Stephen John Hartnett
Biographic Data
| ID | 223154 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen John Hartnett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen John |
| FAMILY NAME | Hartnett |
| SIGNATURE | HARTNETT S J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-6679-4781 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Choose the Good and Be Stubborn”
On April 7, 1989, on the north side of Taipei, magazine editor, free speech activist, and democracy advocate Nylon Cheng ignited himself on fire, defying the authoritarian KMT's attempt to arrest him. The immolation rocked Taiwan and triggered waves of revulsion against the Chiang dynasty, helping to move the nation toward freedom. Thirty-plus years later, Nylon is immortalized in the Nylon Cheng Liberty Foundation Memorial Museum, a site that me…
The Historical Presidency
Archival evidence sheds new light on the Truman administration's 1951 investigation into the “China Lobby” and its links to McCarthyism. Truman's advisors suspected connections among illicit funding streams generated by Chiang Kai‐shek's Nationalist regime in Formosa, illegal lobbying by unregistered agents, and a barrage of anti‐Communist propaganda from activists connected to McCarthy and the “China Lobby.” The White House worried that by flood…
“Imitation (In)Security” and the Polysemy of Russian Disinformation
Russian disinformation activities imitate divisive U.S. political discourse within a polarized social media ecosystem. As part of a multipronged response, U.S. citizens have been urged to increase their personal vigilance and to identify inauthentic messages, hence flagging foreign-made disinformation by studying its content. However, by applying Taylor's concept of “imitation (in)security” to a set of Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA…
Postcolonial remembering in Taiwan
This essay examines the contested dynamics of postcolonial remembering in Taiwan. Focusing on the long-suppressed 228 massacre in particular and the White Terror period in general, we bring Taiwan’s postcolonial remembering into international and intercultural communication studies by analyzing two contemporary sites: Taipei’s 228 Memorial Museum and the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park. As our case studies demonstrate, Taiwan’s postcolonial remember…
Notes on, Confessions about, and Hopes for Globalization
1984/85: When I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, I applied for an exchange program with the University of Southampton, England. Like so many Americans, I was monolingual, so going abroad meant Engl
Avoiding “A Chain Reaction of Disaster”
The Quemoy crisis of 1954–1955 found the Eisenhower White House struggling to appear tough against Mao’s China and supportive of Chiang Kai‐shek’s Taiwan while not triggering World War III. When the initial rhetorical campaign of “fuzzing” failed, Eisenhower’s team switched to launching threats of imminent nuclear war—yet both strategies of deterrence were beside the point, for we now know that Mao had no intention of invading Quemoy or Taiwan. I…
Sovereign Tropes
The South China Sea is the world’s busiest and most important waterway, serving as the crossroads of global capitalism and the connective tissue of Southeast Asia. With shipping routes, underwater resources, and hundreds of small islands claimed by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and others, the area stands among the world’s most contested regions. Since 1945, the United States …
Investigative Poetics
In his Beat‐inflected manifesto, Investigative Poetry , Edward Sanders argued that “the essence of investigative poetry” is to create “lines of lyric beauty [that] descend from data clusters,” hence both seducing and empowering readers with “a melodic blizzard of data‐fragments.” As illustrated in America , his epic collection of data‐fragment‐strewn poems, Sanders hoped to merge poetry with the pedagogical imperative to teach his readers their n…
Working for Justice
This book documents the efforts of the Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education collective (PCARE) to put democracy into practice by merging prison education and activism. Through life-changing programs in a dozen states (Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin), PCARE works with prisoners, in prisons, and in communities to reclaim justice from th…
To “Dance with Lost Souls”
This essay addresses China's Nobel Peace Prize-winning and now imprisoned dissident, Liu Xiaobo, and his movement-launching manifesto, Charter 08, as test cases of the fate of democracy in China. By examining how the Chinese Communist Party attacked Liu and how international nongovernmental organizations and political allies rallied to his cause, the essay probes the limits of human rights discourse in an age of globalization, wherein transnation…
Tibet is Burning
The unprecedented wave of immolations sweeping through Tibet and ethnic-Tibetan-majority areas in China and India has re-ignited a global debate about China's actions in Tibet. Whereas the Chinese claim they have liberated Tibet from Buddhist feudalism and are modernizing the nation, many Tibetans argue they are the victims of a Communist-driven holocaust. In an attempt to map the communicative dynamics of this crisis, this essay analyzes the rhe…
The Folly of Fighting for Providence, or, the End of Empire and Exceptionalism
This article provides an overview of U.S. exceptionalism, the rhetorical habit of portraying the United States as God's chosen city upon a hill, and thus as a nation better than, stronger than, and more righteous than all others. Linking post-World War II reactions to Communism to post-9/11 reactions to terrorism-with a detour through Mark Twain's critique of the Spanish-American War and John L. O'Sullivan's celebration of the Mexican-American Wa…
Turning Silence into Speech and Action
