america adrift

As you all must be aware, the great Paul Newman recently passed on. Katie McFarlane, a graduate student? at UEA has just joined the CM blog as their first contributer with a tribute to Mr. Newman, News: Remembering Paul Newman. Drop by and visit our friends across the North Sea “little pond.” They’re just a click away.

Be careful what you wish for. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was an earnest neophyte feminist at Vassar, earnestly debating the meanings of feminism, sexism, and choice, I used to wish, earnestly, that we would have a political campaign that actually discussed these issues. And this year I finally got one. Sort of. Only the disingenuousness of the conversation we’re actually having is something that I, in my actual ingenuousness then, could never have envisioned. But democracy being what it is, and Republicans being what they are, it’s turned into something very twisted, indeed.

Who knew that French theory-hating Republicans would be such adept poststructuralists? Floating signifiers are everywhere.

by Sarah Churchwell.

I stumbled upon this terrific article by Sarah Churchwell while perusing MyDD, one of the largest progressive Democratic activist blogs on the internets. It’s also “cross-posted” over at the orange giant, Daily Kos.

I was pleasantly surprised when reading her name attached to this cross-posted blog post. Sarah Churchwell is one of our neighbors from the University of East Anglia’s School for American Studies. Her fascinating book, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, was an early inspiration for my research on popular media constructions of Al Gore.

From reading the comments, Sarah is a “newbie” in the blogosphere. But this article has gone “viral” and has potentially been read by several hundred thousand readers already. Not bad for what appears to be her first blog post? Go read the rest of the article (the original post) at the Motley Moose where she’s active in the comment thread.

Robert Hariman and John Lucaites recently posted the one year anniversary of their fantastic blog, No Caption Needed.

You can read Bent’s review of both the blog and their seminal book by the same title here.

They’re experiencing some “growing pains”, something we are familiar with here.

It’s been a year since we began this blog. We had no idea what we were getting into. The initial idea was to put up an ad for the book. Not a great idea, but then we thought that we could write a few posts to thicken the ad. After all, neither one of us had the time to do this on a regular basis. One thing lead to another, and soon we had created a monster: we loved writing the posts and seeing the audience grow, but we still didn’t have the time, so we told ourselves that we’d do it for a year and then quit. It’s been a year and we don’t want to quit, but we need to make some changes.

I encourage you to stop by and leave your comments or drop them an email, or better yet both. This is one of the little jewels out in the academic blogosphere (and a service to the public at large). Both blog and book have been a source of inspiration for me personally as I have become increasingly drawn into visual culture, semiotics and that emerging niche that Bent refers to as iconicity studies.

Best of luck and continued success with No Caption Needed.

Recently we at The Atlantic Community have been honored by a bit of attention from the excellent photo journalism and public culture blog No Caption Needed. NCN is run by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites who authored one of the only sustained books charting the emergent field of cultural iconology, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy. Hariman is a professor in the Dept. of Communication Studies at Northwestern U.; Lucaites is a professor of rhetoric and public culture at Indiana U. Together they have created an indispensable volume for anyone interested in the functions and construction of iconic images in the public sphere. Here is a reproduction of the table of contents: