John Bailes

The cause of postnatal low back pain is not clearly understood. There have been few studies performed to determine the cause, and several theories have attempted to explain the occurrence of postnatal low back pain. It is suggested that an exaggerated lumbar lordosis, laxity of the ligaments due to relaxin, biomechanical strain on the muscles and ligaments of the lumbar spine and pelvis and temporary compensatory posture are possible aetiologies of postnatal low back pain. (Calguneri et al. 1982; Bullock et al. 1987 ; Berg et al. 1988; Wisneski et al.1992: 711 ; Mantle 1994:799.)

Based on Martin Kley’s doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of Texas in 2008, Weimar and Work: Labor, Literature, and Industrial Modernity on the Weimar Left was published in 2013 as part of the series Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature. This series offers scholarly works that examine cross-cultural and national literatures. While Kley’s book clearly belongs to this category of research, it also opens up the field of “literary studies” to an examination of “written documents of low literary stature” (1), that is, texts that do not appear to be works of literature. In his introduction, Kley clarifies that “such texts” are significant for him “not simply out of fascination with their very obscurity,” but also because they allow us “to understand better the complex responses to modernity and modernization on Weimar Germany’s far left,” and to discern how the far left’s “orthodox communism” became what Kley calls “anti-authoritarian socialism” (1). Kley makes a case for the emergence of this unique political view via an analysis of workers’ correspondence and other literature during the 1920s and early 1930s. The author contextualizes this literature within the “larger social processes” (2) and aesthetic meta-discourses of the era, examining how these texts reflect and transform both industrial production and utopian ideas. At the heart of this study is the question of “industrial modernity”—especially as it is articulated and debated in relationship to the Weimar socio-economic conditions from which two critical issues emerge, rationalization and unemployment (2).

This project is a website with web texts, images, and videos that attempts to argue and demonstrate the significance of deixis in composition pedagogy, with specific focus on multimodal text-making. Each section takes up key sub-points. "Why Deixis?" answers exigency. "Deictic Space and Time" grapples with the where and when for teaching multimodal composition as well as deictic-rhetorical time. "Deictic Agency" explores how agency might be defined and used in multimodal composition. And "Deictic Discourse" suggests key theoretical considerations related to deixis in multimodal composition.

This paper explores the relationship between grammar and style in composition. These two genres of rhetoric are often expected to be performed well by student writers, yet grammar and style are rarely taught together. In this paper, I argue that Holcomb and Killingsworth's project for advancing stylistics as performance shares Kolln's call for a "rhetorical grammar" in the composition classroom. This paper offers several definitions of grammar, six close reading reviews, and over twenty-five summary reviews.

Discusses Sharon Crowley's mapping of the turn to Current Traditional Rhetoric as a retreat from classical rhetoric during the nineteenth century, demonstrating modifications to the belletristic style and locating influences in historical socio-economic events and philosophical changes based on Enlightenment thinking.

This proposal posits that rhetoric's inventiveness often eschews composition's formal boundaries, finding possibilities at the edges and in distraction, netting new insights during bouts of aimlessness and idling. Identifying diversion's creative potential in composition, this project turns to the act of doodling in the margins. Such peripheral scribbling, in a literal sense, is a well-known activity of inattentive straying, frequently employed in various writing tasks. Ironically, scrawling outside boundaries has been shown to produce fertile realizations. In addition, this seemingly purposeless (in)activity carries figurative significance, corresponding to the indeterminate act within composition's process of innovation – the very indeterminacy that makes special discoveries possible. As an apt emblem for capturing the generative work necessary for invention, doodling's trifling character embodies pre-cognitive, transgressive, and interstitial aspects of invention. To investigate these facets, this presentation explores the written scratches of four diverse figures – da Vinci, Erasmus, Emerson, and Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, by examining select doodles from each individual's work, this project maps out new directions in inventiveness: (1) how pre-cognitive emergences gain access to an obstructive consciousness; (2) how transgressive disruptions break through walls of formalism and correctness; and (3) how interstitial spaces become revealed, glittering with insights once hidden in dark layers of sedimentary thought. The combination of these mappings crosses and intersects established limits prior to that moment in rhetoric, while promoting a rhetorical fruitfulness through creative loafing and mental vacations.

Memory is mythic. It is a palimpsest layered with transformative moments, terrain stratified by life-altering experiences. Intersected, memory reveals a Deleuzean multiplicity, a new way of seeing and mythmaking. This multimodal presentation will pick up pieces of a young person’s journey from fundamentalist faith to secular liberalism, from Southern Bible Belt roots to Western cities glowing in deserts, turning divine light into Hollywood glitter. Cutting through personal, cultural, and geographical memory, this presentation will deliver an autobiographical-archetypal-sociopolitical- geospatial-mythopoeic odyssey of freedom flowering out of loss, new life fraught with difficulty, dreams shining through depths of depression. More than one tale emerges— from Bible Belt soul-winning and prayer to shimmering smog-laden ecstasies in a vast and sprawling Los Angeles to sharp clines and rapids of the Sierras. To explore these disruptive and wandering episodes, I will examine how both the transpersonal and the historical-material rise out of the breakdown of identity and generate potentials for exigency and difference—highlighting both Lucretius' clinamen and Deleuze's multiplicity as a theoretical understanding of memory bound and unbound.

