The question of post-modern studies tends to focus on reconciling seeming paradoxes in society, culture, history, and literary criticism. These paradoxes–or questions–stem from a constantly changing, fluid sense of truth and knowledge in contemporary culture. Our senses of identity, truth, and understanding are constantly being altered by everything from political rhetoric to entertainment. For my purposes I will focus on the entertainment industry, and what factors/discourses/theories/trends have adapted themselves to the “postmodern condition.” One recent cultural phenomena in the entertainment industry is the consumer infatuation with zombies. The film director George A. Romero can be credited with igniting within the American consumer this zombie infatuation. Romero produced “night of the living dead”–the seminal zombie film–in the late 1960’s. He became self-aware of the ironic zombie/human/consumer satire in the late 70’s with his follow-up film “Dawn of the Dead” which practically set in motion the zombie craze that has continued through to today. I found a few articles that adopt post-modernism to the entertainment industry–particularly in the realm of materialism and commodification–and i found two specific articles that delve into the zombie trend that has consumed american culture and ask what implications this trend has on contemporary discourses. “Eating ‘Dawn’ in the Dark” by A. Loudermilk and “A Zombie Manifesto: the non-human condition in the era of advanced capitalism” by lauro/embry are two articles which attempt to thresh out the implications of zombie-ism in a materialistic/capitalist society. The satire is obvious (…in dawn of the dead the zombies are walking around a shopping mall…) but the social ramifications of this concept has far reaching impacts. The popularization of zombie culture can be seen as the creation of a new ontic (i.e. “real”) entity in american society–that is, the blind consumer, the mindless materialist; in a Marxist sense the consumer is becoming the commodity (corporatism!), and our individuality is being marginalized or alienated in the wake of advanced capitalism.

the literary journal Boundary 2 is intended for people who are interested in literary theory. The quartly review of literary theory is put out by Duke University Press, which accredits the journal with all the professional stature of Duke. The writers can be professors of linguistics and literature at Duke or at other universities, and they have open calls for submission meaning that anyone who has enough critical thinking capicaity could potentially write for the journal. The readers are no doubt a small populus of literary students and teachers. It offers subscriptions primarily to other institutions which idicates that this journal is inteded for readership by the scholarly elite. The journal focuses on a specific feild of literary theory after post-modernism, and attempts to work out some of the cultural and historical dilemas posed by post modernism and deconstructionism. Some current topics include issues of performativity in linguistics and poetry after 1975. To address cultural issues one author did a reading of “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. Qustions such as these are used to expalin cultural discourses and are fundementally a philosophy of language which can help us better understand the society in which we live.

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Engliterarium is a post for students of English Literature, like myself. The driving force of the blog seems to be less an “argument” and more of a discussion, or even summaries of major works from Gilgamesh to contemporary fiction. In the field of fictional writing traditional arguments are less apparent than in other modes of writing such as essays or orations. For example, one post relates the body of work of Ernest Hemingway, and it delves into a concept that Hemingway proliferated called “the code hero.” The writer argues that Hemingway’s protagonists follow a code of conduct outlined by Hemingway as a fictional model of himself, perhaps, or more likely as an ideal form of a gentleman. Hemingway was maturing as a writer through the two World Wars and often sets his novels in a rather bleak, even pessimistic world. The “Code” dictates how Hemingway’s protagonists respond. This blogger argues that Hemingway imbued all of his protagonists with a model of “grace under pressure,” in which the hero is still able to act with courage and honor despite the world around him.

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Response to Bitzer’s “Rhetorical Situation”

2. According to Lloyd Bitzer a “genuinely rhetorical audience” is one that possess the capacity to enact change. A rhetorical situation, by Bitzers account, includes an exigence, or an urgency of some kind, and it follows that whatever problem arises needs a solution. In rhetoric the speaker is responsible for presenting the problem or the question, but it is the audience that is responsible for enacting the necessary change. In this sense an audience is pragmatic. A static audience is a useless audience as rhetoric is called into existence to perform some task.For example, the general audience that sits and observes a court trial is not part of the rhetorical audience insofar as they are not able to affect the outcome of the verdict. The jury or the judge, on the contrary, are directly responsible for the outcome of the trial and are therefore members of the rhetorical audience.

7. The constraints of utterances in discourse change case by case. In the example of the Trobriandi fisherman the rhetoric is immediate. The necessity to catch fish–for survival– and to collaborate with a team of fishermen cannot wait on long utterances, the fish would already be gone by the time a complete sentence was spoken. In this situation it is necessary for the speakers and the audience to be concise, clear, and short in their utterances. The language that the fishermen developed was out of their need to react quickly. The fishermen’s language almost reflects the rapid nature of the fish themselves; if a fish were slow moving in the water, leaving plenty of time for the fisherman to think and react, then the discourse that emerges would probably be longer than the simple quick sentences that the people of the Trobriand Highlands have developed especially for the craft of fishing.

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