Browsing by Subject "Rumor"

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    The aesthetics and politics of rumor : the making of Egyptian public culture
    (2012-12) Koerber, Benjamin William; El-Ariss, Tarek; Brustad, Kristen; Ali, Samer; Al-Batal, Mahmoud; Al-Ghadeer, Moneera
    Whether as a distinct cultural form, or as a problem exaggerated and imagined by a paranoid interpretive bent, “rumor” (al-ishāʿa) claims a place in the writings of many Egyptian intellectuals, littérateurs, journalists, and politicians in the twentieth century that has yet to be adequately addressed and theorized. At the intersection of cultural studies and Arabic literature, this dissertation investigates rumor as a fiercely contested mode of reading and writing public culture in Egypt since 1952. Eschewing the legislative trend in the modern social and clinical sciences that has positioned rumor as an object to be combatted, or reduced it to the mechanisms and motives of mass psychology, I examine some of the many ways in which it generates, animates, or interferes with scenes in the lives of social actors as they move between the centers and peripheries of power. Rumor possesses both affirmative and destructive powers, often inseparably, and in order to theorize its complex imbrications with character, community, and culture beyond the urge to evaluative critique, I develop a host of concepts – such as noise, play, paranoia, and parody – capable of bringing this oft-neglected ambivalence into view. Notoriously resistant to analysis, whether due to is conceptual vagueness or ephemeral phenomenological status, rumor and the scenes it makes require a rethinking of the modes of scholarly writing that dominate the humanities and social sciences. A degree of mobility and eclecticism, drawn from the object itself in its flight across history and culture, imbues the organization and style of this dissertation: rumor is the object, and inspires the mode, of my investigation. Each of the three Parts of the dissertation investigates a different field of public culture in post-1952 Egypt. Part 1 analyzes the rhetoric and interpretive practices deployed by state actors in their confrontation with what they call “rumors.” Three historical events are taken as significant: the rhetorical and dramatic performances of the Free Officers in the early revolutionary period (1952-1954), the social scientific celebration of “planning” (takhṭīṭ) in 1964, and the Mubarak death rumors of 2007. While here rumor comes into view as the object of state discipline and paranoid interpretation, the remaining two Parts investigate its role in the performances of artists, littérateurs, and bloggers. Part 2 analyzes the literary texts of Gamal al-Ghitani, which are unique in their simultaneous recording and performing of rumors in Egyptian cultural politics at the turn of the millennium. Finally, Part 3 examines intersections between play, parody, and the paranoid style of interpretation in cyberspace, including an investigation into the blogging campaign “Mubarak Mat” (“Mubarak has Died,” 2008) and Ashraf Hamdi’s response to rumors spun by the counterrevolution (2011-2012). While rumor, across these many contexts, is deplored as a destructive force, it also, I contend, salvages possibility from necessity, explores alternatives to the status quo, and serves as an unexpected catalyst for innovative cultural and political forms. As noise, it creates disorder and generates a new order. It is at once in public culture, and making public culture.
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    The aesthetics and politics of rumor in modern Egypt
    (2010-05) Koerber, Benjamin William; El-Ariss, Tarek; El-Ariss, Tarek; Brustad, Kristen
    This thesis is an investigation into the aesthetic and political functions of “rumor” in modern Egypt. While previous studies have emphasized the formal or structural features of the genre, I seek to analyze the discursive, political and technological contexts that contribute to its persistence as such a powerful and ambivalent way of imagining speech. The scope of my analysis is a collection of texts culled from the tradition of Arabic letters in Egypt, beginning with early works of historiography (16th century), and into the political journals, newspapers, and novels of the 20th century, as well as the blogs, search engines and internet forums of the 21st century. I argue that specific discourses and imaginings of the rumor – contingent and mutable – emerged as an inseparable feature of the elite author’s textual encounter with the masses. Anxieties over the agency of various mass subjects – the urban crowd, the citizenry, and others – have contributed to the ways in which different writers reify speech. The final chapters of my thesis turn to focus on rumors about the death of President Husni Mubarak, in order to analyze the role the genre plays in contests over national political authority. Here, the rumor is an index of fears, passions, fantasies and other narratives that the writers both draw on and contribute to. Foregrounding these associations becomes a powerful aesthetic and affective process that allows actors to "fix" - solidify and treat - the agency and subjectivity of others.
