Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Commentary, Clyde Taylor

Trotter Review

There's some buzz about Bill O'Reilly's racially ignorant remarks about Sylvia's Restaurant in Harlem. But the darling of left-liberal media jokesters, Jon Stewart, had a good time on his Friday, September 21 show, first, at the expense of President Bush, and then at the expense of Nelson Mandela. Blogs are cheerleading the way Stewart caught Bush in another dumb statement — that Nelson Mandela is dead. The only comments I find on the web are kudos for Stewart's bashing of Bush. No mention of Stewart animalizing Mandela with sounds that echo the mumbo-jumbo sneer at nonwhite speech, or of his …

The "Teucer Paradigm" And The Eastern Other In Western Literature, Maria Beatrice Bittarello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "The 'Teucer Paradigm' and the Eastern Other in Western Literature," Maria Beatrice Bittarello argues that modern representations of characters with mixed-blood heritage (Western and Eastern) are rooted in classical representations of the Middle East and that such representations are thematically re-cast from a literary thematic archetype elaborated on in the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Bittarello examines how Greek and Roman authors portray the Greek mythological hero Teucer, son of Telamon and the Trojan princess Hesione. Teucer's liminal position allows him to be used in already in Greek and Roman culture both as colonizer and "bridge" between …

African Literature And The Role Of The Nigerian Government College Umuahia, Terri Ochiagha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Terri Ochiagha, in her paper "African Literature and the Role of the Nigerian Government College Umuahia," discusses how the college contributed towards nurturing the talent of some of the most relevant authors in African literary history. With the help of the testimonies of these authors in interviews, correspondence, essays, autobiographies, and with the aid of literary critics and scholars who realized the role the Umuahia College played in creating a literary elite, Ochiagha analyses this literary phenomenon and takes us on a journey through the school's literary ambience: its library and the novels which were later to prompt the authors' …

The Dream Scene And The Future Of Vision In The City Of Lost Children And Until The End Of The World, Donna Wilkerson-Barker

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "The Dream Scene and the Future of Vision in The City of Lost Children and Until the End of the World," Donna Wilkerson-Barker examines how these films investigate the place of imagination (or representation) in postmodern visual culture through their portrayal of technologized vision as an obstacle to experience. Drawing parallels between the dream scenes in these films and virtual reality and cyberspace, she argues that image technologies in The City of Lost Children and Until the End of the World lead to a dissociation of experience from corporeal reality, a dissociation that is ultimately linked to …

Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court And U.S. Imperialism, Jennifer A. O'Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and U.S. Imperialism," Jennifer A. O'Neill argues that while it Twain's text is commonly viewed as an attack on monarchy and the Catholic church, one of the book's primary focuses is U.S. imperialism. In the scholarship of Twain's text some have acknowledged the text as a discussion of colonialism, most tend to see it as an exaltation of "civilizing" efforts rather than the scalding indictment it was clearly intended to be. Indeed, Twain embraced U.S. colonial efforts in the Pacific early in his life but by the time …

Chaos Theory And Literature From An Existentialist Perspective, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman proposes in his article "Chaos Theory and Literature from an Existentialist Perspective" that in literature the relation, principles, and processes of chaos and order can be analyzed from an existentialist perspective. Chaos lies at the heart of nothingness and order is the appearance of the achievement it tries to realize, temporary it may seem. Aman argues that with the application of chaos theory to works of literature may yield new insight and applies in his paper aspects of chaos theory reading three literary works which represent three different literatures and cultures, namely Arabic, English, and French. …

A Postmodern Solzhenitsyn?, William H. Thornton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

William H. Thornton undertakes in his article, "A Postmodern Solzhenitsyn?," to bring Solzhenitsyn in from the cold, critically speaking, by closing the gap between him and his many postmodern detractors. That gap has been premised on the rough equivalence of poststructuralism and postmodernism. The postmodern realism advanced in this study challenges not only Solzhenitsyn's critics but his own stated aversion to postmodernism. Operating on both a microhistorical and macrohistorical plane, Solzhenitsyn's literary historiography testifies to the awesome scope of the gulag while never losing sight of its human factor.The double vision of Solzhenitsyn's proto-postmodern referentiality, a simultaneous centering and decentering, …

Mario Van Peebles’S Panther And Popular Memories Of The Black Panther Party, Kristen Hoerl

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The 1995 movie Panther depicted the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense as a vibrant but ultimately doomed social movement for racial and economic justice during the late 1960s. Panther’s narrative indicted the white-operated police for perpetuating violence against African Americans and for undermining movements for black empowerment. As such, this film represented a rare source of filmic counter-memory that challenged hegemonic memories of U.S. race relations. Newspaper reports and reviews of Panther, however, questioned the film’s veracity as a source of historical information. An analysis of these reviews and reports indicates the challenges counter-memories confront in popular culture.

