Carl Couch: Bridging Sociology and Communication

The article documents how Carl Couch used a sociological approach to conceptualize, analyze, and interpret the communication phenomena studied. It is argued that Couch's analyses offered a thorough sociological discussion and comprehensive understanding of communication issues by relating them to the study of social relationships. One major contribution of Couch's works in communication is his analyses of information technologies. Couch demonstrated the reciprocal relationships between information technologies and social structures. He corrected the technological deterministic flaw in Harold Innis' and Marshall McLuhan's work to demonstrate the interface between information technologies and social structures. To further illustrate the insights of Couch's theses, a study of the experiences of college students with Walkman listening and another study of the Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers' Club are considered.     

The Couch Project

Carl Couch had a distinctive project. He was a man of distinctive character. In this commentary, I first describe the Couch project and then discuss how the project was interwoven with the character of its author. I then discuss “Oh, What Webs Those Phantoms Spin” in the context of Carl's larger project and close with a brief discussion of New Iowa School research after Carl Couch.     

A Quiet Catharsis of Comprehension: A Poetic for Paul

Paul Rock is a leading UK interactionist, author of The Making of Symbolic Interactionism and a number of ethnographies on the UK criminal justice system. He was professor of sociology at the London School of Economics until his retirement in July 2008. At his retirement, Ken Plummer presented the following poem to him. The words are largely those of Paul himself, along with a few of his older intellectual companions (meaning mainly Dewey, James, and Mead). Thus this poetic is Paul's words reconstructed and reflected back to him.     

Couch Revisited: A Theoretical Treatment of The Information‐Technological Media of Imgur,Reddit, and Twitter

In this paper, I argue that unique locations of digital interactions constitute distinct information‐technological media. I first apply a close reading of Couch's ( 1995a ) work to digital sociology, and then analyze three popular social media networks: www.Imgur.com , www.Reddit.com , and www.Twitter.com . I close with a theoretical application of Couch's paradigm for analyzing the qualities of information technologies.     

The eye of war: Images of destruction in Virilio and Bataille

In this paper I compare the works of Paul Virilio and Georges Bataille through a discussion of their theories of vision, the image, and destruction. The first section of the paper is a consideration of Virilio's philosophy of speed (dromology) that turns off an interpretation of Theodore Géricault's 1819 work, The Raft of Medusa, moves through a discussion of the Greek mythology of the Gorgon, and ends with an analysis of contemporary military technology. In the second part of the paper I explore Bataille's critique of ocularcentrism through an examination of his famous novel Story of the Eye and a consideration of his concepts of the pineal eye, the limit experience, and the labyrinth. The final section of the paper contrasts the theories of Virilio and Bataille through an examination of the political implications of their ideas about vision, the image, and destruction.     

'The look of hope or the look of sadness': Robert Frank's dialogical vision

Abstract

This article examines the work of Robert Frank with reference to his seminal photographic work, The Americans, and its relationships to his later post-1970s images. It argues that the 'outside eye' he brought to the US post-war consensus offered him a new comparative critical position and represented a fundamental, counter-cultural shift in the tradition of documentary photography. This vision formed around Frank's multiple 'dialogues', with the US social landscape, with earlier traditions of documentary and 'street' photography in Europe and the USA, and with the Beat generation's radical challenges to dominant post-war values. This 'moment' of overlapping and interconnected relations forms the basis for this discussion of Frank's importance as a 'political' commentator whose work has influenced generations of photographers and shares much with those writers who emerged as the Beats.     

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Abstract

Although his obedience research will always remain Stanley Milgram's most important work, his involvement with the social psychology of the city occupied a much larger portion of his professional career. This article traces the evolution and intensification of Milgram's interest in cities, starting with his pre-professional years, through his early research at Harvard, culminating in his multifaceted engagement with urban psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. There, as head of the social psychology program, he was able to infuse it with an urban emphasis. He created and taught a variety of courses on urban psychology and got his students involved in a potpourri of experiments comparing behavior in cities and towns. Those experiments provided much of the substance for Milgram's seminal article in Science, “The experience of living in cities,” in which he also introduced the theoretical concept of stimulus overload to help account for the city-small town differences he and his students found. This article evaluates the overload concept and concludes with Milgram's overarching legacy for the study of city life.     

