March 01, 2007
Exam Questions - Globalization
This isn't as polished as I hoped it would come out when I sat down to write, but it seems more focused that my earlier attempts at developing questions for this area. Comments here are also appreciated.
When Marshal McLuhan introduced the term "global village" and Buckminster Fuller talked about "spaceship earth," developments in telecommunications, television in particular, offered the promise of a more cohesive, peaceful, integrated world where people would live in harmony resulting from better understanding of one another. By the end of the 20th century, the term "globalization" was nearly synonymous with global capitalism, featuring large multi-national corporations, labor outsourced from the United States to factories around the less developed parts of the world, and instantaneous flows of currency across borders. At the same time, patterns of resistance to these developments, sometimes called "globalization from below" developed to promote the interests of indigenous peoples, cultural rights and human rights.
In the academy, globalization has become a focus of scholarship across many disciplines, with a range of observations about the processes of globalization, case studies of its impact in different places, and theories of how it functions and what should be changed about it. Drawing on your reading and your knowledge of theories of rhetoric, identify the principle arguments in globalization discourse and the rhetorical strategies they employ. What are the appeals? Who is the audience? What claims are being made or challenged? What terms are used to describe the world and how do those terms shape the argument? What theories of rhetoric seem particularly useful in sorting through these arguments?
Fredric Jameson claimed that the topic of globalization is "the intellectual property of no specific field, [but] seems to concern politics and economics...culture and sociology....information and the media...ecology...consumerism...daily life." Notably absent from this list is the study of rhetoric. How might you say globalization concerns politics? How might it concern rhetoric? If the job of the university is to prepare students for life beyond the academy, both as workers and as citizens, what are the implications of your answers in terms of shaping that education? If the nature of the world of work has permanently changed, from a Fordist to post-Fordist structure, for example, what are the implications for education, and for the study of rhetoric in particular?
Posted by cageyer at 07:47 AM | Comments (0)