English

A major smartphone company has experienced a gap in sales. This dilemma has caused management to ask questions, and the business has no answers for these questions. Management has decided that in order to understand what the company needs to answer these questions, is research. The research will give them a clear picture to the dilemma that faces the organization.

How do you reach a logical conclusion or suggest a reasonable solution of a conflict after 95 years of repeated attempts to solve the issues, such as those which exist, between Arabs and Jews and the contested lands that make up present day Palestine and Israel?

This paper introduces a pedagogical approach and strategies for using online resources and interactive media to teach in English about writers and writing from around the world without colonizing or excluding other languages and cultures.  First, I explain the context and challenges of teaching world literature: the importance of including diverse works and authors; competing definitions and information overload; barriers to international availability and accessibility of non-dominant works and of non-English languages; and students’ limited historical and cross-cultural knowledge.  I then show how faculty can incorporate open-source Internet and interactive multimedia resources into world literature courses in ways that allow alternative and outsider voices to challenge and expand national, ethnic, linguistic, socio-political, and disciplinary boundaries.  Faculty can use web resources such as blogs and wikis; online self-publishing and translation sites; maps, timelines, primary d...

The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered East-West relations of the past into today's world by writing imaginary lives for historical and mythological women from countries, cultures, and eras far removed from their own. Wolf's Cassandra (Kassandra: Erzählung, 1983) and Boullosa's Cleopatra Dismounts (De un salto descabalga la reina, 2000) construct alternative histories for these two legendary figures in order to critique their heroines' and their own societies, and to envision alternative models of subjectivity and forms of relating for their readers. Both writers incorporate postmodern literary techniques of self-reflexive narration, intertextual references, and parody to foreground the fictionality of their texts and question literary and historical representation. At the same time, Wolf and Boullosa exhibit a utopian impulse by creating within their texts a feminist space beyond patriarchal culture through which their protagonists imagine possibilities that have not yet been realized in the existing world. This paper explores how two authors from different national, political, and linguistic contexts develop a critical-utopian view of "othered" women in order to address gendered violence, war, and injustice in and beyond their own historical moments.

The twelfth-century nun Hildegard of Bingen heard God's voice as a child and developed a sensitivity to all sounds that led her to an increasing conviction of the power of sound. Later this sensitivity to sound issued in a body of religious writing about sound that this dissertation views as systematic, as an implicit “Theology of Sound” that can be legitimately extrapolated from the work. To trace how this theology emerged, Chapter One of this dissertation will give a brief biography and an overview of the chronology and context of Hildegard's work. In preparing for a construction of the theology, Chapter Two focuses on Hildegard's theological and philosophical antecedents, possible influences, and sources. The heart of the argument begins in Chapter Three with Hildegard's widest explorations of the symbolism and significance of sound references throughout all of her writings, both the positive and negative implications and the metaphorical and the concrete. As this chapter shows, she clearly saw vocal sound, divine and human, in crucial redemptive roles. Chapter Four narrows the field of study and looks at Hildegard's understanding of the places of importance occupied by God's voice and the allied human voice, and Christ as Word and the divine and human words. We begin to see how Hildegard synthesizes her beliefs and also to see how strong the associations between the divine and the human are for her. In some cases, it is difficult to see many differences between the two. Chapter Five emphasizes Hildegard's sense of a connection to God's voice in the transmission of her visions. The chapter also explores a sample of Hildegard's lyrics from the Symphonia and shows how they support her conviction of the importance of sound in the spiritual world. The chapter concludes by examining the way in which she effectively conflates her voice with the voice of God giving her an authority and power unusual for any woman in the Middle Ages.

Nongovernmental organizations have attempted to take control of civil society, displacing traditional governing institutions. This serves the interests of the terrorists, warlords, and mafia dons, who benefit from weak central government, and hinders the West's ability to mobilize allies to participate in the war on terror. NGO leaders who are hostile to the nation-state itself seek to transform a voluntary system of participation in international organizations by sovereign member-states via a “power shift” to an unholy alliance of multinational corporations and NGOs. Since they do not possess the traditional sources of legitimacy enjoyed by nation-states, they seek to impose their will by financial or forceful means—for example, “sanctions” or “humanitarian intervention.” A new class of NGOs has thus emerged that is essentially opposed to the diplomatic, legal, and military measures required for dealing with civilizational conflict.

The International Standards Organization (ISO), a Geneva-based secretariat for 163 national standards agencies and more than 3,000 technical groups, has been issuing guidelines on products, services, and processes since 1947. Such guidelines are meant to “provide practical tools for tackling many of today’s global challenges” (www.ISO.org), and have directly impacted areas such energy consumption, food safety, automotive efficiency, environmental sustainability, quality and risk management, and even language and currency use. As well, the guidelines serve to enhance communication among various stakeholders within countries and across national boundaries. One recently issued set of guidelines, ISO 26000, outlines codes of conduct for public and private organizations to induce them to operate in a socially responsible way. According to ISO, “an organization’s performance in relation to the society in which it operates and to its impact on its environment has become a critical part of measuring its overall performance and its ability to continue operating effectively” (www.ISO.org).
In this session, three panelists will discuss the practical and rhetorical implications of these guidelines for corporate behavior. Questions that will be addressed include: How do these standards reconcile a “clash of civilizations” between bureaucratic technocrats and humanist business interests devoted to free-market principles, cultural diversity, and the ultimate responsibility of business to maximize profits? Are such codes of conduct the natural and necessary extension of the increasing personification of corporations as exemplified in recent US Supreme Court decisions? Do corporate codes of conduct translate easily across national boundaries and do such codes advantage large, multinational corporations over smaller, less competitive ones?