Time and mobility in the writing of Charles W. Chesnutt

Abstract

This article considers the elusiveness and ambivalence that characterize Chesnutt's writing in terms of the author's imaginative efforts to probe beyond the historical circumstances that condition and frame his authorship. Noting the focus on figures of absence and illegibility in recent criticism of Chesnutt, I examine the notion of a self in the process of uprooting itself that appears to preoccupy much of his fiction. In a close reading of Chesnutt's journals and his essay on 'Superstitions and Folklore of the South', I elaborate Chesnutt's conception of a literary voice as emerging from a context of commodification and contestation and oriented on a moment of posterior reception. I then discuss how this concept of a detachable voice informs Chesnutt's exploration of a transplantable self and an understanding of freedom in terms of a re-imagined social bond. This discussion focuses on the ways Chesnutt, in some of his short stories and in The House Behind the Cedars, evokes a passage from a condition of bondage to a capacity for multiple and variable attachments.     

Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

Inequalities,Democracy, and Fieldwork in the Chicago Schools of Yesterday and Today

Barriers to public discourse and participation in a democracy were central to the social reform concerns of Mead. Urban ethnographies of the last thirty years that are associated with the University of Chicago and the Chicago School contribute to this aspect of Mead's work. These ethnographies help to illuminate how extreme poverty and racism affect public discourse between groups. The Chicago tradition linked to the work of Park and Wirth has emphasized the importance of persistent inequalities and a lack of public discourse and participation rather than a symbolic interactionist approach that emphasizes the ability of people to create a place for themselves in an open, fluid world. Through field research in poor, often minority urban communities, the sociologists linked more closely to the former group have explored issues of the maintenance of patterns of extreme inequalities, the muting of public dialogue, and blockages to participation while maintaining a focus on the agency of the poor and their efforts to create their social worlds.     

'Becalmed on Strange Waters': Wordsworth,Reagan and Late Ashbery

Abstract

This essay presents an analysis of 'A Wave', the watershed poem of Ashbery's later career, as a Wordsworthian response, in the medium of the romantic crisis poem, to the rise of Reagan and neo-liberalism. 'A Wave' was composed between 1982 and 1984 amid drastic changes to US domestic and foreign policy that aggravate the necessity for a change in poetic stance from the newly 'central' American poet Ashbery had become. In this context, the relationship is explored between 'A Wave' and a poet similarly engaged in articulating crises of social conscience as part of a more specific development of poetic personality. 'A Wave', then, is read as a reading of Wordsworth's Prelude. In this, the particular stylistic issue of Ashberyan metaphor is raised, as 'A Wave', for the first time within Ashbery's reading of romanticism, begins to position irony at the centre of romantic metaphor. Finally, I conclude that the result of Ashbery's wavering crisis poem is a positioning of style as the ultimate determinant of social self-identity.     

Robert W. Cox and the Idea of History: Political Economy as Philosophy

Abstract

Within the discipline of international political economy (IPE), the work of Robert Cox is usually associated with the tradition of historical materialism, especially its Gramscian-inspired version. In this paper, however, I explore some of the less visible elements of Cox's thought. In particular, I highlight a variant of historicism which, although not without a connection to Gramsci's conception of the philosophy of praxis and absolute historicism, is more fully aligned with the work of Collingwood, Vico, Braudel, and Carr. I identify this as a variant of historical idealism, and I suggest that it is this element of his thought which provides a deep intellectual coherence to his work across the different stages of his career. Furthermore, I argue that this use of the idea of history distinguishes Cox's approach from more radical and constructivist accounts of world order, and allows him to connect his framework of historical structures to his method of diachronic change, which centres ultimately on his conception of intersubjectivity. I close by suggesting that Cox's interest in civilizations is deeply connected to these formative historicist influences, which in turn helps to account for why his later work resonates less well with much contemporary historical materialist IPE analysis.     

Moses and nation-building Zora Neale Hurston's Moses,Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European

Abstract

This article examines the significance of the representation of Moses as an Egyptian in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European. Pairing Hurston and Said continues Said's project of seeing authors 'contrapuntally', so exposing imperialism as a neglected, if submerged, context for Hurston's response to nationalism in Moses. I argue that Hurston's novel cannot be read as a straightforward critique of race-based nationalism. Although Moses is of a different ethnic group to the Hebrews he leads, Hurston's portrayal of his rule is haunted by imperialism, in which one ethnic group exploits another. In this sense, Moses, Man of the Mountain bears the signs and strains of her struggle against racialist thinking.     

