Marvin, Carolyn

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 41
  • Publication
    Fables for the Information Age: The Fisherman's Wishes
    (1982-09-01) Marvin, Carolyn
    The computer revolution is less a revolution in the usual sense of the word than the announcement of a glamorous marriage between two powerful promises in the history of the modern West, the Enlightenment, the impulse to encompass the entire world in a rational system of knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution, the fruit of an ancient impulse to reduce the demands of nature to insignificance. By now we know that some of the fondest legacies of the Enlightenment, such as the belief that the world is fully knowable and that nothing more than rational knowledge is necessary to make us free, are ambiguous ones, but it is still difficult for us to admit that the vision of the Industrial Revolution was naive. In many ways we still believe that utopia is available to everyone who has the right equipment.
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    Trooping the Colors on TV
    (1991) Marvin, Carolyn
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    Constructed and Reconstructed Discourse: Inscription and Talk in the History of Literacy
    (1984-10-01) Marvin, Carolyn
    This article considers a theoretical problem at the center of historical research on literacy, the solution to which has implications for studies of contemporary literacies as well. Four models of literacy are identified. The (1) traditionally received skills model still flourishes in educational policy, but is increasingly rejected by literacy scholars who employ either (2) a functional model of literacy as an instrument of power relations or (3) a semiotic “marker” model of literacy. While traditional communications history has evinced little interest in historical studies of literacy, (4) a highly visible grand theory model of literacy associated with McLuhan, Innis, and Ong has its origins in the received model. Where the received model is optimistic about the long-term social and political effects of literacy, however, the grand theory model is pessimistic. Although a growing body of scholars has argued that the definition of any literacy must be located in its actual practices, and although many scholars now believe that oral-literate dichotomies are overly simple historical categories, this article takes that thinking farther and argues that literacy does not merely coexist or interact with oral practices and skills, but includes them. That is, the definition of literacy consists in the written and oral practices and skills, but includes them. That is, the definition of literacy consists in the written and oral practices organized around texts in a particular culture. Support for this argument is taken from pertinent evidence in the history of literacy.
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    Voting Alone: The Decline of Bodily Mass Communication and Public Sensationalism in Presidential Elections
    (2004-06-01) Marvin, Carolyn; Simonson, Peter
    The congregational crowd was a powerful mode of political communication in the nineteenth-century US until banished by the imposition of literate modes on popular electoral politics by Progressive reformers. We examine its major channels of expression, bodily mass communication and public sensationalism, within a framework of class-based struggle, observing that the practice of live bodily assembly created broad points of entry into political life, socialized the young, and successfully conveyed the importance of voting. A text-based normative model of the informed deliberative voter, we argue, offers too narrow a conception of participation compared to a more spaciously conceived democratic community.
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    The First Thirty Years
    (1977-09-01) Marvin, Carolyn; Schultze, Quentin J
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    Religion and Realpolitik: Reflections on Sacrifice
    (2014-11-01) Marvin, Carolyn
    Enduring groups that seek to preserve themselves, as sacred communities do, face a structural contradiction between the interests of individual group members and the survival interests of the group. In addressing existential threats, sacred communities rely on a spectrum of coercive and violent actions that resolve this contradiction in favor of solidarity. Despite different histories, this article argues, nationalism and religiosity are most powerfully organized as sacred communities in which sacred violence is extracted as sacrifice from community members. The exception is enduring groups that are able to rely on the protection of other violence practicing groups. The argument rejects functionalist claims that sacrifice guarantees solidarity or survival, since sacrificing groups regularly fail. In a rereading of Durkheim’s totem taboo, it is argued that sacred communities cannot survive a permanent loss of sacrificial assent on the part of members. Producing this assent is the work of ritual socialization. The deployment of sacrificial violence on behalf of group survival, though deeply sobering, is best constrained by recognizing how violence holds sacred communities in thrall rather than by denying the links between them.
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