Abstract: The field of cultural studies has a long and varied history. It was estab-lished in the 1930s by scholars associated with the Frankfurt School. The tradition was continued by Stuart Hall and others at the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies in Great Britain. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the field of study […]
“… I think of an Athenian Poland, but of an Athens immensely perfected by the greatness of Christianity” (19-year old Karol Wojtyla, in a letter to a friend in 1939, on the eve of World War II. Quoted in Shulz 108). NOTE:  This is a draft manuscript; please do not quote.  Work for this project was supported […]
The art of magic has enjoyed increasing visibility and a resurgence of interest, as demonstrated by the rising popularity of magicians, such as David Blaine, Hans Klok, Franz Harary, David Copperfield, and the production of two major motion pictures within a single year – The Prestige and The Illusionist. With his number one-rated cable television show and his recent ten-year contract for a major Vegas show with Cirque de Soleil at the Luxor, Criss Angel personifies the modern-day magician who is at the forefront of the magic renaissance. This paper attempts to examine the rhetorical potency of magic by analyzing the first season of Criss Angel’s award-winning television show, Mindfreak. By using Kenneth Burke’s concepts of symbolic action and identification, this paper explores the symbolic, albeit persuasive, dimension to magic as exemplified by Criss Angel.
On Good Friday, one of the most significant days in the Christian calendar, when Christians commemorate Jesus’ death on the cross, LifeChurch.tv’s Church Online gathered for an online global prayer outreach for upcoming Easter Services. Essentially, individuals from around the world—who understand each other through the magic of translation software—logged onto https://babelwith.me and prayed together for friends and family who had not yet begun a relationship with Jesus. This community of people is serious about the role they play in fulfilling the mission of God on earth, that is, connecting men and women to God and to each other in spite of the fact that most of them have never met in person.
One of the responsibilities of rhetoric is to point up the use of dyslogistic discourse in the creation of a climate of fear favorable to the scapegoating of targeted groups of people. That technocratic rhetoric may be used toward such ends is pointed out by Steven Katz, who maintains that the focus on expediency in technical communication can create an “ethos of objectivity, logic, and narrow focus,†with devastating effects on the people thus objectified (257).
On 26 January 2007, Today on NBC aired a segment as part of its series on “Today’s Woman†entitled “Cocktail Playdates for Moms.†The segment was ostensibly intended to provide a neutral report on what it identified as a growing trend: mothers who enjoyed a glass of wine or beer together while their children played.
My research was conducted at the Institute Archives of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena where I examined the original documents of E. S. Gosney and the Human Betterment Foundation, and the Historical Files on Biology Division. Caltech is the holder of Gosney’s effects since, as founder of the Human Betterment Foundation, he had its real estate holdings transferred to the university’s biology department in 1942, making Caltech an endowment worth more than $470,000. T