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Part human, part machine, the cyborg is the hero of an increasingly popular genre of American film and, as Janice H. Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz so provocatively suggest, a cultural icon emblematic of an emergent postmodern mythology. Using the cyborg film as a point of departure, Rushing and Frentz examine how we rework Western myths and initiation rites in the face of new technologies. Through in-depth examinations of six representative films—Jaws, The Deer Hunter, The Manchurian Candidate, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Terminator 2—Rushing and Frentz track the narrative's thread from the hunter to his technological nemesis, demonstrating how each film represents an unfolding hunt...
How do academics survive the bureaucracy, the petty jealousies, the absurdities of operating in the university? More important, how do they, as humans, cope with the darker shadows that enter professional lives-- illness, sorrow, death? Coyote, The Trickster, a well known figure in the American Indian world, is also the icon for communication scholar Tom Frentz. Frentz uses the survival strategies of The Trickster in his articulate, amusing, and often emotional autoethnography of striving for quality through the worlds of academia and medicine.
Covering a broad range of rhetorical perspectives, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action presents a thorough, accessible, and well-grounded introduction to rhetorical criticism. Featuring nineteen chapters written by nationally recognized scholars, the volume offers the most comprehensive introduction to rhetorical criticism available.
An investigation of society's heroes during any time period will reveal the personnel deemed worthy of being emulated at that particular time by that particular society. There will be many old and time-tested figures, sometimes with new faces and new profiles; there will also be a mix of new faces. Thus the hero--like history itself--is constantly in transition, and both the hero and the transition are fundamental to the study of a culture. These essays turn the pantheon of heroes around before our eyes and reveal the many complicated aspects of hero worship.
Steven Spielberg has fashioned an enviable career as a writer, producer, and director of American motion pictures, winning Academy Awards for Best Direction (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List), and for Best Film (Schindler's List). With David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg he founded Dreamworks SKG, already one of the most productive and respected studios in Hollywood. Despite Spielberg's notable successes, however, his films have not avoided controversy. The Films of Steven Spielberg provides for the first time a collection of critical writings by professional film critics about the director and his films, bringing together many articles and reviews scattered in often inaccessible specia...
This volume occasions a dialogue between major authors in the field who engage in a conversation on cosmopolitanism and provinciality from a communication ethics perspective. There is no consensus on what constitutes communication ethics, cosmopolitanism, or provinciality: the task is more modest and diverse and began with contributors being asked what the bias of their work suggests or offers for understanding the theme Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality. Rather than responding authoritatively, each essay acknowledges the contributor's own work. This book offers no answers, but invites a conversation that is more akin to a beginning, a joining, an admission that there is more than «me», «us», or «my kind» of people, theory, or wisdom. The book will be an excellent resource for instructors and for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in communication.
After the first issue of PRE/TEXT appeared in 1981, a colleague told Victor Vitanza, the creator, editor and publisher of the journal, how disgusted she was by it, how unreadable it was, how devoted to self-aggrandizement-and how much she enjoyed two articles in it. Devoted to exploring and expanding the field of rhetoric and composition by publishing articles considered "inappropriate" by other journals in the field, PRE/TEXT has, from its inception, made people angry. Yet it has survived, and thrived. This collection of essays pays tribute to the first ten years of the journal, and each reprinted article is paired with a short comment by the author. Also included is Victor Vitanza's retrospective history of the journal and prospectives for the future.
Challenging the classic horror frame in American film American filmmakers appropriate the “look” of horror in Holocaust films and often use Nazis and Holocaust imagery to explain evil in the world, say authors Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and David A. Frank. In Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film, Picart and Frank challenge this classic horror frame—the narrative and visual borders used to demarcate monsters and the monstrous. After examining the way in which directors and producers of the most influential American Holocaust movies default to this Gothic frame, they propose that multiple frames are needed to account for evil and genocide. Using Schindler’s List,...
Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States: Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest is a collection of essays that draws on concepts developed by Antonio Gramsci to examine the imagining of race in popular culture productions, political discourses, and resistance rhetoric. The chapters in this volume call for renewed attention to Gramscian political thought to examine, understand, interpret and explain the persistent contradictions, ambivalence, and paradoxes in racial representations and material realities.This book’s contributors rely on Gramsci’s ideas to explore how popular, political, and resistant discourses reproduce or transform our understandings of race and racism, social inequalities, and power relationships in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together the chapters confront forms of collective and cultural amnesia about race and racism suggested in the phrases “postrace,” “postracial,” and “postracism," while exposing the historical, institutional, social, and political forces and constraints that make antiracism, atonement, and egalitarian change so difficult to achieve.