Forum Introduction: Organizational Communication Scholars As Public Intellectuals, Kathleen J. Krone, Lynn M. Harter

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

We remain optimistic when we read, write, ask, and answer questions. When a journal comes across our desks, we select an article or two to peruse and hope the arguments will transform how we see things. We hope the work will inspire us, offer new ways of thinking about a salient issue or question, and foster edifying dialogue about lived problems. In short, we muse, how does this scholarship enable stakeholders to understand, feel, and grapple with the experiences being expressed? What does the research awaken or evoke in those who consume it? What paths does the scholarship carve? What …

The Depiction Of Alcohol Tobacco And Other Substances In Children's G & Pg-Rated Animated Films Post 2000, Lindsay F. Graham

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This study will analyze the depiction of alcohol, tobacco, and other substances in G and PG-rated animated films from November 1, 2000 to December 31, 2005. These films will include those released in theaters and video in English, at least 60 minutes in length, and of the animated genre during this five-year window. There is evidence that due to recent societal pressures facing the Motion Picture Association of America and their rating guidelines, the presence of alcohol and tobacco in children's animated Grated films has lessened. These incidents of exposure have since moved up the rating totem pole to receive …

"Everybody Else Ain't Your Father": Reproducing Masculinity In Cinematic Sports, 1975-2000, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This essay stems from two cultural strands, which intersect in one cultural form, the sports film. The first of these is the figure of the "star," as opposed to hero, who is interested only in self promotion. The second strand, masculine nurturing, provides a direct counterpoint to the first. Sociologist Robert Connell explains that "In historically recent times, sport has come to be the leading definer of masculinity in mass culture" (54). In North America, sport plays an important and increasing role in our culture. Each of the four major sports leagues added teams in the last decade of the …

Empathy Versus Abstraction In Twentieth-Century German And Russian Aesthetics, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Empathy versus Abstraction in Twentieth-Century German and Russian Aesthetics," Thorsten Botz-Bornstein argues that Alexander Koyré has shown how the crisis of belief incited by Bacon, Montaigne, Pascal, and Descartes made that "man lost his place in the world." The German term Einfühlung (empathy) played an important role in the transformation of the relationship between the person and his/her world at the moment when modern science began to emerge. Botz-Bornstein examines the conceptual links between empathy and Verfremdung (in Russian ostranenie), and style by showing how German and Russian literary critics of the 1910s attempted to retrieve the …

Radical Theology And The Reorganization Of The Us-American Religious System, Philippe Codde

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Radical Theology and the Reorganization of the US-American Religious System," Philippe Codde uses the example of the highly popular movement of death-of-God theology in the 1960s to demonstrate the wide applicability for cultural research of Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory and to illustrate the validity of Even-Zohar's assertion that peripheral elements in any system can yet occasion a dramatic shift in the system's central repertoires. Although Richard Rubenstein's reality model never made it to the center of the US-American religious system, his radical theology did impel the more traditional theologians in the center of the system finally to …

The Cognitive Construction Of The Self In Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Patrick S. Bernard

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "The Cognitive Construction of the Self in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God," Patrick S. explores the conception and representation of the self as a cognitive construct in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. By this approach, Bernard proposes that cognitive paradigms, such as knowing, seeing, thinking, and speaking, for example, and their capacities to engender knowledge and perception, identity and consciousness, memory and narrative, language and speech, are central to the novel's exploration of the self as an epistemological and ideological product. Using tools of interpretation adapted from cognitive psychology and radical constructivism, …

