Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 1996. / Chairperson: Carl P. Schmidt. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: J. Ritchie Garrison, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

M.A. / Political satire in the print news media is a significant part of irony that specializes in gaining entertainment from politics. Jonathan Shapiro (alias Zapiro), and his Lady Justice cartoons of Jacob Zuma, which were published in the Sunday Times on 7 September 2008 and in the Mail & Guardian on 12 September 2008, has brought this function to the foreground in South Africa. This study focuses on the ‘Jester’s Space’ in the print media in relation to The Lady Justice cartoons because of their controversial nature and the possible effects they had on the print news media agenda. The goal of the study was to examine the debates that ensued in select print news media in Gauteng between 24 August 2008 and 31 December 2008. In order for the study to explore the role of the political cartoonist in the South African context, it considers the development of political cartooning globally and in South Africa. It draws on the Agenda-Setting theory. This theory postulates that the media audiences accept guidance from media for determining what information is most important and worthy of attention (Graber, 1984). This study makes use of qualitative and quantitative content analysis in order to analyse the Agenda-Setting function of the Lady Justice cartoons in selected Gauteng English and Afrikaans newspapers – chosen because they represent different media houses, which would ensure a range of editorial and public views. The study successfully shows that Zapiro’s cartoons were able both to frame and set the agenda for the debate themes that were discussed in the public sphere.

The mass media have been widely studied because of their pervasiveness and effect on society. The comic strips, as part of the newspaper, are widely read. By their very existence and pervasiveness they mold our culture. The purpose of this study was to examine marriage and the family and how it is portrayed in the comic strips. A historical overview of significant family comic strips was done using comic strip texts. A content analysis of contemporary family strips was also done. The strips were analyzed to determine how often demonstrated affection and/or abuse occurred. In addition, the strips were analyzed to determine the quality and quantity of parent-child, sibling, and husband-wife relationships. Two month samples of 15 different comic strips were analyzed. The comic strip family emerged as a stereotyped group that was white, lower-middle class, with a father who worked at a white collar job and a mother who was a housewife. The family included several school-aged or teen-aged children. Neither demonstrated affection nor abuse was found to occur often in comic strip families. Parent-child interactions and interactions among siblings were judged to be more positive than negative. Husband-wife interactions were more often negative than positive, although there was a wide variance among individual strips. Interactions about leisure time and its use occurred more often than any other category. Household tasks, food, finances, in-laws or parents, dress and health comprised the other major categories of interactions. / Master of Science

In the last decade of apartheid (1985-1994), South African cartoonists demonstrated a range of responses to the political imperatives of the day. While some worked in support of the status quo, the cartoonists who are the subject of this study opposed it. Like practitioners in other areas of cultural activity during this period, oppositional cartoonists were passionately engaged with the political process and participated in the articulation and dissemination of discourses of resistance. This study situates South African cartooning both in the context of South African resistance discourse, and in the historical and discursive context of cartooning as a form of international popular culture. It presents an argument as to how cartooning should be defined and studied - as a cluster of signifying practices that produce a range of forms in a variety of media. In terms of this definition, anti-apartheid cartooning in South Africa is identified as a specific historical category, within which distinct streams of cartooning are identified. The study locates the various activities of South African cartooning within these streams, and examines the ideological and educational functions they performed during the 1985-1994 period. The study positions cartooning within the broad theoretical field of cultural and media studies, and examines some theoretical problems that are specific to the analysis of visual culture. A language of exposition appropriate to the study of cartooning is developed, borrowing terms from the sometimes widely variant traditions of art history, literary criticism and cultural studies. A methodology for the interpretation of symbolic forms is derived from the work of British cultural theorist, John B. Thompson (1990), whereby selected cartooning texts are subjected to a combination of textual interpretation, socio-historical analysis and discursive analysis, reinforced by insights derived from conversations with 15 selected South African cartoonists. Textual analysis of selected cartooning texts from the 1985-1994 period clearly demonstrates that oppositional cartoonists gave visual expression to discourses of resistance that existed in the anti-apartheid movement, and amongst the broader public, at that time. In so doing, they contributed to the disruption of the hegemony of the apartheid state, to the legitimation of the anti-apartheid struggle and to the provision of symbols and icons that ordinary South Africans were able to utilise in 'rethinking' their own lives in relation to the demands of a rapidly transforming society. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Political Science, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

No description available.

No description available.

The identification and examination of cultural information strategies and censorship patterns used to propagate the controversial issue of the caricatures in two separate cultural contexts was the aim of this dissertation. It explored discourse used for the coverage of this topic by one newspaper in a restrictive information context and two newspapers in a liberal information context. Message propagation in a restrictive information environment was analyzed using the English daily Kuwait Times from the Middle East; the liberal information environment of the US was analyzed using two major dailies, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The study also concurrently identifies and elaborates on the themes and frames through which discourse was presented exposing the cultural ideologies and premises they represent. The topic was approached with an interdisciplinary position with the support and applicability testing of Chatman's insider-outsider theory within information science and Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory and Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model based in the area of mass communication. The study has also presented a new model of information censorship - circle of information censorship, emphasizing conceptual issues that influence the selection and censorship of information.