School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Frontier justice in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Cormac McCarthy
    WOOD, DANIEL ( 2012)
    With narratives set on the American frontier and a focus on the disappearance of the frontier and its intergenerational legacy, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841) and Cormac McCarthy’s series of Southwestern novels (1985-2005) share a genre and a set of common interests. Recently, however, critics of the two series have noted a closer kinship between them, a kinship that emerges as McCarthy recurrently alludes to Cooper’s work and its status as the foremost canonical work of frontier fiction in the American tradition. In this thesis, asking whether there might be more substance to that kinship, I suggest that Cooper and McCarthy share similar concerns about the effect of the frontier as a site of settlement on the jurisprudential principles of the American justice system as codified in the United States Constitution. With his Tales, I argue, Cooper articulated an ambivalent response to the nineteenth century popularisation of what I call the ethic of frontier justice — a mode of jurisprudence, emerging from the settlement of the frontier, which departs from that of the Constitution — while McCarthy’s Southwestern series identifies its ongoing popularity, despite the absence of the frontier, and points to Cooper’s Tales as having contributed to its survival.
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    Beyond mediated conflict: journalism, justice and the transnational community
    Gajevic, Slavko ( 2012)
    This research explores how journalists understand, interpret and construct the notion of justice while commenting on armed conflicts. The study argues that journalists perceive justice not only as members of the journalistic community, or as representatives of nation-states directly involved in armed conflicts, but also as members of the transnational community emotionally, morally, politically and economically affected by these conflicts. More precisely, the effects of armed conflicts on the transnational community turn the argumentation of newspaper editorials into a specific mediator of transnational public reasoning. This research shows that newspaper editorials on armed conflicts conceptualise the notion of the transnational community as a discursive community. The transnational community is understood as a community that arises in times of conflict to protect civilian lives and liberty and therefore serves as an authority of normative criteria for justice. The discursive nature of the transnational community enables members of different national or local communities to join the transnational community in an active deliberation of justice in times of conflict, and to retreat to the routine of their lives as members of a particular national or local community when the deliberation has concluded. This PhD research argues that it was the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s in particular that gave birth to this modern notion of the transnational community. This study also demonstrates how newspaper editorials on armed conflicts involve not only information and arguments related to a particular conflict, but employ and reinforce collective memories related to that conflict. The research found that the analysed editorials routinely employed collective memories to convince the readers that the newspapers’ argumentation of justice was firmly grounded within a historically proven continuity of similar events and their meanings. Therefore, to make their argumentative claims plausible to their audiences, these editorials continuously employed collective memories of historical events and personalities, or collective memories of procedures and institutions such as those which constitute international law or the international community. This research also argues that editorials on armed conflicts approach the concept of justice as a notion that is understood differently following changes in a wider social context. These issues are discussed through the analysis of argumentation strategies employed by two newspapers in their editorials about conflicts in the former Yugoslavia: the American The New York Times and the Serbian Politika. This research demonstrates that both newspapers discursively situated these conflicts within the wider globalising forces of the 1990s. In this context the research approaches the newspapers’ language as an element of the discursive standardization of globalising social processes. Particular lexical items such as ‘globalization’ or ‘illegal bombing of Serbia’, were employed by the newspapers’ editorials on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia as discursively constituted objectivities to support arguments about these conflicts. Acts of justice or injustice committed by the various parties involved in the former Yugoslavia’s conflicts were consequently argued and represented in the newspapers’ editorials as commonsensical consequences of these discursive objectivities.