Medical Rhetoric and the Sympathetic “Inebriet”: 1870–1930

The modern view of addiction as a progressive brain disease originated in the second half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Historians attribute the shift from a moral to a medical concept to the efforts of a small but well-organized band of physicians forming what is known as the Inebriety Movement in the United States and Great Britain. Members aimed to distribute the disease theory to a disinterested and biased medical community, establish protocols for evidence-based treatments, and transfer the management of drinkers and drug users away from religious organizations and penal institutions to the care of trained practitioners. Members’ efforts to rhetorically achieve these goals on the pages of medical journals has received scant attention in the scholarly community. Based on an analysis of 92 medical articles on addiction published between 1870 and 1930, I will reveal a complex, inclusive, and multimodal rhetoric employed to refigure “drunkards” and “underworld” drug “fiends” as patients and their confounding addictive behaviors as symptoms rather than signs of degeneracy. Before advanced understanding of brain’s pleasure circuits and dopamine receptors, these early medical authors dramatically rendered the havoc that substances can play on those systems. Recovering the narratives and patient tropes I find in these texts may be instructive as we try to find ways to erase persistent stigma surrounding addiction. My findings will hopefully encourage dialogue and new research pathways for scholars interested in the rhetorical history of addiction

Reason, tradition, and authority: a comparative study of Habermas and Gadamer

This thesis explores the possibilities for normative grounding of authority through a focus on the relationship between Habermas’s ‘critical theory’ and Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’, with particular reference to the bases of authority in East Asian culture. More specifically, it examines the role of reason and tradition in justifying political authority. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics locates the conditions of authority in tradition, constituted in part by prejudice, while Habermas offers a theory of communicative action that transcends the limited horizons of tradition. The distinction between reason and tradition is applied in East Asian culture through an analysis of the practice of filial piety. The thesis endorses Habermas’s charge that Gadamer hypostatizes tradition. Habermas correctly identifies the political implication of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, namely, that it obscures power relations. It is argued that Habermas’s ‘communicative action theory’ and ‘discourse ethics’ are better able to do justice to the basis for the normative grounding of authority. The relevance of discourse ethics for the justification of political authority in East Asian culture is explored

Crappy New Year : evaluation, stance and drinking stories

This thesis is an examination of drinking stories and how authors, through linguistic means, achieve narrative, social, and cultural goals. Language is a biological fact of Homo sapiens and narrative is a universal method by which humans make sense of their world. Humans’ primeval relationship with alcohol is an expression of the innate desire to achieve altered states of consciousness. To study drinking stories is to study a manifestation of the essence of humanity. This research employs the narrative theories of Labov (1997) and Labov and Waletzky (1967) combined with Du Bois’s (2007) model of stance. I focus on the linguistic techniques of authors as they attempt three basic narrative goals of drinking stories: the construction of a believable and tellable narrative; production of satisfactory accounts for transgressive behaviors; and self-presentation of an identity as a competent drinker. Through Du Bois’s (2007) model of stance I detail how narrators strategically deploy language as they invoke and assign cultural value; manage alignment with interlocutors and their stances; and position themselves in relation to evaluated entities and their utterances. I find that the structure and content of the drinking stories examined is shaped by cultural expectations about the genre of drinking stories, dominant discourses about drinking, the specifics of narrated events, the narrators’ experience of intoxication, and authorial decisions about methods to achieve narrative goals. Furthermore, both stories examined contained a variety of stance and discourse markers, grammatical constructions, valenced lexical tokens, reconstructed dialogue, and causal arguments. I conclude that an appreciation and understanding of context is critical at all levels of discourse analysis; drinking stories are maximally intelligible only when considered with regards to the context of events described, the context of production, surrounding cultural discourses, and narrator goals. Finally, the virtual absence of literature on drinking stories per se demands further research

The Waves of the Deluge Breaking on Jonah the Intertextual Use of the Noachic Narrative in Jonah

Golden, Kevin S. “The Waves of the Deluge Breaking on Jonah: The Intertextual Use of the Noachic Narrative in Jonah.” Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2010. 251 pp. Two overarching matters are considered: intertextual methodology and its application to the use of the Noachic narrative within the book of Jonah. The intertextual methodology, the lesser of the two foci, employed within this study seeks a symbiotic relationship between the text and the reader. Textual evidence establishes the existence of the link while the reader’s interaction with the texts explores the subtleties of the intertextual relationship based upon the textual evidence. The greater focus of the study is the application of that methodology to the intertextual use of the Noachic narrative within the book of Jonah. The link is textually established by various elements including, but not limited to, the unique setting of both narratives and the reflection of Noah’s three sons in the three principal human characters of the book of Jonah. On the basis of such textual links, the reader explores various matters including, but not limited to, the gracious character of Yahweh, the role of human repentance, and the influence of the Noachic covenant upon all creation

Pelikulang Komiks: Toward a Theory of Filipino Film Adaptation

This paper tackles the major assumptions of a proposed/emergent Filipino komiks-to-film adaptation theory based on archival texts from the 1950s. An inventory of extant texts has led to the identification of twelve komiks-to-film adaptations representing Filipinized genres such as the korido film, fantasy/folklore, family drama, woman’s film, personality comedy, and historical film. Textual analysis of uncovered texts has been complemented by a social film history based on unstructured interviews with ten komiks and film scholars and retrieval of archival film journalism pieces. The main concern of this paper is to present the concepts and assumptions about komiks-to-film adaptation that will constitute the proposed Filipino film adaptation theory. The main arguments of the prospective theory follow either one or all the definitions/phases of contextualization, namely: indigenization, localization, vernacularization, and hybridization. The prospective theory will be referred to as Pelikulang Komiks