Roger C. Aden

“Dreams are born on places like this”: The process of interpretive community formation at the field of dreams site

Thousands of people from across the nation visit the site of the film Field of Dreams each year. This paper analyzes the narratives of 113 of those visitors as relayed during a three‐day period in the summer of 1992. In exploring these unstructured narratives, the authors develop a theory that explains how interpretive communities are formed despite theoretical writings that argue for individualized interpretations of texts. Synthesizing theoretical offerings of Kenneth Burke and Michael C. McGee, the authors demonstrate that individuals at once can converge and diverge symbolically within the confines of an interpretive community.

Back to the garden: Therapeutic place metaphor in field of dreams

Field of Dreams provides “cultural therapy” for individuals concerned about the ongoing transformation from the industrial age to the technological age. The therapy, the creation of a place metaphor similar to the Garden of Eden, illuminates the benefits of self‐sacrifice and producerism valued by American culture prior to the industrial age. By sacrificing for others, the film suggests, individuals can transcend time and find their home on earth. The implications of this therapy, culturally and theoretically, suggest that place metaphors are perhaps the best symbolic approach to coping with cultural transformations.

Lost and found in America: The function of place metaphor in sports illustrated

The writing in Sports Illustrated locates sport in the metaphorical, American version of the Elysian Fields. Because the metaphor is of a place rather than a concept, a number of different symbolic forms interact within the confines of Sports Illustrated’s field. For instance, the place metaphor itself is constructed through the collision of American realities and Elysian Fields ideals. This intersection of symbolic forms produces a metaphor that Sports Illustrateds readers can use to resist American cultures machine metaphor.

Communities of Cornhuskers: The Generation of Place Through Sports Fans' Rituals

This article explores communication at University of Nebraska Cornhusker football “watch parties”—public gatherings where fans watch the football teams game on television—at seven locations across the United States. This study concludes that the decoration of the watch-party site, the attire worn by fans attending the watch parties, and collective activities of relating and connecting that occur during the watch parties constitute a unique type of performance ritual. Specifically, this article analyzes how the watch-party rituals spin a web of communal connections in which fans at each site connect with one another, with fans at other sites, and with the state of Nebraska to form what is called an “intermediate place”—a place that is symbolically rooted in a specific geographic location and simultaneously manifest in other physical locations.

Placing Townies: The Symbolic Work of Naming

This article explores how students in one college town use the name “townies” to describe some local residents who are not affiliated with the university. Embedded within this name are unspoken connections that link townies (and the students who use the name) to discourses of socioeconomic class. In addition, the naming of particular bodies as townies symbolically works to stretch the social space of the university well beyond its physical boundaries, which reshapes the conceptual map of the local sociocultural terrain to, ironically, position townies as “out of place” within many portions of the town.

‘I stared at him in defiance:’ Hollaback! movement and the enactment of reflexive, resilient countervisuality

ABSTRACT Hollaback! is an international movement seeking to end street harassment. Its website invites women to share narratives of their experience of street harassment as well as photos of the men who harassed them. We treat Hollaback! as an exemplar of feminist online activism and aim to identify lessons for other feminist online activists and organizations. In particular, we argue that the site’s narrative-image posts provide a powerful means of enacting countervisuality in public spaces. After analyzing 26 narrative-image postings on the Hollaback! website, we identify three collective rhetorical effects of countervisuality: Altering the traditional dichotomy of male/observer and female/observed, enacting feminist rhetorical agency through mobility in public spaces, and generating women’s solidarity through shared experience. We then argue that Hollaback!’s strategy of countervisuality insufficiently enacted the core principles of feminist rhetorical resilience, especially the concept of mêtis. We conclude by offering recommendations for feminist online activists and scholars.

Doubling Down: President Barack Obama’s Doubled Persona after the Zimmerman Verdict

This article analyzes President Barack Obama’s remarks following the acquittal of George Zimmerman on the charge of murdering Trayvon Martin. Speaking directly to, for, or about African Americans would lead some to accuse him of speaking primarily as a black man, while ignoring the idea of race would lead some to accuse him of failing to acknowledge its omnipresence in American life. To manage these constraints, the president employed what we have termed a doubled persona; that is, he enacted two different speaking personae and envisioned a distinct audience persona for each speaking persona: He spoke both as a black president and as a president who is black.