Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Modern Arabic Film : A Study Of Selected Works Of New Arab Expressionist Filmmakers, Mohamed Masoud Elmasmari

Student Works (2000-2009)

Film reached the major cities of the Arab world within a matter of months of the first film showing in Paris, London, and New York, so the history of film exhibition and to some extent film production in virtually as long in the Arab world as in the West. The experience of the last thirty years has shown situation to be of enormous creative potential for an artist. In this study, attention is paid to the achievements of just a handful of notable filmmakers of the New Arab Cinema, even this choice is limited but not random, for all the …

What Do We Do When We Do Law And Popular Culture, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

"What We Do When We Do Law and Popular Culture" establishes a theoretical framework for analyzing legal popular culture, taking as its point of departure Richard Sherwin's book "When Law Goes Pop." The article stresses what Professor Silbey considers to be three major stumbling blocks in the growing interdiscipline of law and popular culture. She argues that if we are to advance our understanding of the relationship between law and popular culture, we must follow at least three simple charges: (1) demarcate our beginning concepts, such as law or culture, so that amidst the vast phenomena that may be called …

Ezra Pound's Comparative Poetics, Naikan Tao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Ezra Pound's Comparative Poetics," Naikan Tao concentrates on Pound's theories regarding comparison and examines the significance of his comparative studies to the formulation of his poetics, an aspect that has not been sufficiently investigated. On the basis of Pound's work, Tao observes that the conception of comparison Pound shaped through his comparative studies is the internal principle that governs the presentation of details and particulars, the method Pound advocated as a reader-oriented approach to truth and as an efficient, self-reliant means to avoid others' generalization and discursive presentation. Pound's view of comparison as an epistemological norm -- …

Entropy In Pynchon's "Entropy" And Lefebvre's The Production Of Space, Jason Snart

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Entropy in Pynchon's 'Entropy' and Lefebvre's The Production of Space," Jason Snart examines Thomas Pynchon's short story "Entropy" for the ways in which it deals with the kinds of disorder(s) associated with entropy as a thermodynamic and informational concept. Those concepts are installed as a framework within which to consider cultural studies work like Henri Lefebfre's thought in his The Production of Space and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems theory and themodynamics: disorder is rendered not as confusion, but rather as a state of potential energy and productivity and Lefebvre's and Bertalanffy's concepts serve to show how …

(Post)Feminism, Transnationalism, The Maternal Body, And Michèle Roberts, Ayako Mizuo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "(Post)Feminism, Transnationalism, the Maternal Body, and Michèle Roberts," Ayako Mizuo argues that the question and problematics of feminism have diversified over the last few decades. Diverse and competing voices have been, nonetheless, incorporated into the paradigm of an equality and difference sexual dichotomy. Further, recent discussions about feminism suggest the problematization of gender differences. Consequently, exponents of postfeminism are compelled to ask what comes next? Mizuo urges that the issue of the tangibility of the body acquires a particular relevance within this context and that thus the ultimate question is how the site of the maternal body …

Western Culture And The Ambiguous Legacies Of The Pig, Benton Jay Komins

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Western Culture and the Ambiguous Legacies of the Pig," Benton Jay Komins provides a cultural lineage of the pig by the example and reading of Piggies by the Beatles. Komins observes that Piggies enacts the possibilities of the ubiquitous pig in Western culture by juxtaposing swinish antics with interpretations of limitation and heartbreak thereby forcing listeners to blur the distinctions between struggle, unrequited love, and boorishness. Komins continues his discussion by locating this juxtaposition within the Western pantheon of real, metaphorical, and imaginary animals, where the pig is noted to have obsessively endured. Komins argues that through …

Comparatist Postcolonial Studies: A Review Article Of Books By Coundouriotis, Matthews Green, Yeager, And Gould, Vautier, And Canadian Literature, Angeline O’Neill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Aimé Césaire And Gestures Toward The Universal, Gary Leising

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Aimé Césaire and Gestures toward the Universal," Gary Leising argues that Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land presents a speaker struggling with his own identity, torn between a double consciousness of his black African heritage and his French-European education. This dichotomy appears in the poem in terms of his perceptions of his ancestry as well as in symbols of the masculine and feminine in the surrounding landscape. For the speaker, the African appears as the "real" around him, while the European is an "absent presence," and he confronts the two at the poem's climax, …

Language, Vagueness, And Social Communication, Colin B. Grant

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Language, Vagueness, and Social Communication," Colin B. Grant adopts an interdisciplinary approach to an interrelated complex of language, communication, and society. Grant operates with a modified concept of vagueness as a pragmatic property and attempts to establish a link between pragmatic vagueness and contingency in communication. This communicative contingency takes the form of improbabilities (entropy). Grant observes that the challenge lies in modelling communication as porous networks which nonetheless enable society to function. In this sense, contingency in communication must not be confused with arbitrariness just as cognitive closure cannot be confused with solipsism. This line of …