Globalisation, Empire, And The Vampire, Mario Vrbančić

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Globalisation, Empire, and the Vampire," Mario Vrbančić opens up the question of the possibility of a dialectical utopian thinking in postmodernism. Following Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Vrbančić analyses the vampire as the nation looking both at Hardt and Negri's theory of Empire and Žižek psychoanalytically inclined theory of nationalist identification. The vampire always occurs in the wake and decay of Empires: Dracula embodies Victorian fears of the infestation of the undead by invading the imperial centre; in America vampires disperse and multiply in popular culture and the mass media; in a newly emerging global order (Empire) they may …

The Rebirth Of Comparative Literature In Anglocalization, Anand Patil

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Anand Patil examines in his paper, "The Rebirth of Comparative Literature in Anglocalization," the debates on effects of "globalization" on literary studies and "cultures" in India. The focus of his comparative scrutiny follows the debate about the "death" of comparative literature. Patil re-imagines the rebirth of interdisciplinarity, a basic tenet of the discipline of comparative literature and a characteristic of globalization. He has coined the term "Anglocalization" to analyze the complexity of the effects of globalization in the multilingual and multicultural situation of the sub-continent. The term is used to describe a tripartite process: Anglicization by global English, economic liberation, …

Forum: Twenty Years Of Mcq: Forum Introduction, Kathy Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In this issue we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Management Communication Quarterly. To do so we invited the previous editors to reflect on their experiences providing leadership for the journal. In what follows, each editor looks back on his or her vision for MCQ, how his or her hopes for the journal were realized (or not), and the challenges he or she faced during his or her tenure as editor. Management Communication Quarterly approaches its 21st year rooted in their collective experience of working to establish the journal’s reputation for quality, interdisciplinarity, and internationalization. Although its interdisciplinary roots …

Deep Ecology And Postmodernity: Making Space For Conversation, Chris Drinkwater

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Fourth paragraph]

I begin with the fact of ecology's virtual exclusion from cultural studies. Cultural studies are centrally concerned with issues of meaning, subjectivity, objectivity and knowledge. They attempt to describe their production, conditions and complex structural effects. They are particularly interested in effects of inclusion and exclusion: for instance, "What is a legitimate object of attention within a particular discourse?" Why do cultural studies not attend to ecology? Why is negligible attention paid to a discourse and cultural movement, which are so challenging to dominant values and ways of life? I suggest that the omission is not accidental. Cultural …

Introduction, Alexandra Ganser, Vibha Arora

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

At the time of finalizing EcoCultures for publication, nearly all discussions in mass media remind us that climate change has been caused by anthropogenic excesses in the last three centuries. Environmental concern, intertwined with a critical and scholarly perspective, is also at the heart of EcoCultures: Culture Studies and the Environment. The twelve academic articles comprising this issue were written by scholars based in the North and South, speaking different languages yet living in a multicultural global world, and positioned in disciplines ranging from landscape and environmental history, literature and gender studies to visual studies and art. …

Contemporary Art Facing The Earth’S Irreducibility, Amanda Boetzkes

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article considers the aesthetic strategies and ethical implications of contemporary earth art. Drawing from feminist and ecological phenomenology, I argue that an ethical preoccupation with the earth is identifiable in works that evoke the sensorial plenitude of natural phenomena, but refuse to condense it into a coherent image or art object. By denying a perceptual grasp of the earth, contemporary earth artists question the possibility of representing it as such. They thereby position the earth as a territory of alterity that exists beyond our conceptual and perceptual limits. This approach counters two deeply flawed but nevertheless pervasive stances towards …

Translating Ecocriticism: Dialoguing With Michel Serres, Stephanie Posthumus

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Since its humble beginnings in the Western United States, ecocriticism has grown under the banner of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment into an organization of over 1000 members with international affiliates in Australia-New Zealand, Canada, Europe, India, Japan, Koria and the UK. At first sight, it would seem that ecocriticism has achieved global status. But as Ursula Heise remarks in her assessment of ecocriticism, this process of globalisation has been mainly a process of becoming known internationally. In truth, ecocriticism has remained strongly rooted in Anglophone literary studies even as it has been exported to …

The Bachelor Primetime Construction Of Romance, Fairy Tales, And Melodrama, Susan E. Beck