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    Between then and now, there and here, guilt and innocence : Škvorecký’s Two murders in my double life and the ambiguities of transitional justice
    (2013-05) Weil, Abigail Ruth; Neuburger, Mary, 1966-
    I situate Škvorecký’s novel as both a primary document in the historical record of transitional justice and as a literary creation in the author’s larger oeuvre. In creating this work of autobiographical fiction, Škvorecký deals with the ambiguities of a tumultuous historico-political moment and creates an appropriately complex work of art. I combine social science research with close-reading of the text in the tradition of new historicism. In the introduction I explain the historico-political background, specifically transitional justice and lustration in Czech Republic in the early 1990s, that engendered Two Murders. In my first chapter, I examine the book reviews, Czech and English, that appeared following the two language-respective publications of Two Murders. In the remaining three chapters I present my analysis of the novel based on close-reading and applied historical information. Chapters two and three discuss different but interconnected manifestations of distance. Chapter two examines memory as the temporal distance of the mind, while chapter three explores exile as spatial distance. Škvorecký invests memory and exile with enormous significance, and uses both concepts to depict his characters’ isolation. In the final chapter, I discuss rumor and reputation in the novel’s two distinct story-lines, demonstrating how they come together to create a cohesive artistic work. Approaching the novel as both a historical document and a work of art, I hope to critically examine this complicated historical moment and appraise Škvorecký’s contribution to the post-communist Czech dialogue.
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    Optimization Problems for Maximizing Influence in Social Networks
    (2020-04-21) Ghosh, Smita
    Social Networks have become very popular in the past decade. They started as platforms to stay connected with friends and family living in different parts of the world, but have evolved into so much more, resulting in Social Network Analysis (SNA) becoming a very popular area of research. One popular problem under the umbrella of SNA is Influence Maximization (IM), which aims at selecting k initially influenced nodes (users) in a social network that will maximize the expected number of eventually-influenced nodes (users) in the network. Influence maximization finds its application in many domains, such as viral marketing, content maximization, epidemic control, virus eradication, rumor control and misinformation blocking. In this dissertation, we study various variations of the IM problem such as Composed Influence Maximization, Group Influence Maximization, Profit Maximization in Groups and Rumor Blocking Problem in Social Networks. We formulate objective functions for these problems and as most of them are NP-hard, we focus on finding methods that ensure efficient estimation of these functions. The two main challenges we face are submodularity and scalibility. To design efficient algorithms, we perform simulations with sampling techniques to improve the effectiveness of our solution approach.
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    Rumor mongering: scapegoating techniques for social cohesion and coping among the Japanese-Americans in United States internment camps during World War II
    (Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) Biggs, Jenny Catherine
    This thesis examines the linkages between the verbal response to social stress, the ostracism of individuals from a social group, and the subsequent increased cohesion of the remaining members. To write the thesis, I utilized these printed references in the forms of scholarly research, journals, diaries, and interviews primarily from the Texas A&M Sterling Evans Library and the online journal resource JSTOR as well as a video documentary. Previous research into the genres of rumor, identity, and scapegoat accusations are explicated. Then, these approaches are applied to the rumors told by the Japanese-Americans who were removed from their homes and sent to internment camps in the United States during World War II. The internment camps were rife with scapegoat accusations between the internees whose once unified culture group was fissured along lines of loyalty to the United States or to Japan. These scapegoat accusations against fellow internees were an outlet for the stress exerted upon them by the American government that was not directly combatable. Even processes as complicated as changing social dynamics can be observed through the mechanisms of rumors and scapegoat accusations.