Inside Unlv, Betty Blodgett, Tom Flagg, Diane Russell

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

Bending The Rules Of “Professional” Display: Emotional Improvisation In Caregiver Performances, Jayne M. Morgan, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Organizational norms of emotional expression are open to negotiation through improvised performances, as employees may bend or break emotion rules to gain more leeway in expressiveness and participate in the development of their own role identities in the workplace. In this ethnographic study, a dramaturgical perspective is used to analyze the processes and outcomes of emotional improvisation as observed among nurses, technicians, and physicians in a cardiac care center. It was found that the emphasis on maintaining a “professional” appearance in caregiving largely constrains actors to perform along their scripted roles. Results are discussed in terms of practical implications for …

Geek Culture: An Annotated Interdisciplinary Bibliography, William L. Svitavsky

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In recent years, there have been numerous studies on science fiction fans, role-playing games, comic book fans, and the culture of those strongly interested in computers. When a study profiles a group engaged in one of these activities, it is not unusual for the group's participation in the other activities to be mentioned as well. In popular culture (as opposed to studies of popular culture), this overlap has been recognized all along. Each of these groups has been ridiculed as geeks or nerds, and each has subverted those terms into proud self-identification. In his work on media fandom, …

2001 Presidential Address: Do More With More, Dawn O. Braithwaite

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

As I have listened to, and recently reread the addresses of our WSCA Presidents, I have been moved and challenged by their words and their wisdom. And their speeches are challenging. They have exhorted us to embrace quality discourse, to welcome change, to maintain the centrality of communication in the university of the 21st century, and to avoid becoming out-of-touch whiners. I wondered, what can I add to their words in my own address?

Over this past year, I have thought about my life as a communication professor. How are my times similar and different from those who have come …

Exploring The Emergent Identities Of Future Physicians: Toward An Understanding Of The Ideological Socialization Of Osteopathic Medical Students, Lynn M. Harter, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This project brings contextual factors to the forefront of socialization research by investigating how medical ideology relates to the formation of the identities of students of osteopathic medicine. In particular, we investigate their attitudes toward, the role of communication in, and the expression of emotion in health care delivery. Through in-depth interviews with students about their vocational development experiences, we began exploring their emergent identities as future practitioners of osteopathic medicine. Three themes emerged from a constant comparative analysis of data, including (a) selecting osteopathic medicine, (b) encountering osteopathy, and (c) students’ emergent identities. These themes, and their respective subthemes, …

Literary Careers: Breaks And Stalls, W. Ray Crozier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Literary Careers: Breaks and Stalls," W. Ray Crozier argues that biographical evidence points to considerable individual variation in writers' output over the life span even when allowance is made for longevity and length of writing career. This issue has been neglected by psychological accounts of creativity. Crozier outlines a theoretical framework for understanding variation in terms of an "artistic career." This is conceptualised as a sequence of projects, the success of which are influenced by intra-project factors such as the rewardingness and difficulties of literary projects and extra-project factors such as work pressures, poverty, and competing demands …

Bibliography Of Contextual (Systemic And Empirical) Approaches In The Study Of Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Art, Literature, And The Empirical Paradigm, Aldo Nemesio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Perception Of The Song And Its Video Clip, Mariselda Tessarolo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "The Perception of the Song and Its Video Clip," Mariselda Tessarolo examines the relationship between image and music within promotional video clips. Tessarolo observes that images underline the music, where the song marks the rhythm to be given over (and into) the images. As a consequence, emotion prevails over narration within video clips: Affect is their desired effect. The Schwichtenberg typology is used to determine the nature of the relation between emotional and perceptual response. Video clips were classified according to the way they enact this relation, and 100 university students provided the responses to be evaluated. …

About Art, Baruch Blich

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "About Art," Baruch Blich investigates why is art -- and especially modern art -- so difficult to understand? Why do art objects raise questions as to their status? Why scrutinizing art involves semiotics, philosophy of language, linguistics, epistemology, ontology, and even metaphysics? Why art is interpreted by psychoanalysis as well as by behaviorism and psychology of perception? What anthropology and sociology have to do with art and why do we witness art debated in the courtroom concerning copyright issues? In short -- what makes art a crossroad for many and sometimes conflicting disciplines? Is there something in …

A Psychological Outline Of "Yerma's Dream", Antonio Fusco, Rosella Tomassoni

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "A Psychological Outline of 'Yerma's Dream'" Fusco and Tomassoni examine the world of Lorca in his play. Fusco and Tomassoni present an examination of the psychological characteristics of this world, and focus their attention upon a dream of one its female protagonists. Yerma is observed to be a heroine of "sterility" -- or rather, the heroine of an impossibility to love. The heroics of this impossibility is interpreted according to the social constraints made upon women within a male dominated society. These constraints are said to surface symptomatically within her own dream world -- as a heroine …

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 Boundary-Spanning Role Of A Cooperative Support Organization: Managing The Paradox Of Stability And Change In Non-Traditional Organizations, Lynn M. Harter, Kathleen J. Krone

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This project provides an interpretation of how one cooperative support organization, the Nebraska Cooperative Council, discursively functions to help its constituent cooperatives consolidate resources in order to better intersect with organizations in a larger bureaucratic system. In analyzing qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, surveys, and organizational documents, we found the paradox of stability and change a revealing prism through which to make sense of participants’ experiences. We work toward locating and describing how the Council, through its boundary-spanning activities, helps cooperatives manage the paradox of stability and change while protecting their core participatory ideologies. By providing networks of learning, …

