Writing the Strike: How Writers Won the 2007-8 Writers Strike and Changed TV

I argue that television entertainment writers, their cultural status, and rhetorical skills are critical to national discourse and media structures. Focusing on the 2007-8 writers strike, the project analyzes videos that writers made about the conflict, showing how "rhetorical writers" used satire, complex argumentation, and knowledge of digital media to publicize writers' value. These "pro-writer" videos, online and on television, challenged media executives for primacy in entertainment industries and helped writers win the right to compensation when their work is viewed online. Exploring the histories of television writers and writing alongside technological and political changes, the project pinpoints a lineage of irreverent and ironic humor that contributed to the strike videos. This lineage of "rhetorical" writers and writing, which deconstructs cable news and media politics using satire, prepared writers for the 2007-8 strike by honing their skills in argumentation and activist community-building using satire

Catholic semiotics in Shakespearean drama

The preoccupation with the biographical question “Was Shakespeare a Catholic?” has obscured the literary significance of the residual Catholicism in his plays. Problematically representing England’s heritage and also its contemporary enemy, Catholicism has an awkward but unavoidable resonance when it appears in early modern drama. On the one hand polemic and (some) legislation produced a firm sectarian binary whereby superstitious, hypocritical and treacherous papists differentially defined a Protestant ideal. But on the other, English religious identity was a hybrid of traditional beliefs, non-theological nostalgia and political-religious disapprobation of Romish corruption. Attending to both flux and dichotomy, I demonstrate that looking at the way Catholic signs signify enriches our understanding of the texts of which they are a structural and structuring part. I consider a diversity of plays to show that just as Catholic resonance alters according to context, generic difference is also partly determined by ideological content. Catholicism was associated with ideological fraud and thus its literary presence renders the early modern concern about the moral and philosophical validity of fiction both more evident and more pressing. I explore what Shakespeare’s use of residual Catholicism tells us about his attitude to the value of creativity. The wide application of an understanding of Catholic semiotics is demonstrated through a consideration of a variety of dramaturgical features. The linguistic focus of Chapters 1 and 2 encompasses the dramatic implications of Catholic metaphors and oxymoron in Romeo and Juliet and The Comedy of Errors, and the links between verbal and theological slippage created by the use of topical onomastics in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The next two chapters explore dramatic epistemology by looking at the productive difficulties of characterising a famous Catholic in the multi-authored Sir Thomas More, and the fabrication of layered identity through the use of Catholic costume in Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well. Chapter 5 concentrates on King Lear, and in particular on Shakespeare’s reading of a polemical tract that denigrates Catholic ritual as a dangerously fraudulent fiction. Concluding with The Winter’s Tale, I explore a positive reading of superstition that grants to fiction an emotional and ethical transcendence

Little Village December 5, 2018 - January 1, 2019

https://ir.uiowa.edu/littlevillage/1254/thumbnail.jp

The Lost Tribalism of Years Gone By: Function & Variation in Gay Folklore in Armistead Maupin\u27s Tales of the City Novels

This thesis intends to demonstrate that, because of the unusual circumstances of its writing - a semi-journalistic piece produced during a period of crisis in the real-life community fictionally depicted - Armistead Maupin\u27s Tales of the City series stands as an unusually accurate and reliable ethnographic source for information concerning the gay male subculture of San Francisco in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, not only the practice and behavior themselves, but also reflecting their personal and communal function. The methodology employed in demonstrating this thesis is necessarily subjective. Like gay folklore scholar Joseph P. Goodwin in More Man Than You\u27ll Ever Be, the seminal study of the folklore of gay men in the United States, I am a gay man, who, to some degree, draws on personal knowledge and observation to recognize and identify elements of gay folklore depicted in the fictional milieu I have chosen to study. This is unavoidable to an extent: ethnographic work within the gay communities has been limited by a number of factors, including the covert nature of the group, the biases of exoteric analysts, and the lack of observations informed by insiders\u27 perspectives. Nonetheless, the groundwork that has been accomplished by Goodwin and a handful of other scholars provides an adequate basis for comparison between the real world, professional folk study, and the fictive domain of Armistead Maupin. In addition to an examination of gay oral folklore in the novels - including how gay oral tradition informs both the content of the novels and Maupin\u27s authorial voice - this thesis also considers aspects of gay customary folklore and gay material culture, including how the content of the novels chronicles some of those folkloric forms and how the novels themselves have become a significant part of gay customary and material tradition. To a large degree, folklore functions in gay folk culture to encourage communication and cohesion and to divulge important psychological insights into the minds of many group members

