Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Public knowledge is inadequately served by standard rhetorical studies for standard rhetoricians fail to acknowledge how ideas once expressed are then circulated within the public sphere. Scholars are beginning to deploy socio-biological metaphors to describe the viral nets of influence and the survival of the fittest contesting of memes. This essay will attempt to provide this alternate explanation for the creation of public knowledge using the evolution of memes through the media as a case study. An explanation of the metaphor will be provided, and then the essay will turn to how information, both factual and nonfactual, can evolve into truths within the realm of public knowledge.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In light of greater attention being paid to “moral values” in the wake of the 2004 Presidential elections, a possible resurgence of the “culture wars”, and the international growth in moral and/or ideologically-informed phenomena emphasizes the compelling need for sociological explanations addressing why certain forms of moral discourse and understanding become dominant within a given society. Three perspectives that attempt to explain the rise and dominance of certain forms of moral discourse are memetics, the metaphorical reasoning of George Lakoff and moral vocabularies. Memetics contends that “memes” spread in a pattern analogous to the transmission of specific genes. Lakoff contends that much of recent political discourse appeals to particular dominant metaphorical “frames” such as the “strict father” and “nurturing parent” frames. The moral vocabulary paradigm contends that coherent forms of moral discourse are comprised of differing moral resources whose compatibility with the larger host society reflects the degree to which fragments of the moral vocabulary becomes accepted within the host society. A comparison of these three paradigms is conducted in order to demonstrate the relative explanatory strengths and limitations of each perspective and why particular forms of moral discourse have become dominant within forms of political and moralistic discourse.

Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: This presentation first of all welcomes the publication by the University of New Mexico Press of Gerald Vizenor’s Father Meme. A novella given over to sexual abuse by a reservation-based priest, the title-figure, there could be a risk of easy melodrama, a quick-shot round of outrage. Quite the contrary—the storytelling, the storying in Vizenor’s own phrase, is wonderfully pitched and modulated. Told as though by the ex-altar boy, now an adult journalist-author, to a visiting French woman lawyer first at the Mayagi Ashandiwin Restaurant and then at his Anishinaabe reservation cottage, it comes over as a kind of memorial soliloquy posing as a colloquy. This I-you relationship works to great effect: the opening culinary flourish, the remembrance of reservation boyhood and the church, Father Meme himself in all his baroque sexuality, the fourteen torments as the narrator and his circle enact justice on their abuser, and the final denouement. Nicely interposed are memories of Duane White and the events of 1898 at Bear Island. How, then, is Father Meme “told” and how does that telling best serve the vision Vizenor seeks to put into play throughout the story?