This paper explores and maps how masculinity is signified as martial performance in post Cold War America. To investigate how this masculinity is currently represented, it identifies three military performances – unmanned drones, prosthetic soldiers, and unseen coffins. These tropes refigure the visible, valorous warrior who is glorified by combat sacrifice into an invisible military technician who is remote, bionic, or undead. In 1991, George H. W. Bush banned the public viewing and photographing of America's war dead, a ban that remained until 2009. Soon after 9/11, George W. Bush ordered the first unmanned drone strike, one that failed in killing Osama bin Laden. Since then, the Defense Department has invested billions into neurological and prosthetic sciences to enhance rehabilitation for PTSD victims and amputees. These three post Cold War developments may be theorized as compensating for what feminist critic Bonnie Mann refers to as an "unmanning" effect of the Vietnam War. In Sovereign Masculinity Mann argues that two narratives emerge from the Vietnam era. One calls on America to "man up" after a lost war. The other seeks to construct a new masculine ethic after a wrong war. These two narratives—of an indomitable hyper-masculine warrior versus an anti-violent "feminized" male—situate this examination of the history of the three post Cold War military tropes in a new martial performance starting in 1991 and coming forward, a performance that these narratives find paradoxically both desacralizing and satisfying.

A powerful interplay of language and imagination courses through Euripides' HELEN, raising questions about human perception, discovering mistaken identities, and playing with both dream and reality. The play places us in the realm of the surreal as Menelaus (after ten years of war and seven years of wandering with Helen) comes upon another Helen. Rhetorically, this "doppelganger" provides an OTHER that expands both reality and language, opening up contraries within the objective and generating multiplicities within an emerging intersubjective. Euripides pits language and fantasy against reality to sharpen his political and mythic critique of the Homeric tradition. Each Helen is greater or lesser than the other, redirecting meaning and value, hence changing the very nature of politics and history. The phantom version (eidolon) of Helen, for which both Greeks and Trojans had fought and died in a decade-long war, disrupts Athenian masculine ideologies, while the exiled Helen provides a spellbinding/dispelling revision for a nation misled. This rhetorical reading will demonstrate how moving from spectre (eidolon) to action (pragma) and then back again in Euripides' play both collapses meaning and dissolves personas, and yet also flows against total nihilism to refigure material relations.

“Cursing Allegiance: Performing the Oath during the 1981 Air Traffic Controller’s Strike” engages the boundaries of oath-taking and oath-breaking. Situating oath performance within one of the most important union events in modern American history, I explore how the oath operates as spectacle and sovereignty by performing the oath with the audience. Acknowledgements to Mindy Fenske, Benjamin Harley, Ragan Glover, and Kristofer Reed.

ID: 539 / Pop Culture 3: 1
Single Paper or Presentation
Topics: War and Literature, Film and Literature, Popular Culture
Trauma & Terror: Memory's Place in Christopher Nolan's _Batman_
William Bailes
University of South Carolina, United States of America
Trauma is prologue. Traumatic events can terrorize, paralyze, and even destroy individuals or societies. However, traumatic events can also ignite personal or social narratives that define new histories and social or political movements. Trauma as personally felt or socially experienced is a new concept developed only very recently in Western history. For ancient historian Herodotus, the Greek word "trauma" had several uses; it could signify a "wound" to one's body, indicate some physical "damage" to things, such as a ship, or mean a military "defeat." It is not until the late nineteenth century that "trauma" is expressed as a nervous condition of the brain, a development within psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and not until the twentieth century that "trauma" signifies a range of mental disturbances, from psycho-sexual memory loss to combat trauma and PTSD to the trauma caused by terrorism. And the list grows. This paper seeks to discover in Christopher Nolan’s BATMAN trilogy a discourse of archetypal power that utilizes a rhetoric of trauma and terror to expand on the multiplicities of trauma's effects. Far from demonizing the mentally disturbed, Nolan's BATMAN humanizes—albeit ever so darkly. As humanized, the heroes and villains come to us with shadowy complexity and multidimensional motives. Dichotomies are often blurred, and binary thinking is usually subverted. Moral ambiguities exist, and contradictions are expected. The tension between trauma and terror opens up possibilities for archetypal or mythic discourse within several regimes of power (personal, social, political, economic, and technological). As a result, the rhetoric of trauma and terror echoes, reflects, and critiques our contemporary history so that past is memory of both the fictional and the real, the powerful as well as the other.

According to Aristotle, teaching rhetoric has something to do with shoes. A problematic analogy, as will be shown, although an apt analogy since we live in a world of seemingly endless commodities. Shoe stores are dominant in terms of their diverse selections. American consumers stack dozens, even hundreds, of shoes within walk-in closets. For a modern society in which transportation is not primarily pedal, shoes offer more in style than in comfort or utility. This distinction would not be lost on Aristotle. For the ancient Greek, shoes were much more practical, the variety more limited. For Aristotle, to learn (or to teach another) to select the right shoes is similar to providing didaskalia (instruction) without practicing techne (art of making). This critical conflict continues today, manifesting itself within our academy, especially in higher education. This dichotomy appears under various names: standardized testing versus real-world experience, theory versus practice, scholarship versus pedagogy. The list could go on. I argue that while this dichotomy (although useful to Aristotle’s refutation of sophistry as well to generating sides for a debate) does not differentiate precisely enough the situation in which rhetorical scholars and instructors usually find themselves, the Aristotelian method is still relevant to teaching rhetoric. Etymologically, the historical tension between the goals of the schola and the paedagogium are still with us, where the work of the scholar and the work of the teacher often seem at odds. Ironically, this conflict is moralized by Enlightenment thinker Francis Bacon when he argues that “to spend too much time in studies is sloth” while scholarship is “perfected by experience.” In my presentation, I assert that Aristotle’s dialectical approach is both problematic to yet valuable in discovering a pedagogy for rhetoric that does more than generate false dichotomies and ethical dilemmas. Indeed, focusing on a few instances of using Aristotle’s topoi in teaching rhetoric, I demonstrate that there is much more to making Aristotle’s shoes than knowing the parts and process.