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Television and language are two imperfect forms of communication that are recursively explored in the works of David Foster Wallace. Many critics have analyzed these two motifs as they function in the author’s works, however a decisive link between these two devices has yet to be fully established critically. Critic David A. Kessler suggests that television’s dominance over its audience’s consciousness has created a disconnection with reality, as it did in Wallace’s own life. Kessler coins this disconnection, “capture”, and theorizes that it led to Wallace’s own disillusionment and eventual withdrawal from life. In the thesis, I take this idea further by arguing that the capture television caused in Wallace’s own life can be meta-reflexively identified in the characters Neal (“Good Old Neon”), Julie (“Little Expressionless Animals”), and Chris Fogle (The Pale King). By close reading these short and long fictions paired with Wallace’s own criticism, treatises, and interviews, I investigate how television and language are used as imperfect forms of mediation, then assess the capture that supervenes as a result. Citing popular Wallace critics, I explore the evolution of these concepts over Wallace’s career as he strives to create a “New Sincerity”. Wallace ultimately demonstrates that language and television create a capture in the lives of his characters that distorts their perception of reality, and thus an understanding and expression of the self. It is only by becoming aware of this capture – that is hidden in plain sight – that one can learn to transcend it.

Ideological and political education is the most important part of the daily education management of college students. The methods and methods of ideological and political education are very old, and students’ learning efficiency is very low. How to use ideological and political education technology combined with modern technology for teaching has become a current research hotspot. Based on this background, this article proposes to use a new type of Internet multimedia technology interactive teaching. In the ideological and political network multimedia teaching system, use occasions suitable for IP multicast applications, such as broadcast teaching, group discussions, and on-demand courseware. Among these functions, the IP multicast mechanism is appropriately used. The adoption of the extended conversation node scales each conversation group to a multicast group, and the members of the multicast group represent the participants, which brings convenience and ease of management. Through case study analysis, it can be seen that this method can reduce the burden on the system and improve efficiency, and the number of multicast members is unlimited, which has a very good auxiliary effect on course learning. Through the Internet multimedia technology, the innovation of ideological and political education has been realized, the learning environment of students has been improved, the ways of ideological and political education have been broadened, and the education system has been better optimized.

Reading the Machine: Digital Reading Practices and the Contemporary U.S. Novel, investigates how emerging information technologies—networked devices, software programs, and algorithmic protocols—redefine cultural forms of textual production and reception. Focusing on the longstanding literary form of the novel as a point of entry, Reading the Machine develops a new account of the social, material, and aesthetic processes that constitute reading in concert with smart machines and social networks. At stake is an examination of how reading in the digital age has evolved within the larger political and technological systems of digital society. The project thus attends to pressing issues ranging from democratic participation to the racialized and unequal structure of cyberculture itself.Reading the Machine demonstrates how contemporary fictions build pathways for creative, dynamic digital reading on the part of human and nonhuman readers, even as the economic and political infrastructures of digital technologies seek to limit that potential. The four body chapters of the dissertation juxtapose fictional narratives with case studies on hardware engineering, social networks, digital campaign analytics, and artificial intelligence. Central to the argument are novels and short stories about these technologies by prominent U.S. writers: among them, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and Black Box (2012), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), and Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne (2017).

McLuhan, Herbert Marshall, The Mechanical Bride (Folklore of Industrial Man), Beacon Press, Boston, 1968, 157 pp.

This dissertation analyzes the rhetorical changes in public diplomacy in the decades since the Cold War. Public diplomacy is the deployment of culture, a form of soft power, to shape public opinion overseas. In many ways, it has portrayed a consistent image of America in these decades: a multicultural meritocracy, where our strength is in our democratic values and the ability of anyone to contribute to society. However, public diplomacy has also changed in many ways in those decades, in particular its increased reliance on popular culture to reify that image of American multiculturalism and democratic values. My project contends that these shifts are largely due to the demands of globalization and neoliberalism, to a change in perceived external threats, and advances in information technology. Yet, as it responds to the demands of neoliberalism, public diplomacy of the past few decades also benefits American neoliberal empire. Increasingly, it advances America and its people as a brand, seeking to entice foreign publics into market-based relationships. It encourages its audience to buy into American ideas and economic structures. The first chapter will ground this dissertation in a series of intellectual conversations, examining rhetoric particular to American exceptionalism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, and neoliberalism. Then, I will chronicle these shifts in a series of case studies, focusing on the products of American public diplomacy -- including radio broadcasts, magazine articles, theatrical productions, and television commercials -- in the Cold War and continuing through today. Each chapter of this dissertation will examine texts from a particular era of public diplomacy -- the Cold War, the early War on Terror, Obama’s administration, and, finally, under Trump -- and describe the continuities and discontinuities of this particularly elusive form of rhetoric.

