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  Essentials of Public Relations Management

  Edward J. Lordan

  Filling a gap in current PR literature, Essentials of Public Relations Management takes students to the next level. Designed to help students and professionals who have mastered the fundamentals of public relations, this book develops management skills needed for further career advancement. Appropriate for those in the fields of business, communications, journalism or political science, this down-to-earth study of the practical application of public relations covers: Relating to clients, Managing staff, Conducting and applying research, Coping with crises, Handling finances, Understanding the power and the problems of technology, Recognizing actual and potential legal issues, Defining professional ethics.

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  Politics, Ink: How American Editorial Cartoonists Skewer Politicians, From King George III to George Dubya

  Edward J. Lordan

  This fun and extensively illustrated book tells the story of the American political cartoon, from its origins over 250 years ago to today. Edward Lordan gives us a tour of artists, politics, media, American society, and the technology of cartooning, including the work of Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, Currier & Ives, Thomas Nast, Dr. Seuss, Pat Oliphant, Draper Hill, Tom Toles, Ted Rall, Mike Keefe, and countless others. Interviews with today's political cartoonists—including Pulitzer winners Ann Telnaes and Signe Wilkinson—go behind the art form, to show how and why we respond to editorial cartoons as well as what syndication and the Internet mean to the future of political cartooning.

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  Sports and Scandals: How Leagues Protect the Integrity of Their Games

  Edward J. Lordan

  Sports are inspiring and uplifting. They can also bring out some of the worst characteristics in human nature: narcissism, prejudice, greed. This book looks at the major sports scandals in modern American history, from the Black Sox fix of 1919 to the current concussion crisis in the NFL.

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  The Case for Combat: How Presidents Persuade Americans To Go To War

  Edward J. Lordan

  From Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush, many American presidents have used their words to garner support to go to war. What are the techniques they employed to convince citizens to get behind their president in committing to combat? Are these methods effective—or ethical?

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  Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies

  Graham MacPhee

  This radical reassessment shows how, after the Second World War, British national identity and culture was shaped in ways that still operate today. As empires declined, globalisation spread, and literature responded to these influences. As Graham MacPhee explains, postwar writers blended the experimentalism of prewar modernism with other cultural traditions. In this way, they reveal both the pain and the pleasures of multiculturalism, as they seek to cope with the shock of post-imperial downsizing.

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  The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture

  Graham MacPhee

  Visual technology saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual-now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy-have interpreted this new condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. Intellectuals-from Baudelaire to Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida-have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual, but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire's flaneur to Benjamin's arcades. The Architecture of the Visible presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary approaches to visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York-two key world cities for over two centuries-Graham MacPhee analyzes how visual technology is revolutionizing the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.

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  Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective

  Graham MacPhee and Prem Poddar

  The growing debate over British national identity, and the place of "Englishness" within it, raises crucial questions about multiculturalism, postimperial culture and identity, and the past and future histories of globalization. However, discussions of Englishness have too often been limited by insular conceptions of national literature, culture, and history, which serve to erase or marginalize the colonial and postcolonial locations in which British national identity has been articulated. This volume breaks new ground by drawing together a range of disciplinary approaches in order to resituate the relationship between British national identity and Englishness within a global framework. Ranging from the literature and history of empire to analyses of contemporary culture, postcolonial writing, political rhetoric, and postimperial memory after 9/11, this collection demonstrates that far from being parochial or self-involved, the question of Englishness offers an important avenue for thinking about the politics of national identity in our postcolonial and globalized world.

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  The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Media Management and Business

  L. Meghan Mahoney and Tang Tang

  The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Media Management and Business connects research and industry practice to offer a strategic guide for aspiring and current media professionals in convergent environments. As a comprehensive one-stop reference for understanding business issues that drive the production and distribution of content that informs, entertains, and persuades audiences, aims to inspire and inform forward-thinking media management leaders. The handbook examines media management and business through a convergent media approach, rather than focusing on medium-specific strategies. By reflecting media management issues in the information, entertainment, sports, gaming industries, contributed chapters explore the unique opportunities and challenges brought by media convergence, while highlighting the fundamental philosophy, concepts, and practices unchanged in such a dynamic environment. this handbook examines media management through a global perspective, and encourages readers to connect their own diverse development to a broader global context. It is an important addition to the growing literature in media management, with a focus on new media technologies, business management, and internationalization.

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  Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change

  L. Meghan Mahoney and Tang Tang

  Strategic Social Media is the first textbook to go beyond the marketing plans and how-to guides, and provide an overview of the theories, action plans, and case studies necessary for teaching students and readers about utilizing social media to meet marketing goals.