“Becoming A Family”: Developmental Processes Represented In Blended Family Discourse, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Loreen N. Olson, Tamara D. Golish, Charles Soukup, Paul Turman

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

We adopted a process-focus in order to gain a deeper understanding of how (step) blended family members experiencing different developmental pathways discursively represented their processes of becoming a family. Using a qualitative/interpretive method, we analyzed 980 pages of interview transcripts with stepparents and stepchildren. We studied the first four years of family development, using the five developmental pathways developed by Baxter, Braithwaite, and Nicholson (1999). Three salient issues identified in the family experiences were boundary management, solidarity, and adaptation. While the negotiation of these issues varied across the five trajectories, there were commonalities across family experiences that helped determine whether …

The Role Of The Internet In Chinese Foreign And Domestic Affairs, Jean Bowman Leedy

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Problem: Rapid dissemination of Internet technology and the free access to information it affords poses a threat to non-democratic states that rely on control of information to maintain power and stability. This is of substantial concern to the Communist regime in The People's Republic of China due to the fact that its repressed population constitutes the fastest growing body of Internet users in the world.

Methods: This paper examines the potential impact of the Internet on Chinese foreign and domestic policy through interpretation of existing literature as it applies to the Internet, interviews with experts studying the emergence of China's …

Southern American Regional Sensibility Versus The North, Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Southern American Regional Sensibility versus the North," Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski investigates some key myths underlying the culture of the American South. Kowalczyk-Twarowski discusses the issue of national versus regional sensibility in early statesmen and writers such as Thomas Jefferson, George Fitzhugh, and John C. Calhoun. Starting with the mythology that evolved about North-South relations in the wake of the Civil War, Kowalczyk-Twarowski delineates some steps in the construction of regional feeling. In his analysis of the latter, Kowalczyk-Twarowski argues that the romanticized image of the South is a product of Northern needs for an antidote to the fast …

On The Comparison Of Interliterary Configurations, Armin Paul Frank

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "On the Comparison of Interliterary Configurations," Armin Paul Frank proposes to draw conceptual and methodological conclusions from what comparatists know but do not always act upon, namely that comparison is essential to an understanding of literature because most authors of primary literature write comparatistically. They inscribe in their texts similarities or differences or both to extant international (and national) texts and sources. This is how literary meaning is produced, this is how status is implicitly but effectively ascribed to works, authors, and literatures, and thus resulting in (inter)cultural work including the enriching of a national literature. From …

Comparativist Interpretations Of The Frontier In Early American Fiction And Literary Historiography, Barbara Buchenau

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Comparativist Interpretations of the Frontier in Early American Fiction and Literary Historiography," Barbara Buchenau points towards problematic processes of selection and narrative positioning at work in historiographical studies when analyzing and synthesizing early American frontier fiction. Apart from selecting only a small number of literary texts from the large pool of frontier fiction, these over-arching narratives tend to reduce the meaning of the literary works selected to those characteristics that are understood to be of importance for the emerging national literature. Concentrating on two novels long excluded from the American canon, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) …

Canadian Feminist Writing And American Poetry, Eugenia Sojka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Canadian Feminist Writing and American Poetry," Eugenia Sojka explores contemporary English-Canadian feminist avant-garde and language-focused writing and its intertextual linkages with American Language Poets. Texts of English-Canadian feminist writers such as Lola Lemire Tostevin, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Erin Mouré, and Gail Scott are read with reference to ideas and hniques inscribed in the writing of Ron Silliman, Charles Berstein, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman. Sojka focuses first on the socio-historical dimension of the writing and proceeds to the exploration of several discourses inscribed in the texts of writers associated with both groups. Their texts …

British Travel Writing About The Americas, 1820-1840: Different And Differentiating Views, Frank Lauterbach

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "British Travel Writing about the Americas, 1820-1840: Different and Differentiating Views," Frank Lauterbach analyzes representations of the United States and South America in British travel writing of the post-Monroe years. His analysis rests on examples from two travelogues by Basil Hall, written in 1824 and 1829, respectively. Lauterbach discusses three related points: 1) Intent on overcoming the colonial affiliation with Anglo-American culture, British travelers try to establish a clear (romance of) difference between themselves and the United States, they employ a post-colonial rhetoric that stresses the strangeness rather than likeness of America; 2) Ironically, US-American responses to …

Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad Y Los Perros And The European Novel Of Adolescence, John Neubauer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Vargas Llosa's La Ciudad y los perros and the European Novel of Adolescence," John Neubauer investigates Mario Vargas Llosa's 1962 novel about cadets in a military school located just outside of Lima, Peru. The life of a gang (the dogs) in the city and on the premises is described from constantly changing perspectives. Neubauer's article looks at Vargas Llosa's work in terms of features one finds in narratives about adolescents in European literatures around 1900 and where these texts can be read with three main foci found in them. Thematically, the texts focus on the city and …