http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/ speculations :: literary theory. cultural studies. media. power. art. philosophy. film. pop culture. en-us 2005-12-05T10:25:36-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/013243.html Despite the fact that this blog was never approved by a scholarly review board or even by peers or professors, I receive numerous comments asking for further advice and research on the topics I've discussed. This blog is a fairly... Kate Cielinski 2005-12-05T10:25:36-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/009268.html With just one week left of classes, it seems like a good time to bring this chapter of my blog to a close. I’ll use this opportunity to reflect on this independent study and also to bid farewell to my... Cultural Studies Kate Cielinski 2005-05-01T16:58:28-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/009070.html I just read Jean Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra.” Whoa, baby. This stuff is out there.... Kate Cielinski 2005-04-17T17:09:08-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/008885.html “On the Audience Commodity and its Work” is an eye-opening excerpt from Dallas W. Smythe’s larger work, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada. In this entry, I want to discuss not Smythe’s theories, but his language. Smythe’s article shatters... Cultural Studies Kate Cielinski 2005-04-10T13:37:12-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/008798.html I refuse to believe that there is absolutely no work in the Pittsburgh area that is related (even vaguely) to my degree.... Lit Kate Cielinski 2005-04-06T18:07:23-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/008797.html If we had the gift of time travel, I’d take you back to my sophomore year of high school. I’d allow you to perch on the edge of a window looking into my ecology class, or even into my own... Cultural Studies Kate Cielinski 2005-04-06T16:28:16-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/008581.html This week I enjoyed Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” – a piece that offers a lovely continuation of Barthes’s work with semantics. In this article, Hall explores the relationship between encoding and decoding messages and explains how television audiences interpret television in... Cultural Studies Kate Cielinski 2005-03-28T18:25:33-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/008338.html Guy Debord’s “The Commodity as Spectacle” is a nice follow-up to McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message.” While McLuhan stated that the medium is a vehicle for the transportation of the message, Debord seems to be saying that there IS... Cultural Studies Kate Cielinski 2005-03-13T16:47:15-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/008258.html I’ve recently discovered the best (or worst) way to deter future educators from the world of teaching: Read blogs.... Kate Cielinski 2005-03-10T13:04:15-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/007899.html When studying Marx and Engels’ “The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas,” Dr. Arnzen and I discussed how machinery gained an almighty power during the industrial revolution. As machinery replaced the human worker’s role in the factory, people were driven... Cultural Studies Kate Cielinski 2005-02-27T16:46:47-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/007756.html Today I received my acceptance letter from Carnegie Mellon's graduate program in Literary and Cultural Studies! :D I'm absolutely thrilled and giddy right now, and I wanted to share the good news with anyone in the blogosphere.... Kate Cielinski 2005-02-22T16:39:45-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/007726.html Hunter S. Thompson, dead at 67.... Kate Cielinski 2005-02-21T08:48:15-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/007699.html Do I sense a tiny bit of optimism? Over the past several weeks, I’ve read some incredibly dismal takes on culture, class, and society. After last week’s experience with Horkheimer and Adorno, I’d given up all of my hope (which... Cultural Studies Kate Cielinski 2005-02-20T17:28:22-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/007507.html This week, I waded through Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Like Walter Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno are critical of the mass reproduction of art because under the circumstances of mechanical reproduction, art ceases... Cultural Studies Kate Cielinski 2005-02-13T13:04:35-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/KateCielinski/007337.html For this week I read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” I was familiar with this essay because I had read part of it in my “Philosophy of Art” class last spring. Before I... Cultural Studies Kate Cielinski 2005-02-06T15:14:14-05:00