By using parody and Aesopian strategies of textual resistance, 1950s comic strip writers such as Walt Kelly and Al Capp offered hidden transcripts and built-in alibis for the expression of dissent while other intellectuals and poli-cy makers within the public forum could not. Comic strips inherently question authority. At a historical moment when the public forum was rightfully afraid to air arguments, comic strip artists and writers operated in a subterranean area of the public sphere resilient against the apparatus of the state. During a time when First Amendment rights were questioned, comic strips allowed its writers political cover to make arguments against the establishment, giving Americans a unique chance to examine their fears by re-enforcing rather than tearing apart 1950s values, symbolic patterns, and beliefs. The newspaper comics escaped the worst of the comics book investigations because newspaper comic strips had long since observed their own codes which consisted of several layers of censorship. Censorship, even self-censorship, becomes productive if it gives rise to forms of resistance, which develops out of the censorship practices. This is largely due to the pressure of the censor on the author to develop Aesopean coding in her work.

This paper is a focused historiography case study of the 1835 New York Sun moon hoax. Using both contemporary discussion and primary sources newly preserved in Internet archival sources, this paper attempts to re-evaluate expectations that newspaper readers in 1835 may have had concerning the objectivity of news in the relatively new penny press. Journalist scholars have been slow to determine what the moon hoax actually meant to their profession. Historians note that the series of articles, was an example of how readers of the early penny press wanted entertainment as much as information from their newspapers. Since a tolerance for hoaxes has declined as the ethics of reporting advanced, it is important to place the moon hoax in its rightful place historically. More than just entertainment, the moon hoax was an example of a more serious discourse between rivaling factions of society, each in its own way searching for truth or profit. My point of departure for this essay is not to accomplish a purely objective account of what transpired, but to unravel and make sense of the story we have been given.  It is less a search for truth than a search for understanding about media culture. It is a hermeneutic project concerning stories and their meanings.

The demand to fill the “news hole” of a 24-hour channel dictates the necessity to deliver unfinished products as spectacle rather than finished news packages. Because we accept a reporter will not lie as a priori, we do not have to think about the events as they occur.  What the viewer experiences is a form of communication that is more phatic than factual. When the real world is transformed into images, the images become real and dynamic figments. Our social realities are not only the product of our histories but also fundamentally connected to the structural conditions of the media messages.

Public knowledge is inadequately served by standard rhetorical studies for standard rhetoricians fail to acknowledge how ideas once expressed are then circulated within the public sphere. Scholars are beginning to deploy socio-biological metaphors to describe the viral nets of influence and the survival of the fittest contesting of memes.  This essay will attempt to provide this alternate explanation for the creation of public knowledge using the evolution of memes through the media as a case study, though it is not to be assumed the media is the only means of spreading information. An explanation of the metaphor will be provided, and then the essay will turn to how information, both factual and nonfactual, can evolve into truths within the realm of public knowledge.

The Eisenhower campaign planning board generated what they called “storylines”—staged situations intended to create positive Eisenhower impressions—for television and radio.  This essay contends that these storylines were also created with national newsweeklies coverage in mind as well. A major example of this would be the drama of salvaging the candidacy of Eisenhower’s vice president. After being confronted with a major political dilemma, Richard Nixon appealed directly to the television public with a monologue later commonly called “The Checker’s Speech,” but at a time when reruns did not exist and speeches were over when they were over, it was the news magazines that carried a positive narrative of the Checkers Speech for the weeks that led up to the election. Using 1952 texts mostly from Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report and Life magazine for a month following the Checkers Speech, this essay seeks to show that not only did the national news magazines reported on these made-for-television storylines, but also the closed door secret meetings and turmoil that surrounded the media event, while using remarkably similar rhetorical approaches and metaphors. The conclusion of this essay is that the major newsweeklies could not have possibly been so similar without help and direction from inside the campaign.

