Advertising, as the early agency Lord and Thomas put it, is "salesmanship in print." It is just that simple, just that complex. Understanding advertising entails understanding the difference between personal and printed or broadcast communication; the differences entailed in the "decontextualization" of thought and feeling that systems of mass communication make possible. With the invention of writing in human history, anthropologist Jack Goody observes, "Speech is no longer tied to an occasion: it becomes timeless. Nor is it attached to a person; on paper, it becomes more abstract, more depersonalized." For Goody, this opens the way to science, to the growth of criticism, and to a more tolerant attitude toward one's own frame of reference. But the same forces that enable people to see themselves as individuals independent of social and traditional contexts make people susceptible to the appeals of mass media, including advertising. This is an openness or susceptibility qualitatively different from the householder's vulnerability to the direct sales pitch. Among other things, it connects the consumer not only to an item for sale and a person selling it but to an invisible, yet present, audience of others attuned to the same item for sale and the same symbols used to promote it. The advertisement, like the sales talk, links a seller to a buyer. Unlike the sales talk, it connects the buyer to an assemblage of buyers through words and pictures available to all of them and tailored to no one of them. Advertising is part of the establishment and reflection of a common symbolic culture.

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Advertising as Capitalist Realism

It was over thirty years ago this summer that I, Deanne Bogdan, the senior member of this writing team, sat in the balcony of the theatre of the Canadian Stratford Shakespearean Festival, where I witnessed my very first live performance of The Merchant of Venice. Having studied the play in high school and at university, I had just finished teaching it to first-year secondary school students, and that day I delighted in the powerful springing to life of the characters on stage before me. The role of Shylock was played by the legendary Czech actor Fredric Valk, who electrified his audience with a portrayal of dignity and grandeur. Riveted into silence by the power of Valk’s delivery of the famous “I am a Jew. . . . Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech in Act III, I was presented with another drama of a somewhat different sort: at the conclusion of that soliloquy, a middle-aged man in the fourth row leapt to his feet, fist defiant, uttering a piercingly anguished “No! No! No! . . .” This speech occurs just after Salarino asks Shylock what would be accomplished by insisting upon an actual pound of flesh, whereupon Shylock replies: To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not

Reintegrating Sensibility: Situated Knowledges and Embodied Readers

One way of trying to establish connections between the humanities and urban planning is to explore some of the meanings of planning within the philosophical and cultural contexts of modernity and postmodernity. Modernists call it urban planning; postmodernists call it urban design. The difference signifies a transition, from the twentieth-century modernist ideal of large-scale, technical, and efficient city plans, and the International Style of functionalist, no-frills architecture, guided by the 'less-is-more' and 'form follows function' aesthetic of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to a late twentieth-century postmodernist conception of urban life as being highly resistant to this approach. Urban design is preoccupied instead with a collage or pastiche of past styles within a fragmented, ephemeral, diverse environment. Derrida, for example, sees collage/montage as the essential form of postmodern discourse.

The Modern/Postmodern Divide and Urban Planning

Supervisory Committee Dr. Robert Graham (Faculty of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction) Supervisor Dr. David Blades (Faculty of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction) Departmental Member Dr. Kathy Sanford (Faculty of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction) Departmental Member Dr. Darlene E. Clover (Faculty of Education, Department of Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies) External Examiner This M.A. thesis is a narrative inquiry into a westerner’s personal stories of teaching and living in Thailand. It narrates the experiences of becoming an ajarn (a teacher), but moreover an ajarn farang (a white teacher) in a Thai university. As International Education programs are largely supplemented with western-developed curricula and teachers, what are the implications for a western teacher when material and pedagogy fails in a new cultural situation? How can a teacher reconcile feelings of power (as a perceived education authority) and powerlessness (as a cultural foreigner)? This narrative inquiry explores the role of story to make meaning out of otherwise uncertain situations. The stories are about experiences deemed emblematic of tensions and ideas employed by multiculturalism, postcolonialism, phenomenology, and transformative education. These discussions aim to expose and exploit borders of experience that exist for reasons of culture, colonialism, location, and race. The transformative exercise of exploring spaces between borders recognizes that people are characters inside one another’s stories, which thereby expands boundaries of identity to anticipate and embrace moments of uncertainty that can inspire innovative pedagogy because of cultural difference, and not in spite of it.

Becoming ajarn: A narrative inquiry into stories of teaching and living abroad

This thesis investigates the Brazilian television mini-series as a cultural form in the media landscape of Brazil, examining it as a reflection of the political, cultural and social history of Brazil The research question asks in what ways does the Brazilian television miniseries represent continuity and change in Brazilian national culture, values and identity In this thesis, I construct a theoretical framework based on two strands of the concept of hybridity: the sociocultural dimensions of hybridity in the postcolonial context, and the textual-generic implications of hybridity for popular texts, their producing institutions,and their readers and viewers Methodologically, my sample consists of 41 mini-series from a twenty-five year production history I also engage with press commentary on the mini-series and conduct interviews with mini-series creators The analysis examines the discourses that these sources produce in tandem with tools from television studies In this study, I find that Brazilian national culture is represented by geography and gender Geography serves as a physical and symbolic mode of representation in the mini-series We witness historical and contemporary negotiations of the temporal and spatial divides that separate the foreign from the Brazilian, and we often follow stories about ‘becoming Brazilian’ Gender appears through a practice-based discourse that informs the difference between the emotional and educational dimensions of the genre Gender also appears in the mini-series narratives through the archetypes of sufferer and malandro, who in turn reflect the transgressions and the limits of gendered representations in Brazilian popular culture In relation to national values, I find a continuous dialectical exchange between authority and resistance in the mini-series’ historical and contemporary representations
of Brazil Not only do authority and resistance transcend the value frameworks of class, family, morals and politics in the mini-series narratives, but they also inform the ways in which creators assert their position in the space of Brazilian television production Critics express resistance to the narratives and the institutions producing the mini-series as well, which enables us to recognize a wariness of the historical tendency of Brazilian television to insert its values into the public sphere Finally, I find that Brazilian national identity is represented by a mix of foreign and national traditions in the mini-series form, and by strategies that differ from conventional narrative modes These qualities demonstrate the persistence of tensions between the foreign and the national and imitation and originality that have defined negotiations with modernity in Brazil, but they also show how these tensions have shifted inward to reflect Brazil’s changing awareness of its role on a global stage In addition to the social, cultural, political and institutional dimensions of Brazilian experience that this study reveals through the mini-series, it adds to knowledge on the ways in which cultural forms enter and shape public discourse about nationhood

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Dudley Flamm

Papers

The Modern Century