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis is centered on the reality television program The Bachelor. Presenting itself as a modem day Cinderella story, The Bachelor speaks directly to women's fantasies and their familiarity with fairy tales. In the process, women are molded into convenient and stale stereotypes. Furthermore, the show uses melodrama to create suspense as well as sensational episodes and romantic sentiments to keep the viewer tuned in. Instead of "reality" the show highlights a series of marginalized, sexualized, commodified, and pacified women who place marriage at the epicenter of their selfworth. From Queen for a Day to The Phil Donahue Show …

Family Stories As Indicators Of The Family Dynamic, Allison Clarkson

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

An important element of the family unit involves the stories that are often told and retold. Although the collection of stories varies among families, the themes within these stories are sometimes common across different families. Within this research, certain patterns were shown to recur regarding these story themes. Furthermore, a positive relationship was found between families’ stories and the characteristics that are used to describe the families.

The Humanities, Human Rights, And The Comparative Imagination, Sophia A. Mcclennen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "The Humanities, Human Rights, and the Comparative Imagination" Sophia A. McClennen argues that understanding the relationship between culture and human rights depends on humanist perspectives attentive to the relationship between storytelling and identity, mass culture and ideology, text and audience, critical thinking and engaged citizenship. After briefly considering how the divide between the humanities and human rights advocates developed and how it might best be overcome, she suggests that comparative cultural studies grounded in an ethical commitment to study the relationship between culture and society offers an indispensable perspective on the ties between culture and identity integral …

Introduction To Representing Humanity In An Age Of Terror, Sophia A. Mcclennen, Henry James Morello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Black Body And Representations Of The (In)Human, Li-Chun Hsiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Li-Chun Hsiao, in his article "The Black Body and Representations of the (In)human," takes cues from the theoretical insights of Agamben's "bare life" as well as Laclau's and Mouffe's "social antagonism" and explores how the slave can be considered a constitutive element which is nevertheless foreclosed from Western democracies. Hsiao also analyzes the various ways the term "slave" functions as trope in the founding discourses of Western democracy. "Bare life" remains included in politics "in the form of the exception," as "something that is included solely through an exclusion." Such an "inclusive exclusion" is represented not in its differential relationship …

The Global Phenomenon Of "Humanizing" Terrorism In Literature And Cinema, Elaine Martin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "The Global Phenomenon of 'Humanizing' Terrorism in Literature and Cinema" Elaine Martin presents -- following a discussion of two early examples, Schiller's The Robbers and Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) -- an analysis of several contemporary works that model different ways of representing terrorism: Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) and its 1976 filmic adaptation by Volker Schlöndorff, Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist (1985), Santosh Sivan's film The Terrorist (1999), and Tom Tykwer's film Heaven (2002). Edward Said provided a critique of the battle against terrorism, saying that it is selective ("we" are …

The Logic And Language Of Torture, Jonathan H. Marks

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "The Logic and Language of Torture," Jonathan H. Marks explores the tragic temptation of torture in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. Emotive responses to terrorism fueled by ticking bomb scenarios and other narrative constructs caused the U.S. to reconsider torture and the boundaries of permissible interrogation tactics in the aftermath of 9/11. While many in the media and the academy debated the necessity of "interrogational torture," the government decided that something more than moral reconstruction was required. For that reason, it embarked on a campaign of legal exceptionalism. While affirming its commitment to the …

Collateral Damage And The "Incident" At Haditha, Tom Engelhardt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Collateral Damage and the 'Incident' at Haditha," Tom Engelhardt provides a comparative analysis of the massacres of innocent civilians in the Viet Nam and Iraqi wars. Focusing on the events of My Lai, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah, Engelhardt traces the uncanny resemblance between the ways that the military attempted to contain the flow of information about these atrocities. Engelhardt analyzes the rhetorical tropes of media coverage via the favored terms of "collateral damage" and "incident" and the preferred statistics that always claim that 99.9% of the military conducts itself professionally. The fact that the media not …

A Monk's Tale, Sam Hamill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "A Monk's Tale," Sam Hamill recounts his ongoing commitment to using poetry as a form of protest and explains how poetry bridges the personal and the public, weaving together the life of one poet and that of an entire globe. In late January 2003, in response to an invitation to a symposium by Laura Bush to celebrate "Poetry and the American Voice," Hamill declined to participate; a longtime pacifist, he could not in good faith visit the White House following the recent news of George W. Bush's plan for a unilateral "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq. …