The concept of authenticity has been central to the human capacity to communicate for over two millennia, and it continues to enjoy wide usage throughout popular culture today. “Authenticity” typically conveys a sense that one has reached solid bedrock, the unchanging foundation of an object or inner-self that transcends the context of the moment. In this sense, the search or struggle for authenticity is a quest for VIP access to the ineffable “real” that language can only inadequately gesture toward. This study investigates the contemporary struggle for authenticity, or what can be described as the “rhetoric of authenticity,” by exploring the way authenticity is negotiated, constructed, and contested through various symbolic resources. More specifically, it focuses on how authenticity is negotiated in the U.S. blues community, a complex cultural site where the struggle over authenticity is especially salient and materializes in a variety of complex ways. Drawing on a number of philosophical perspectives and critical theories, the study employs the methods of rhetorical criticism and oral history as it seeks to answer three central questions: First, what are the major rhetorical dimensions of authenticity? Second, what does rhetorical analysis reveal about the relationship between authenticity and its various signifiers? And third, what does our desire for authenticity teach us about ourselves as symbol-using creatures? The study employs a case study approach that moves inductively in order to discover the larger rhetorical dimensions of authenticity. The case studies examine the relationship between authenticity and the blues’ larger historical trajectory; between aesthetics and authenticity in the oral history narratives of professional blues musicians in Austin, Texas, especially as they converge along a style/substance binary; between identity and authenticity in the editorial policy of Living Blues magazine; and finally, between imitation and authenticity in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. The study concludes by exploring how authenticity is contextual, aesthetic, ideological, and political, and frames a rhetorical theory of authenticity that can be applied widely throughout popular culture. / text

This document is an oral history of Ester Mae Bodie, one of the Exumas’ renowned plant experts. During the Bahamas Marine Protected Area Study, members of Richard Stoffle’s research team spent numerous hours interviewing Mrs. Bodie a range of topics including ethnobotany, traditional marine use, the proposed MPAs, and her life growing up in the Exumas. In order to honor her contributions to the overall project, members of the Stoffle team constructed this document to share her story.

This is a sustained critique of the historiography of oral, scribal and printed news processes in the English language in the early-modern period.  Focusing on central-government proclamation it suggests that the early-modernist consensus that news media were a sudden invention within the period 1569-1641 is fundamentally flawed. In particular, it refutes the notions 1) that proclamations were always commands, and should be understood as laws; 2) that the Tudors were master communicators whose efforts to ‘speak’ to the entire populations they ruled surpassed those of their Yorkist predecessors, Stuart successors, and foreign contemporaries; 3) that physical communication within, between, to and from Britain and Ireland in the period 1460-1642 was so difficult that the maintenance of any mass medium was tantamount to impossible; 4) that proclamation (and news in general) may be understood largely without reference to the Church; 5) that proclamation practices – especially in terms of geographic range – are impossible to reconstruct; 6) that if these practices were reconstructed, they would show that central-government attempts to inform the subject were intermittent and rare; 7) that the sixteenth century was virtually devoid of serious journalistic activity; and 8) that there was a sudden evolution from ‘bad’ news media to ‘good’ ones, which occurred after 1600. The final chapter argues that proclamation as a news medium continued to dominate the communicative strategies of all parties in the early Civil Wars period (1637-1642).  The collapse of the proclamation system can be traced to strategies of widespread mimicry and iconographic theft.  The emergence of true party newspapers from January 1643, and other important subsequent developments, represent not innovation in a vacuum, but the death throes of proclamation as a system of news distribution and management.

<p>It is now forty years after the start of African Socialism, or Ujamaa, in Tanzania. This study examines to what extent Tanzanians still tell their national history in ways which feature the important themes of social change that were introduced by President Julius Nyerere and his political party after independence: increasing equality, popular participation, egalitarian values and self-reliant economic development. The intention of the study is to see to what extent these ideas are still important in the ways that Tanzanians today tell their national history. The study is based on oral history interviews, with Tanzanian expatriates living in Cape Town, and is supplemented by secondary sources on the post-independence and Ujamaa periods. It argues that memory can be affected by current events.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Commonwealth University, 2007. / Prepared for: Dept. of Gerontology. Bibliography: leaves 121-129.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Abilene Christian University, 1991. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 228-230).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 194 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1973. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 341-347). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.