The Montclarion, February 21, 1985

Student Newspaper of Montclair State Collegehttps://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/montclarion/1443/thumbnail.jp

Of Corpse

Laughter, contemporary theory suggests, is often aggressive in some manner and may be prompted by a sudden perception of incongruity combined with memories of past emotional experience. Given this importance of the past to our recognition of the comic, it follows that some ""traditions"" dispose us to ludic responses. The studies in Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture examine specific interactions of text (jokes, poetry, epitaphs, iconography, film drama) and social context (wakes, festivals, disasters) that shape and generate laughter. Uniquely, however, the essays here peruse a remarkable paradox-the convergence of death and humor.Two studies here focus on joke cycles concerning disasters and celebrities, particularly as spawned or mediated through television and the Internet. One offers an exhaustive look at Internet humor that followed ""September 11,"" and the other interprets the influence of television as especially fertile for the proliferation of humor about mass icons and disasters. Other essays examine the social leveling through laughter at festivals and calendar customs associated with Mexican Day-of-the-Dead traditions, and another highlights the role of the Haitian family of playful, erotic death spirits known as Gedes during Carnival. A chapter on The Grateful Dead shows how the folkloric name and ludic iconography of this rock band nurtured participatory, egalitarian cultural scenes of collective merriment. Another essay inspects Weekend at Bernie's, a film employing the humorous manipulation of a corpse-a time-honored folk motif also explored in chapters on the ""Irish wake"" and the ""merry wake."" In another essay, we saunter through the contemporary American cemetery, noting the instances and import of humor in gravemarker texts.Taken together these essays provide a wide variety of interpretations for complex expressive forms that link death and humor, and that appear to unite groups through their own aesthetics of laughter. By letting down their guard together when encountering communications normally judged as unpleasant, people collectively affirm their own taste and ""sense"" of humor, in the face of official culture and even death itself

Bards, priests and prophets: the newspaper poets of the South African War (1899-1902)

Hundreds of poems were published in British daily newspapers during the South African War. Serious poets and enthusiastic amateurs, serving soldiers and anonymous correspondents chose newspaper publication, self-consciously assuming a range of public roles. The thesis begins by considering the functions of bard, priest and prophet as alternative models for wartime newspaper poets, who were called upon to contribute to public debates about British character and culture, imperial ambition and international policy. Poems circulated nationally and internationally, and readers responded with performances, parodies, censure and debate, subjecting newspaper poets to political and literary scrutiny. The second section of the thesis is concerned with representations of masculinity and gentlemanliness, showing how poets took on Kipling’s voices and verse forms in order to articulate different visions of military manliness, and thus to proffer alternative ways of conceptualising imperial Britain’s national character. The third section is concerned with representations of the South African landscape, showing how wartime newspaper poets mediated the war to civilian newspaper readers by adapting and subverting tropes of earlier imperial landscape writing, in particular in their representations of war deaths. Meditating on this ultimate intimacy between body and land, poets both perform and moderate imperial anxieties through a cartography of remembering. A short concluding chapter centres on a figure in the metropolitan landscape: the ragged newspaper boy. The newsboy is closely related to Tommy Atkins; but he is also connected, in a number of poems, with the newspaper poet: the bodies – and the contested roles – of the British soldier, the newsboy and the wartime poet coincide. The stereotype of newspaper verse as uniformly patriotic doggerel, compounded by a disciplinary bias against ephemeral and anonymous material, has contributed to critical neglect; this thesis argues that the newspaper poetry of 1899-1902 is an important site of social and literary engagement

This machine kills fascists : the public pedagogy of the American folk singer.

