This paper explores the work of an ongoing research project at University College Cork (UCC) which has sought to further the understanding of students in the BA Early Childhood Studies (BAECS) programme on issues of global diversity, set within childhood contexts. It tracks the process of development of the project thus far, highlighting key…

Focusing on documentary elements, this study examines the film content and film techniques of 681 motion pictures produced in the United States prior to 1904. Analysis of films by type, subject matter, and trends in subject matter shows that one-third of the early films are documentary in type and three-fourths of the films use subject matter of a…

The six articles in this collection explore the following topics relating to rhetoric: the distinction between the truth value and the exchange value of a message and between the signifier and the signified in a message; the rhetoric of silence in modern fiction; the way in which readers are influenced not only by what writers say but by how they…

Film is not often taught for itself and by itself; it is too often viewed as the handmaiden of literature. More often than not it is taught in English departments because: (1) like novels, poems, plays and philosophical arguments, it is a humanistic text; (2) film writers and directors have historically turned to literary texts as their source…

Rhetorical theorists since Socrates have advocated a rhetoric that reveals truth and avoids concealment. This tradition rests, however on the questionable epistemological assumptions that data exist prior to the linguistic formualtion of them and that such data can be articulated in objectively verifiable discourse. In opposition to this point of…

The idea that rhetoric might operate in epistemologically significant ways was first presented by Plato. This paper argues that the heart of Plato's conception of epistemic discourse is a recognition of the centrality of intrapersonal rhetoric. Through a careful study of Platonic writing, particularly the "Phaedrus," three principal…

A psychological/ritual model of criticism is used to examine the movie "The Deer Hunter" as a rhetorical event in which males undergo psychological change through their war and postwar experiences. The critical model depends on understanding a Jungian interpretation of the human psyche, the form and function of initiation rituals, and…

The purpose of this essay is to examine philosophy, history, sociology, and rhetoric with an eye toward demonstrating that the rhetorician is at least as well equipped to deal with the concept "movement" as other writers with different training. Rhetoricians have been preoccupied with moving men and not societies. A…

Intended as an examination of both the novel and the film, this study analyzes the themes and images of "Slaughterhouse-Five." The study is divided into three sections: a thematic analysis of the novel; an examination of the images and camera techniques in the film; and a discussion of similar themes in an effort to show how they are…

In a collaborative effort in teaching literary analysis, two professors aimed to make the usually seamless act of reading visible and ideologically bound by emphasizing the constructed nature of interpretation. A course was pieced together that asked questions about literature, that assumed that both students and teachers are subjects constructed…

A University of Calgary seminar in dramatic criticism, intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, connects dramatic criticism with actual performance. In the first of a flexible series of units, students explore the meaning of criticism and learn where criticism is found. The second unit focuses on dramatic criticism as a…

This paper explores two ways in which myth operates in and informs the structure of "Absalom, Absalom!": (1) the suggestion of mythic import created by direct parallels with a Biblical myth, and (2) the creation of a modern myth through the accumulation of oral histories, oral interpretations, and oral revisions of the major story--that…

Despite Stanley Fish's assertion that the interpretive communities basic to his theory of literary and legal interpretation are "engines of change," it seems clear that in Fish's conception of change, "plus ca change, c'est plus la meme chose." In particular, Fish denies that the legal profession can achieve the more…

Since narrative forms help provide the rules and contexts for guiding human behavior, film and television offer excellent sources for the study of rhetoric in the college classroom. Kenneth Burke, Ernest Bormann, and Erving Goffman are all theorists, working from a "dramaturgical" perspective, who disuccuss the powerful role of the media…

"Fantasy-theme analysis" suggests that the individual and collective dramatizations of a group's goals, scope, and activities--the group's conceptualized reality, or fantasy theme--can be used to study social movements. Based on the notion of fantasizing in small groups, this analytic approach provides a method of discovering how…