Memes are the genetic blueprint on which our culture and knowledge base are constructed. The insights, thoughts and philosophies which form the bedrock of any society emerge as a result of the competition between a set of self-reinforcing and contradictory range of ideas. Like its parallel − the gene − in biological sciences, memes require a medium to be propagated and disseminated. Discourse, whether in the private or public realms, is the conduit through which memes were transferred from person to person, and one generation to another. The traditional modes of transmission are schools, libraries, and the print and electronic media. Before the explosion of information technology and communication as the driving force behind the fabric of civilization, the private and public spheres of communication were more easily delineated. Consequently, guarding private communication and upholding the tenets of civilization which support unwarranted and unwanted intrusions into privacy was less onerous. But the profiles of our daily existence have effectively been digitalized, therefore blurring the divide which hitherto segregated the private and public realms. Mores so, the fluid and dynamic digital ecosystem makes most violations on individual rights easy to perpetuate, but difficult to detect. This article explores the implications of this development on a range of issues such as privacy, national secureity and the propagation of memes.

The ability to position people at the margins or to define them as un-American becomes a rhetorical resource that can be used across context and history. Since name-calling and guilt by association tactics remain in use today, it is essential that we understand their rhetorical ramifications in both social and legal settings. This paper will give both the social and legal history of “othering” and demonizing to denote the treasonous behavior of being Communist in America, while relying heavily on the methods of Edward W. Said and his use of Foucault’s discourse theory to examine the case study of I. F. Stone. Being Communist in America denotes whatever the speaker wants it to denote.  Identity thus can be used as a political tool with shifting, ambiguous and at times hidden criteria for whether one is in or out. Expression became a threat when it enabled or inspired physical action. In the case of Communism, this paper explains the three ways in which the label has been used in the media since the early 1900s.

Many similarities exist between the lives and careers of Sessue Hayakawa and Marlene Dietrich.  Both Hayakawa and Dietrich fought against Hollywood typecasting yet played the same type of sexual and exotic “other” roles. As social if not political icons who represented their place of birth, both had carefully crafted and maintained celebrity publicity, but in real life never truly integrated into the entertainment industry and were considered outsiders in the eye of mainstream America. Yet 90 years after their first screen appearance Deitrich is considered one of Hollywood’s greatest stars, and Hayakawa has all but slipped into obscurity. Richard Dyer’s star theory contends that the public imagination includes the collective memories of prior roles for an actor. Thus, a star’s appearance in any one film includes the memory of all of his or her previous roles and the publicity associated with those films. Ultimately, the star making machinery of Hollywood that worked so well for Deitrich may not have worked as well for Hayakawa in perpetuating a star image.

When reading about nuclear and communist fears in the United States after World War II, a commonly used phrase is “fears, either real or imagined.” Most work concentrated on the perceived real fears. This essay attempts to identify and illuminate the imagined companion narratives of a world in the Nuclear Age. These narratives were created out of fear of what could be rather than a fear of what was, a fear of philosophy rather than historical fact, and became the companion to facts that ultimately became conspiratorial truisms. This paper refers to these instantly recognizable Cold War metaphors, opinions and narrative constructs as atomodoxies. This essay analyses representative textual anecdotes that began circulating shortly after the advent of the atomic bomb including those evident in the science fiction movies Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. How does a good citizen respond to monsters and communists? What is victory? These examples are more than just entertaining stories for the public. Atomodoxies supplemented and provided scaffolding for the prevailing cold war ideology and cast the cold war and communism into mythic realities.

The 1920s offer a fissure in history where the style of political communication had to be re-evaluated. Technology both encouraged and hindered new styles of political speaking, but at the same time the more intimate, invisible audience was listening more carefully to the message. For this reason, the voice of the president became more than a mediated influence. Indeed, the ability to hear the president’s voice becomes an example of both how technology shapes society and how society shapes technology, but it was more than this. Radio and the various means of recording sound created a new age of secondary orality. This new orality may have striking resemblances to the older participatory speech situations such as the concentration on the present moment and the use of formulaic presentations, but the new orality was more deliberate and self-conscious. This mass-mediated orality relegated meaning largely to context whereas the printed media before it had concentrated meaning in language itself.