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  An Exalted House

  Paul Maltby

  PR man George Burghess, employed to whitewash the name of a firm linked to a fatal factory fire, suffers torments of conscience. Then a friendship with a woman, who squats in the flat above his own, points the way to the redemption he seeks. But Burghess cannot give up a hard-won career in corporate PR and, instead, descends into spiritual ruin. Through its story of a soul in crisis, "An Exalted House" brings into view the warring sides of London: the corporate zone of hostile takeovers and monuments to financial power versus an alternative zone of popular-festive breakouts and squats, presided over by the spirit of William Blake.

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  Christian Fundamentalism and the Culture of Disenchantment

  Paul Maltby

  Within the familiar clash of religious conservatism and secular liberalism Paul Maltby finds a deeper discord: an antipathy between Christian fundamentalism and the postmodern culture of disenchantment. Arguing that each camp represents the poles of America's virulent culture wars, he shows how the cultural identity, lifestyle, and political commitments of many Americans match either the fundamentalist profile of one who cleaves to metaphysical and authoritarian beliefs or the postmodern profile of one who is disposed to critical inquiry and radical-democratic values. Maltby offers a critique that operates in both directions. His use of the resources of postmodern theory to contest fundamentalism's doctrinal claims, ultra-right politics, anti-environmentalism, and conservative aesthetics informs his engagement with contemporary fundamentalist painting, spiritual warfare fiction, dominionist attitudes to nature, and a profoundly undemocratic interpretation of Christianity. At the same time, Maltby identifies some of fundamentalism’s legitimate spiritual concerns, assesses the cost of perpetual critique, and exposes the deficit of spiritual meaning that haunts the culture of disenchantment.

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  Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon

  Paul Maltby

  Critics who hold that postmodernist art is essentially non-adversarial and apolitical, Paul Maltby contends, have ignored the historical context of the postmodern focus on problems of language. In "Dissident Postmodernists", Maltby examines a major current of postmodernist fiction that can be read as a dissident response to developments of late capitalism that have transformed the field of language and communications. Among Maltby's models of dissident postmodernist writings are "Gravity's Rainbow", "The Public Burning", "Snow White" and more recent publications like "Vineland" and "Spanking the Maid". In a series of readings, he examines the ways in which these works respond to the erosion of the public sphere, the elevation of functionalist discourse, the enlargement of the state propaganda network, the corporate management of mass communications, and the diffusion of concept-poor language forms which limit social understanding. Alert to such developments, Maltby argues, dissident postmodernists such as Barthelme, Coover and Pynchon write with politicized perceptions of language and a heightened awareness of language as a medium of social integration.

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  The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique

  Paul Maltby

  In The Visionary Moment, Paul Maltby draws on postmodern theory to examine the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment, or 'epiphany', in twentieth-century American fiction. Engaging critically with the works of Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and William Faulkner, Maltby explains show the literary convention of the visionary moment promotes the myth that there is a superior level of knowledge that can redeem or regenerate the individual. He contends that this common-sense assumption is a paradigm that needs to be confronted and critiqued.

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  Standing Up, Speaking Out: Stand-Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change

  Matthew R. Meier and Casey R. Schmitt

  In recent decades, some of the most celebrated and culturally influential American oratorical performances have come not from political leaders or religious visionaries, but from stand-up comics. Even though comedy and satire have been addressed by rhetorical scholarship in recent decades, little attention has been paid to stand-up. This collection is an attempt to further cultivate the growing conversation about stand-up comedy from the perspective of the rhetorical tradition. It brings together literatures from rhetorical, cultural, and humor studies to provide a unique exploration of stand-up comedy that both argues on behalf of the form’s capacity for social change and attempts to draw attention to a series of otherwise unrecognized rhetors who have made significant contributions to public culture through comedy.

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  The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic

  Christopher Merkner

  Christopher Merkner is a Shirley Jackson for the contemporary Midwest, where the ties of family and community intersect darkly with suburban American life. In these stories, an enraged village gaslights unsuspecting vacationers and a young man delays a impending confession, fondling the nostrils of his mother’s pet pig. Sharp and uneasy, for these inheritors of tradition, that which binds them most closely—offering stability and identity and comfort—are precisely the qualities that set them back, pull them down, burden, limit, and ruin them.

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  Mirror on America: Essays and Images from Popular Culture

  Joan T. Mims and Elizabeth M. Nollen

  Mirror on America meets students where they are right now. Whether they have lived in America all their lives or have only just arrived, they can consider themselves experts in pop culture. After all, they participate in it every day. Brief, current essays and images on topics like hip-hop, our online lives, and, of course, vampires and zombies spark discussion and critical thinking. And because critical thinking should lead to solid writing, the book’s editorial apparatus gives students clear instruction and support for every step of the reading and writing process. Always engaging and always accessible,Mirror on America reflects the interests of students and the instructors who want them to become confident writers.

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  The Writer's Options: Lessons in Style and Arrangement

  Max Morenberg and Jeff Sommers

  The Writer's Options encourages readers to investigate their writing “options” through sentence-combining and rearrangement to create more sophisticated, more effective compositions. The text contains ample practice with arranging and rearranging sentences, paragraphs, and essays as a means of strengthening prose and conveying a more effective message.

