Inventing Culture: A Rhetoric of Social Codes
Gary M. Heba
- School: Purdue University (0183)
- Degree: Ph.D.
- Date: 1992; pp: 226
- Advisor: Berlin, James
- Source: DAI-A 53/09, p. 3130, Mar 1993
- Subjects: Education, Language And Literature (0279); Cinema (0900); Education, Sociology Of (0340)
- ProQuest Document Number:
- ISBN:
- UMI Number: AAT 9301309
Abstract:
-
The dissertation provides a theory and method for teaching cultural critique in composition courses.
The purpose of this approach is to provide students with heuristics for interpreting the cultural
information they receive from various media sources, such as television and movies. I argue for using
such an approach in composition because these sources of information heavily influence the development
of students' social identities, yet students often lack strategies for understanding or critiquing
those identities. The heuristics supplied in this project are intended to help students see how their
social identities (in terms of race, class, gender and age) are formed by images as well as by words,
and that the images function rhetorically as a language of visual codes. I demonstrate how students
can use the heuristics to engage in a cultural analysis of the social codes in popular movies.
The project is an initial step in a research agenda aimed at understanding the impact of both new
and existing media technologies on cultural literacy and writing, and at forming theoretical and
practical foundations for the teaching of media literacy in composition courses.
Dissertations
We post the dissertation abstracts
our graduates enter into ProQuest's
database of Dissertations and Theses (and link to 24-page previews as available).
Those at Purdue can locate the full texts through the Purdue Library.