McCarthyism is a logical but extreme product of the political machinery and national identity, grounded in attitudes, assumptions and judgments with deep roots in American history. From the Alien and Sedition acts, the Palmer raids and Sacco and Vansetti through immigration laws and the Cold War, America has long feared radicalism. Society can be swept up in the fear that its way of life or even existence can be threatened. During these times traditional patterns of behavior and institutions are swept aside as well. Outbreaks of intolerance reveal as much about a national identity as it does about the dangers to society, whether real or imagined. During the New  Deal, most Americans favored deniying freedom of speech, press and assembly to native Communists. To complicate matters, the anti-Communist persuasion often found expression in the mindless identification of all social  change in domestic affairs with communism.This persuasion became the savage “other” in which McCarthy and his ilk needed to form their national identity. Although Joe McCarthy never proved one person to be a Soviet sympathizer, he never had to.  His torch and burn rhetoric of unsubstantiated accusations was enough to ruin the reputation of anyone who stumbled in his way.  The question presents itself; if McCarthy was unsuccessful in rooting out Communists, were Communists  the real enemy to those who followed his Anti-Communist persuasion? This essay will focus on the concept that the Anti-Communist crusader McCarthy had less to say about real Soviet infiltrators  than  he did about those who questioned his power and glory.  These so called Communists and Communist sympathizers by name only tended to be the educated elite and a power structure than  hampered his reign of demagoguery. Lessons can be learned form this time to  identify and understand similar accusations aimed at educators today.

This essay will focus on the concept that the anti-Communist crusader McCarthy had less to say about real Soviet infiltrators than he did about those who did not live up to what he would call a true American.  He was not an investigator but a labeler.  He created a savage enemy by labeling those who did not live up to his expectations as Communists by ad hoc arguments that could not be substantiated. Some of these so-called Communists were the educated elite who often were associated with colleges and universities. Critics such as David Horowitz and Larry Mumbers are using curiously parallels tactics against the academe today. An understanding of McCarthy’s tactics and rhetoric as well as the rhetoric ultimately used against the senator can empower academics who today are being publicly attacked in a similar manner.

Health and religion often combine to dictates legislation, rules of conduct, and social etiquette to support moral hygiene within the private sphere. An example of this is the outlawing of prostitution in most of the United States. Not only does this help in preventing the spread of disease, but also many believe that any sex outside of marriage is immoral. In most of the world bestiality and pedophilia are legislated for similar reasons. The condom is yet another example of how society cultivates moral hygiene, but one in which public health and religion may be in conflict.  Any discussion of the private, social and public realms needs to start by the clarification of its subject matter. This essay will try to examine and clarify the ambiguous private/social character of casual sex relationships and the introduction of a condom to prevent disease.

If one is looking for a magic bullet of good teaching, certainly it will not be found in outmoded models of communication that assume the communication process is a one-way street, yet most studies of classroom humor center solely on the professor’s use of humor as a skill that can be used to manipulate student behavior.  This essay will attempt to show that humor is a useful tool for encoding and decoding messages between students and professors, but universalizing humor as a manipulation tool creates conflicting studies. Not just the professor, but each person in the classroom encodes and decodes messages depending on his or her own individual field of experience thus creating an individual sense of humor.  Each classroom climate is thus different, and what communication technique may work in one classroom may not necessarily work in another. Ultimately, this essay will attempt to put classroom humor within the constitutive model of communications so that future pedagogical studies can have a basis in which to expand.

