Browsing by Subject "Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The clarity of the Cold War: truth and literary communism between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. in the era of postmodern globalization.
    (2012-07) Gill, Meredith Morgan
    This dissertation examines the cultural logic of the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, as a symptom of postmodern globalization. Following Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson's 1947 proclamation that Cold War propaganda should be crafted as "clearer than truth," this study investigates the complicated relationships among truth, production, and interpretation that emerged in similar manners between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War period. In particular, I consider literary, visual, and critical texts that contest a logic of truth which seeks to dissociate truth from its conditions of production. In so doing, I assert that a second Cold War took place between a global creative class, which has been termed "the multitude," and the (unwittingly) allied forces of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Accordingly, I argue that the Cold War cannot be understood simply as a battle between East and West, capitalism and communism, two world orders, or disparate modes of production. In chapter one, I explore the transition to postmodernism, as the cultural logic of late capitalism, to detail the changing conditions for aesthetic and political dissent against the neo-liberal management of American capitalism and the socialist management of Soviet state capitalism. I explore diplomatic correspondences between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as well as a number of examples of aesthetic dissent ranging from popular magazines to Soviet subcultures to Leftist American avant-garde visual art and a ten-year old American schoolgirl's quest to discover the truth about the Cold War. In chapter two, I provide a close reading of E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, a meta-fictional, "autobiographical" novel about political life during the Cold War period. I read this text alongside Louis Althusser's autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, to examine the complexities of locating truth that have resulted from postmodernity's complication of the distinction between subjects and objects. Chapter three presents a historical case study of how the concept of truth was contested within samizdat, the underground late-Soviet self-publishing movement. In particular, I look at Metropol, a 1979 samizdat literary anthology, which, I argue exemplifies a form of literary communism within the creative block of actually lived "communism." The fourth and final chapter explores the autobiography of Assata Shakur--communist, former Black Panther, and escaped convict who writes from socialist Cuba. I argue that the complex interplay of narrative forms in her text, as well as her use of intuition as a methodology, exposes a logic of truth that is non-representational, points to similarities between late capitalist and prison temporalities, and radically remaps the discursive parameters of the Cold War.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Conceiving difference through alternative reading strategies:Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Post-Civil Rights US minority texts.
    (2009-07) Park, Susan Shin Hee
    This dissertation aims at engineering a dialogue between Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida's conceptions of difference and expressions of difference in Post-Civil Rights US minority texts. I assemble these divergent manifestations of difference under the united cause of resisting a "master" discourse of difference which harnesses difference as the rationale of Modern racism. I begin by introducing the problematic of an established narrative that maintains difference in negative relation to "sameness." This narrative subordinates difference vis-à-vis an imagined white universal subjectivity, evacuating the singular, a-relational difference inherent to the particular. The four chapters of my dissertation argue for a reclaiming of positive, non-dialectical difference by proposing alternative reading strategies. I synthesize Deleuze and Guattari's notions of "becoming-minority," "deterritorialization" and "collective enunciation of minor literature," Deleuze's writing on the "suspension of judgment," and a Deleuzian understanding of Spinoza's Ethics with Derrida's conceptions of "becoming friendship," "becoming literary," "différance," "interval of undecidability," and "lovence." The texts used to bear out these articulations of difference include artworks by Kara Walker and Faith Ringgold, the legal storytelling of Derrick Bell, the album liner notes of John Coltrane and the fiction of Maxine Hong Kingston. This dialogue on difference, between philosophy and cultural texts, produces ways of imagining subjectivities that resist the conception of subjectivity associated with such figures as Aristotle, Descartes and Hegel. These figures are among the "masters" whose discourse of difference I challenge through the uprising of Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida in conjunction with differential writing produced by US minorities.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Connected isolation: screens, mobility, and globalized media culture
    (2008-12) Groening, Stephen Francis
    >"Connected Isolation: Screens, Mobility, and Globalized Media Culture" is an analysis of the implications of individualized media forms that increasingly constitute and encroach upon what was previously regarded as public space. I argue that the role of screens in non-theatrical contexts requires that we reassess the importance of media distribution and flows. The reconfiguration of social spaces caused by the proliferation of screens leads to new aesthetic modes and new forms of sociality. The push and pull of those media forms results in a social order I call "connected isolation," a predicament in which subjects must isolate themselves in order to connect to the world through media technologies. These technologies compel separation from the local in order to achieve immediacy with the global, thereby reconfiguring long-standing categories of space. The unresolved tensions between public and private produced by these devices (the use of cellular phones in public areas, for example) express the emergent social order of connected isolation. My dissertation provides a deeper understanding of a larger cultural problematic - the role of communication technologies in structuring social belonging - through a focus on the tensions between community and technological innovation in a social milieu structured by mass media. To describe the emergence of connected isolation as a new social order, I engage four theoretical constructs: distraction, the "space of flows," "mobile-privatization," and the aesthetic of liveness. As specific objects of analysis, I examine corporate training films from the silent era, in-flight entertainment, cellular phones, and television screens in public spaces. This dissertation, then, moves between the sociology of culture, economic geography and social theory to arrive at some conclusions regarding electronic communications technologies and the proliferation of screens.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A refusal to play along: videogaming and ludic thought.
    (2010-02) Grey, Sarah Cameron Loyd
    In this dissertation, I analyze the videogame as a way of approaching emerging forms of selfhood, as well as new models of technological innovation, economic activity, and artistic production, utilizing writings by theorists of visual culture, in particular Theodor W. Adorno. By evaluating the media phenomenon of the videogame, I assess the new ludic individual and elucidate the problems and possibilities that accompany her. I propose that games be played critically, not simply as expressions of culture or as products for consumption, but as objects through which we can think. In this way, games function much like artworks, as pieces of visual culture that allow us to explore different avenues of reflection. Games can be catalysts for deliberation on a variety of topics, from aesthetics to constructions of selfhood. Individuals often play the role of the gamer even without knowing it, due to the unavoidability of games on phones, computers, TV, etc. The individual as a gamer is active, but entrapped; she has choices, but they are from a menu; she has a purpose (or a quest), but its outcome is predetermined. My project is to scrutinize this tendency in order to explain how technologies have shaped us and, more importantly, how we can reclaim play for our benefit.