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  2,001 Most Useful German Words

  Joseph W. Moser

  The ideal travel companion and at-home reference, this volume features more than 2,000 common German words, each accompanied by a brief definition, a sentence in German demonstrating proper usage, and a translation. These up-to-date terms cover 21st century digital technologies and consumer electronics, and a convenient reference section offers greetings and words related to directions, restaurant orders, and other everyday activities, plus helpful tips on vocabulary and grammar.

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  Approaches to Teaching Homer's Iliad and Odyssey

  Kostas Myrsiades

  Homer's epics usually appear first in anthologies used for the general literature courses required of most college and high school students throughout the country. His influence extends beyond the confines of English and classics departments into seminars offered in comparative literature, history, philosophy, and the social sciences. This volume in the Approaches to Teaching World Literature series describes how teachers present Homer in the classroom and convey to students the importance of his epics in Western culture.

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  Others Must Dance for the Lord Dionysus Now: a Poetic Memoir

  Kostas Myrsiades

  A poetic memoir in which mythic figures ascend from funeral spaces to stroll the village streets and descend again to light their darkened realms, of saints in wooden casings stern above the bedsheets of shuttered homes, of wrinkled men whose vineyards suck their life's wine, of wine-stained easrth and sun-dyed thighs, of returning home and leaving, again and again.

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  Reading Homer: Film and Text

  Kostas Myrsiades

  These nine new essays on Homer's epics deal not only with major Homeric themes of time (honor), kleos (fame), geras (rewards), the psychology of Homeric warriors, and the re-evaluation of type scenes, but also with Homer's influence on contemporary film. Following the introduction and an essay which sets the historical background for the epics, four essays are devoted to fresh analysis of key passages and themes while another four turn to a discussion of the film 'Troy' and Homer's influence on two other genres of American cinema.

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  Reading Homer's Iliad

  Kostas Myrsiades

  We still read Homer’s epic The Iliad two-and-one-half millennia since its emergence for the questions it poses and the answers it provides for our age, as viable today as they were in Homer’s own times. What is worth dying for? What is the meaning of honor and fame? What are the consequences of intense emotion and violence? What does recognition of one’s mortality teach? We also turn to Homer’s Iliad in the twenty-first century for the poet’s preoccupation with the essence of human life. His emphasis on human understanding of mortality, his celebration of the human mind, and his focus on human striving after consciousness and identity has led audiences to this epic generation after generation. This study is a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s 24 parts, meant to inform students new to the work. Endnotes clarify and elaborate on myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Iliad, in addition to bibliographies accompanying each book’s commentary.

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  Reading Homer’s Odyssey

  Kostas Myrsiades

  Homer’s Odyssey is the first great travel narrative in Western culture. A compelling tale about the consequences of war, and about redemption, transformation, and the search for home, the Odysseycontinues to be studied in universities and schools, and to be read and referred to by ordinary readers. Reading Homer’s Odyssey offers a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s themes that informs the non-specialist and engages the seasoned reader in new perspectives. Among the themes discussed are hospitality, survival, wealth, reputation and immortality, the Olympian gods, self-reliance and community, civility, behavior, etiquette and technology, ease, inactivity and stagnation, Penelope’s relationship with Odysseus, Telemachus’ journey, Odysseus’ rejection of Calypso’s offer of immortality, Odysseus’ lies, Homer’s use of the House of Atreus and other myths, the cinematic qualities of the epic’s structure, women’s role in the epic, and the Odyssey’s true ending. Footnotes clarify and elaborate upon myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Odyssey, in addition to the bibliographies that accompany each book’s commentary.

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  The Beat Generation: Critical Essays

  Kostas Myrsiades

  It has been fifty years since the Beats first came upon the literary scene and although the academy’s hostility toward the Beats has not completely abated, it has certainly diminished. Today mainstream publishers are adding many Beat titles to their lists, and students of Beat literature can draw upon a wealth of critical resources that have been published in the last twenty years. The fourteen critical essays gathered in this collection verify that Jack Kerouac is still the undisputed king of the Beats followed by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. At the same time, however, the Beat movement is shown to be broader and more far reaching than previously thought, encompassing names such as Oscar Zeta Acosta and William Kotzwinkle and even suggesting influences on contemporary German literature in authors like Wolf Wondratschek, Rolf Dieter Brinkman, and Jörg Fauser.

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  Karagiozis: 3 Classic Plays

  Kostas Myrsiades and Linda Myrsiades

  From the Greek Karagiozis Folk/Popular Theater are presented in new English translations, 3 classic plays to celebrate 200 years of documented Karagiozis performances in Greece. The 3 plays are: "The hero Katsandonis", "Alexander the Great and the Cursed Snake", and "Karagiozis Baker".