addresses his flock after a reading from one of the Gospels. These homilies ordinarily last between 10 and 20 minutes and allow the priest an opportunity to interpret the Gospel message from that day's reading, as well as discuss how that message relates to contemporary events and issues.

During the final two months of his life, Pope John Paul II provided a longer, more powerful symbolic homily to the world. The message summarized his positions on freedom, suffering, and the dignity of human life.

Telling Tales: Enacting Family Relationships In Joint Storytelling About Difficult Family Experiences, April R. Trees, Jody Koenig Kellas

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Narratives help people make sense of difficult experiences. In addition, stories provide insight into people’s conceptualizations of the world, including their understanding of their family relationships. Given these two functions of storytelling, the ways in which family members tell stories about difficult experiences together should reveal or reflect relational qualities. This project focused on how the family relational context relates to jointly enacted sense-making behaviors as families tell stories of shared difficult experiences. Findings indicate that interactional sense-making behaviors, in particular coherence and perspective-taking, predict important family relational qualities. This suggests that family qualities affect and are reflected in the …