What does Media Studies study? Recent contributions to the field have made the compelling case that everything that communicates meaning—texts, bodies, networks, environments, the world itself—is media, declaring the field’s status as the discipline of all disciplines. But media is also something historically and linguistically specific: the concept didn’t even enter common usage until the late 1950s. This dissertation examines the specificity of media’s semantic forms—mass media, the media, mediums, and mainstream media—each of which serves as the inspiration for one of its chapters. But I am no less invested in the word’s vagaries and (sometimes obscurantist) capacity: what forms of political critique and ideological mystification does \"media\" afford? Just as each chapter is defined by an iteration of the media concept, so too is it focused on a specific social formation—the intelligencia, the market, the art world, the industry—that has appropriated the media concept to reinforce its own boundaries and influence.Chapter One recovers the already dense meaning of “mass media” from a 1959 conference, hosted by the Tamiment Institute, titled “Mass Media and Mass Culture,” featuring Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, and the President of CBS Frank Stanton, among other intellectuals and industry titans. For the conference’s illustrious speakers, “mass media” was variously a boon to civic participation, a scourge inviting corporate monoculture or totalitarian social control, and a clever euphemism for commercialism. Zooming out from the high-level circumlocution of the Tamiment conference, I trace the term’s multiplying meanings (and related terms) in the New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Vogue, Ebony, Jet, ArtNews, and the Partisan Review between 1950 and 2000—a corpus of magazines that I built and analyzed using word-embedding models, with support from Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab. The results of this data collection and processing lead me to the questions that motivate each of the dissertation’s subsequent chapters.In Chapter Two, I question the historical significance of personifying media (i.e. the media) for midcentury black intellectuals—even as communication theorists like Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton were dispelling the notion of a singular, centralized media as a myth perpetuated by Cold War paranoiacs. Beginning with Harold Cruse’s call to Black intellectuals to “revolutionize the cultural apparatus” and “neutralize CBS, NBC, and ABC,” I use archival and textual analysis to reexamine the complex relationship between Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison—often seen as ideological and stylistic opponents—in terms of their different political and rhetorical strategies for confronting, revolutionizing, and neutralizing “the media,” singular and hegemonically white.Chapter Three moves from the Black press and publishing to art criticism and museums. I demonstrate that in the very decades that the “media concept” entered the vernacular, the “medium concept” began to shape art criticism, art history, and museum studies. It became standard practice, for example, for wall labels and catalog captions to display the medium, or material, of the work of art; and art historians and connoisseurs began to use the un-Latinate plural “mediums” to rhetorically elevate and distinguish the category of art from the imperial spread of mass “media.” This was no coincidence: mediums emerged as a category for the organization and appreciation of art as the dialectical counterpart to media, and in response to the cultural imperialism of its mass-produced forms. I analyze the cultural criticism of Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss, alongside the exhibition archives of the Museum of Modern Art. I then turn to the earliest theorists and purveyors of “camp” culture—Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford, Gore Vidal—to demonstrate that the camp sensibility worked through the mediums/media dialectic toward a self-critique of both high and low art forms.Chapter Four turns to the institutional history of American electricity companies, film studios, and broadcast networks, which in the 1970s and ‘80s stopped being called agents of “mass media” and were rechristened as tributaries of the media’s “mainstream.” In this age of conglomeration, these industries pivoted from competing for “mass audiences” to functioning as collaborators or subsidiaries, and presented the “media personality” as their friendly face. A study of eponymous TV shows of this era (from the Nat King Cole Show to the Mary Tyler Moore Show), reveals that, unlike “mass media,” agents of “mainstream media” could absorb alternative media into their flow of programming and capital. Mobilizing the logic of the “personality,” they even made racial and gender difference the face of their increasingly consolidated production.In each of these chapters, “media” bolsters a secondary concept that it also threatens to obsolesce: culture, democracy, art, diversity. So, too, with the humanities—as Media Studies offers itself anew as a macro-disciplinary means of understanding our world.

