Thesis (PH.D.)--Michigan State University. Criminal Justice, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Aug. 11, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 284-301). Also issued in print.

This thesis examines how Baby Boomers utilize Facebook to promote radical political ideology. A convenience sample of 51 Baby Boomer Facebook profiles were selected and critically analyzed for radical content using Bernard L.Brock’s (1965) A Definition of Four Political Positions and a Description of their Rhetorical Characteristics, and Making Sense of Political Ideology: The Language of Democracy (Brock, et al., 2005). The rhetoric from these profiles was then categorized using James W. Chesebro’s (1972) Rhetorical Strategies of the Radical Revolutionary. Conclusions from the research indicate that radical Boomers on Facebook seem to have moved from real world activism to symbolic action on Facebook through the liking and sharing of radical articles and posts. Though consistent in posting radical content in their profiles, radical Boomers using Facebook in this study utilized profiles more to promote radical culture online than to foment political revolution offline. / Department of Telecommunications

This dissertation, All Things Commune: The Communal Imaginary in Twenty-First-Century French Fiction & Poetry, is animated by two fundamental questions: How can life be led differently, together? And, what is French literature’s radical political potential? Over the course of this project, I argue that twenty-first-century French literature is a site of radical political imagination, and, in certain cases, a veritable form of radical political practice. Through close readings of works by a diverse set of authors – including Jean Rouaud, Yannick Haenel, Virginie Despentes, and Jean-Marie Gleize – I reveal a countercurrent of twenty-first-century French literature bound up in a radical politics that is invested in imagining alternative forms of community that are autonomous from the French state, capitalism, governance, and traditional political structures. I read these literary works in light of theories of community developed by collectives such as Tiqqun and Le Comité invisible and critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière. All Things Commune demonstrates how reading these authors and theorists together reveals a shared imaginary of alternative communal life and radical Leftist politics, which I place under the rubric of destituent power. All Things Commune insists on the profound continuities between contemporary French literature, history, and politics. Overall, this project questions the narrow political frameworks through which twenty-first-century French literature continues to be read and demonstrates how radical politics appear in unexpected ways in a period of literature sometimes reduced to the reactionary or the apolitical.