The Thematic-Extrapolation Method: Incorporating Career Patterns into Career Counseling

One of Donald Super's most important contributions of career counseling was the career model, the idea that one person's sequence of work positions constitutes a whole and unique career. In 1954, he advocated a method for predicting career patterns called the Thematic-Extrapolation Method (TEM). TEM is described and summarized in three identifiable steps. Recent writings from developmental, psychodynamic, and narrative approaches to career counseling suggest innovative revisions and elaborations on the original method. A modified TEM remains a promising, but largely untried, career counseling technique.     

William Blake and America: Freedom and Violence in the Atlantic World

Abstract

In this article, I consider the absence of a general readership of William Blake's poetry in nineteenth-century Britain and compare that neglect to the American Transcendentalists' reading of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) in the 1840s. The American interest in Blake's poetry is complemented by his fascination with the events in the Atlantic World in the years culminating in the American War of Independence. I will offer a reading of Blake's America: a Prophecy (1793) showing that the Civil War fulfilled his prophecy of inevitable future conflict. This is developed first by considering Ralph Waldo Emerson's changing responses to slavery and race during the turbulent middle decades of the century, and then by addressing Walt Whitman's attempt to negotiate postbellum America. This negotiation, I argue, results in the emergence of those two powerfully conflicting strains in his mature poetry: emancipatory fervour and simultaneous despair at the violence intrinsic in liberty.     

Racial/Ethnic Minority Vocational Research Trends: An 11‐Year Update

This study extends Flores et al.'s ( 2006 ) 36‐year analysis of racial/ethnic minority (REM) career research to identify recent trends in choice of topics and leading individual and institutional contributors. The authors identified 166 articles on REM career research published from 2005 to 2015 in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, The Career Development Quarterly, the Journal of Career Assessment, and the Journal of Career Development. Of these studies, 92% were empirical, with more than three quarters of these using quantitative rather than qualitative methodology. Most frequently, the empirical studies (n = 153) were based on samples of high school (30.7%) or undergraduate (34.6%) students. The authors discuss the implications of their findings and suggest ways to expand REM career research in the future.     

Vygotsky's Stage Theory: The Psychology of Art and the Actor under the Direction of Perezhivanie

This article reviews Vygotsky's writings on arts (particularly logocentric art including the theater) and emotions, drawing on his initial exploration in The Psychology of Art and his final considerations set forth in a set of essays, treatises, and lectures produced in the last years of his life. The review of The Psychology of Art includes attention to the limits of his analysis, the mixed Marxist legacy that is evident in the book, the cultural blinders that affect his vision of the relative value of different artistic productions, the content of what he elsewhere refers to his “tedious investigations” into extant views, and the gist of what he considers to be the essence of art. Attention to his late work falls into two areas: Emotion in formal drama and emotion in everyday drama, each of which involves perezhivanie, roughly but incompletely characterized as emotional experience. The article concludes with an effort to situate Vygotsky's writing on art and emotion both within his broader effort to articulate a comprehensive developmental psychology of socially, culturally, and historically grounded individuals and social groups, and within scholarship that has extended and questioned his work as his influence has expanded beyond the clinics of Soviet Moscow.     

In Defence of Kazakshilik: Kazakhstan's War on Sacha Baron Cohen

This article explores the controversy surrounding Borat Sagdiyev—the fictitious Kazakhstani reporter whose foibles mock Kazakhstan in particular and post-Soviet culture in general. With his appearances on Da Ali G Show, Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat persona long ago became the bête noire of the Kazakhstani government. However, when Borat was selected to host the MTV Europe Music Awards, the dispute over Borat's authenticity as a Kazakhstani became an international incident. In response to his negative portrayal of Kazakshilik (Kazakhness) through the deterritorialized medium of MTV, the government of President Nazarbayev threatened Baron Cohen with legal action and brought down his web site borat.kz. Baron Cohen immediately responded in character via his new domain (.tv) and defended the actions of Kazakhstan, thus fuelling the controversy. The ongoing feud has prompted an interesting postmodern praxis—one in which a fictional persona and national government can carry on a mass-mediated dialogue. As I document the details of this ongoing conflict on the global and local levels, I seek to explain the changes in the international system which have enabled this intriguing paradox. In doing so, I attempt to draw some larger conclusions on the importance of protecting national identity in the postmodern era, especially from threats (both internal and external) which weaken a country's global brand.