This thesis reads T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as a dramatization of the progress of the spiritual life as elaborated within early Christianity, moving from praxis, where the soul engages in ascetical practice in an effort to cleanse itself of passions; through the contemplation of nature, which aims at an understanding of the created world in its cycles of generation and decay; to theologia, or the mystical union with God. The focus in this essay is with the second stage in particular and seeks to better account for Eliot’s representation of nature by grounding it in the ascetical and mystical traditions, primarily but not exclusively Christian, that he was most engaged with. It is argued that this deep spiritual structure undergirding the Quartets functions to make the reading experience itself a type of spiritual exercise, with the end of cleansing the doors of perception and the discernment of life and beauty amidst a universe of death.

The Vietnam War coincided with an intense period of technological change in the US that marked a significant turning point in the relationship between the citizen and the state. While computer technology found new and deadly uses on the field of battle, it also found its way into people’s homes, giving the state the means through which to monitor and control subjects like never before. While Michel Foucault describes Vietnam as ‘the gates of our world’, this thesis argues that Vietnam stands rather as the gates of our biopolitical world – a period in which Foucault’s original concept of biopolitics is reborn in the computer age. To this end, this thesis examines some of the early impacts and implications of the computerized biopolitical state, and the robotized human subject. It offers an exploration of the ways in which biopolitical ideas can be used alongside science fiction texts to interrogate the cultural tendencies of the USA during the Vietnam War period, stretching from the start of the war in 1955 through to the war’s end in 1975 and the shadow cast in the years that follow. In doing so, it charts how human subjects are complicit in the means of their own oppression, and the ethical implications of the blurred distinction between the human and the machine. Thus, it calls for a new cybernetic form of biopolitical insight – a techno-biopolitics – that integrates the robotic with current understandings of the human, the non-human and the animal, and how they are used as a means of discursive control.

The concluding chapter attempts to understand cyberpunk in its various prominent forms: American Classic cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and Japanese cyberpunk, across literature, manga and anime, along with video games, to study how the perceptions of gender, sexuality and cultural identity, shaped by various socio-political-economic concerns, have resulted in a vast body of work.This, however, raises grave concerns regarding the understanding of the very term cyberpunk, as wholly representative of merely the American form – while the Japanese form differs substantially ideologically, the common understanding of cyberpunk is unapologetically American. This raises questions regarding the Othering of all forms of cyberpunk except for the American form, and on the possibility of the same being true in line with the tendencies of Techno-orientalism, extending to the process of canonization itself.

Ella Cheever Thayer’s bestselling 1880 novel Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes begins with a “significant noise.” The noise, a rapid series of short and long mechanical emissions, comes from a telegraph sounder. Thayer’s telegraph-girl protagonist immediately wonders if the “smart operator” is a man or a woman. Finding the answer to her question means confronting what is at stake for women personally and professionally when they work on the wire. “Women, Technology, and Work in Nineteenth Century Narrative 1840-1900” analyzes texts that offered a range of ideas about who operates and uses new communication technology and contends that, like Thayer’s protagonist, they did so along gender lines. I argue that representations of new media of communication in the latter half of the nineteenth century were preoccupied with women and work. I study the material form and commercial use of three media of communication, the penny press, the daguerreotype, and the telegraph, and trace how they activated networks of discourse that plotted the co-evolution of gender and professionalism. These networks designated who benefitted and belonged in new media environments in both corresponding and contradictory ways. In a project combining a media ecology approach with a feminist lens on American literature and culture, my research examines Edgar Allan Poe’s early 1840s detective fiction alongside Margaret Fuller’s proto-feminist work Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845); Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854) alongside a subgenre I call daguerreian comedy; and Henry James’s In the Cage (1898), Ella Cheever Thayer’s Wired Love (1880), and Lida A. Churchill’s My Girls (1882) alongside popular techno-romances of the period. Exploring each narrative as a link in larger network of discourse about women, class, and work shows how our media form distinct ecologies that affect women’s public and private identities. These texts broaden our understand of the complex, ideological work carried out in narrative to understand and shape gender amidst changes facilitated by modern communication technologies and associated their professional cultures.