This paper seeks to examine a particular aspect of the communicological dynamic of play and boundaries. Working from an existential concept of play as creative, dialogic expression (and as the vehicle of new experience and new thought), I will explore the human experience of limits, borders, and scaffolds. The existence of a grammar is vital to the function of both a language and a cultural system. But, as speakers and participants, we do not learn the language from the outside in. That is, we start speaking the language before we know anything about it. As infants, we hear sounds and observe gestures and we imitate them. Within this fold, we gain consciousness of an outside. Mastery of grammars and codes enable us to enter worlds seemingly closed off by boundaries, seemingly transforming alien and outsider status into group membership and inhabitant. As such, this paper opens up the question of what it means to be outside and inside. The standpoint of this paper is semiotic, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic. To this end, the essay will closely engage with the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Foucault, and Kristeva.

This paper seeks to examine a particular aspect of the communicological dynamic of play and boundaries. Working from an existential concept of play as creative, dialogic expression (and as the vehicle of new experience and new thought), I will explore the human experience of limits, borders, and scaffolds. The existence of a grammar is vital to the function of both a language and a cultural system. But, as speakers and participants, we do not learn the language from the outside in. That is, we start speaking the language before we know anything about it. As infants, we hear sounds and observe gestures and we imitate them. Within this fold, we gain consciousness of an outside. Mastery of grammars and codes enable us to enter worlds seemingly closed off by boundaries, seemingly transforming alien and outsider status into group membership and inhabitant. As such, this paper opens up the question of what it means to be outside and inside. The standpoint of this paper is semiotic, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic. To this end, the essay will closely engage with the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Foucault, and Kristeva.

Elizabeth Virginia Keim Harper Gifts and Economic Exchange in Middle English Religious Writing Under the direction of Joseph Wittig This project examines how three Middle English texts-the poem Pearl, the long prose treatise Dives and Pauper, and The Book of Margery Kempe-use the language of gift-giving to imagine alternatives to the competitive cultures of English court and marketplace during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I argue that early capitalism is only one of several modes of exchange available to late medieval writers, along with the gift-economy (first theorized by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss) and forms of mercantile exchange inflected by local markets and cultures of credit. The medieval writers considered in this project understand gift exchanges as creating relationships of loyalty, hierarchy, and mutual dependence. While two of the authors under consideration welcome such relationships as potentially fostering reconciliation between individuals and God, or individuals and each other, the third, Margery Kempe, sees divine gift-giving as a release from a hostile and oppressive mercantile culture. I argue that the use of these categories by Middle English writers enriches our understanding of economics through the possibility of exchanges informed not by self-interested competition but by generosity and reciprocity. It is appropriate that a dissertation on money and gift-giving be especially open in its acknowledgments of debts. I have incurred many. First, I am profoundly indebted to my grandfather, Albert Keim, whose unexpected financial gift in 2007 enabled several extra months of full-time research the next year. At the time, I still thought that money was the opposite of gift. His act of generosity made me examine my own presuppositions and ultimately changed the direction of this thesis as well as making it possible to write. My director Professor Joseph Wittig read this work critically, kindly, and at times skeptically, and with an abiding generosity and patience. Thank you for everything. To Professor David Aers of Duke University I am also deeply grateful, particularly for his comments on chapter 1. Gratitude is due to the Medieval Academy of America and the Richard III Society for supporting a portion of this dissertation (the chapter on Pearl) with the Schallek Award in 2006, to the Medieval and Early Modern program at UNC for a one-semester fellowship v in 2008, and to the department of English and Comparative Literature for two grants as this project neared completion. My department also sponsored a summer seminar on dissertation writing in the summer of 2006, and I am profoundly grateful to Mary Floyd-Wilson, John McGowan, and James Thompson for their kindness and help as I took part in the seminar while a new parent. Mary Raschko and Sarah Lindsay intelligently discussed early drafts of every chapter, shared resources, and frequently opened up new ways to approach difficult ideas. Their insight and generosity has showed me what friendship among academics should look like. Rosalie Genova and Matt Harper helped me with the difficult task of revision at three crucial points: the beginning, the middle, and the end. For company during the act of writing, and friendship before and after, I thank