This dissertation examines the figure of the American folk singer as a public pedagogue engaged in rhetorical action for social change. Through four case studies—Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Ani DiFranco, and Tom Morello—the dissertation examines nearly a century of folk music as a form of activism through these four figures. Each folksinger occupies a unique role in a unique era, requiring each musician to revise the work of their musical forebears to accommodate new cultural and technological environments. Drawing on theories of public pedagogy, rhetorical framing, and media, I argue that an effective use of music in social change depends largely on the relationship between the music, musician, and media. While hundreds of folksingers might have been appropriate to include in this study, these four chart a specific trajectory as each demonstrate a savvy relationship with the technologies that mediate their music, image, and message. This reveals how the ethos of a musician is rhetorically constructed and changes over time in negotiation with the multiple publics in which the musician circulates. Through specific and intentional framing activities, these musicians offer something of a handbook for how activist musicians can most effectively participate in social action in both physical and digital environments

Tickets to His Head: Larry Gelbart (1928-) as Writer and Adaptor.

Larry Gelbart (1928-) has dominated the field of comedy writing in the latter half of the twentieth century the way George S. Kaufman (1889-1961) dominated the first half. Comedy, according to Gelbart, is a tic--a way of making myself comfortable. I can\u27t imagine not having comedy to lean on. I tend to write things with a circus-like atmosphere. In my mind, there\u27s a circus--three rings--all the time. . The three comedy rings in his head may be classified according to the areas where his unique talents especially emerge: (1) talent to adapt comedy from one medium to another, or from one historical period to another; (2) talent with words, to use precise language to detail character, layer meaning, or simply get the biggest laugh; and (3) talent to satirize--to show the world what his eyes see and his ears heal, and invite the audience to become angry, too. The rings in Gelbart\u27s head constantly rearrange themselves, for he has been an ardent student of comedy and the human condition throughout his career. Gelbart, although involved in some of the most historically important or successful projects in radio (Duffy\u27s Tavern (1946), The Bob Hope Show (1948)), theatre (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Sly Fox (1976), City of Angels (1989), Mastergate (1989)), television (Caesar\u27s Hour (1957), M*A*S*H (1972)), and film (Oh, God! (1976), Tootsie (1983)), prefers to stay out of the public eye. His work in radio, theatre, film, and television has paralleled the explosion of the entertainment industry in this century. Because of the large amount of collaboration and adaptation in his more than fifty-year career, it becomes a complicated subject for the scholar who endeavors to separate the material of a single voice in a writing room, or the contributions made to a comic masterpiece originally staged centuries before. The examination of his remarkable career confirms Gelbart to be what his colleague, the writer-director Mel Brooks, called, One of the funniest comedy writers that has ever lived. One of the truly great comedy writers of our epoch.

Schulz\u27s Religion: Exploring Faith in the Mainstream Media Through the Peanuts Franchise

This dissertation is an exploration of various theoretical and cultural issues surrounding depictions of religion and spirituality in mainstream entertainment media properties. Such portrayals cultivate particular cultural norms that dictate the conditions of public and private discourse on religion, and in this study, these issues are approached through a mixed-method study guided by the Peanuts franchise. The Peanuts franchise is a provocatively rich launching point for analysis of dominant media cultures, given its colossal success in the secular mainstream entertainment industry and its explicit references to and even affirmations of Christian theology. Throughout the study, the references to religion manifested across the various Peanuts media are tracked, catalogued, and analyzed – i.e., across the 75 television titles, global product merchandise, Charles Schulz\u27s biographic history, and of course the nearly 18,000 Peanuts comic strips Schulz drew over a 50 year career. Based on theoretical foundations of cultivation theory, narrativity, and public sphere theory, a hybrid approach of social-scientific content analysis, rhetorical analysis, and historical archive research is employed (including original interview data from Schulz’s family and friends). The study demonstrates that while many entertainment media properties tend to reflect and reinforce a cultural public/private split in secularity/religion, rich opportunities for nuanced portrayals of religious belief and action are possible within a mainstream title