Based on almost 50 years of combined experience as prison activists and prison teachers, the authors offer three case studies of prison activism and pedagogy in action. The first case study, by Hartnett, details the “artistry of agency” as enacted in poetry workshops in prison and in public poetry events, thus illustrating artistic communication. The second, by Wood, examines how friendship becomes political in the epistolary communication betwee…
Google and the “Twisted Cyber Spy” Affair
The "twisted cyber spy" affair began in 2010, when Google was attacked by Chinese cyber-warriors charged with stealing Google's intellectual property, planting viruses in its computers, and hacking the accounts of Chinese human rights activists. In the ensuing international embroglio, the US mainstream press, corporate leaders, and White House deployed what I call the rhetoric of belligerent humanitarianism to try to shame the Chinese while makin…
An Ugly and Sickening Business,' or, the Bush 'Legacy' and the Decimation of Iraq
Interweaving five meditations on imperial power, this article appraises the consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. By including excerpts of poetry from the U.S./Mexican War, the Vietnam War, Plato, the Iraq War, and ancient Buddhist texts, the article raises larger questions about the ethics of resistance, the dilemmas of complicity, and the possibility of hope
Walking Amidst Heroes; or, Celebrating the Enlightenment and the Persistence of Democracy
Buddy Goodall's A Need to Know and the Long Road From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
This short article is the text of a speech offered as part of a public tribute to Buddy Goodall's A Need to Know; as the text of a speech offered before friends and colleagues, it employs colorful language not usually found in academic publications. The speech/essay pursues three arguments, one regarding questions of silence and decorum, one about the personal damage caused by state repression, and one criticizing Goodall's cavalier comments (app…
A Discovered Dissembler Can Achieve Nothing Great”; Or, Four Theses on the Death of Presidential Rhetoric in an Age of Empire
Because of the explosion of mass media, we have entered a new age of white noise; because of the disastrous extension of U.S. imperial ambitions, we have entered a new age of political deception; when these two historical factors are combined with the peculiar communicative habits of President George W. Bush, Americans are left with what we call a post‐rhetorical presidency. This is an anti‐democratic condition wherein presidential discourse is n…
Tonight Another Man Will Die”
Merging our work as grassroots activists and scholars, we map the master tropes of contemporary arguments both for and against the death penalty. This rhetorical work is preceded by analyses of who uses the death penalty and why, noting especially the overlap between lynching and capital punishment; the status of exonerations, moratoriums, and contested scientific evidence; and recent court cases affecting executions. In addition to providing thi…
War Rhetorics
Research Article| January 01 2006 War Rhetorics: The National Security Strategy of the United States and President Bush's Globalization-through-Benevolent-Empire Stephen John Hartnett; Stephen John Hartnett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Laura Ann Stengrim Laura Ann Stengrim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2006) 105 (1): 175–205. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-105-…
The Whole Operation of Deception
Based on analyses of seven pre-war intelligence documents, we demonstrate that estimates of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs were laced with ambiguities and contradictions. Yet President Bush turned this contested intelligence into a heroic rhetoric of certainty, hence dragging the U.S. into war on the basis of lies. Based on a comprehensive critique of their post-9/11 speeches and testimonies, we offer a four-step rhetor…
Visiting Mario
Fanny Fern's 1855 Ruth Hall , the cheerful brutality of capitalism, & the irony of sentimental rhetoric
In order to reconstruct the historical, rhetorical, and political implications of Fanny Fern's 1855 sentimental novel, Ruth Hall, this essay engages in three critical maneuvers. First, as a means of situating Fern both in and against contemporary scholarly views of sentimentalism, the essay addresses arguments offered by Edwin Black and Stephen Browne. Second, as a means of expanding our understanding of sentimentalism, it reconstructs both the e…
And the Poetics of Complicity
“National security, and all that it implies ...”
Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. xxv + 299 pp., $19.95. Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. xii + 242 pp., $15.95. Don DeLillo, Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. 827 pp.: $16.00. James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War. Cambridge, MA: Blackw…
The Whole Operation of Deception
Based on analyses of seven pre-war intelligence documents, we demonstrate that estimates of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs were laced with ambiguities and contradictions. Yet President Bush turned this contested intelligence into a heroic rhetoric of certainty, hence dragging the U.S. into war on the basis of lies. Based on a comprehensive critique of their post-9/11 speeches and testimonies, we offer a four-step rhetor…
Tibet is Burning
The unprecedented wave of immolations sweeping through Tibet and ethnic-Tibetan-majority areas in China and India has re-ignited a global debate about China's actions in Tibet. Whereas the Chinese claim they have liberated Tibet from Buddhist feudalism and are modernizing the nation, many Tibetans argue they are the victims of a Communist-driven holocaust. In an attempt to map the communicative dynamics of this crisis, this essay analyzes the rhe…
A Discovered Dissembler Can Achieve Nothing Great”; Or, Four Theses on the Death of Presidential Rhetoric in an Age of Empire
Because of the explosion of mass media, we have entered a new age of white noise; because of the disastrous extension of U.S. imperial ambitions, we have entered a new age of political deception; when these two historical factors are combined with the peculiar communicative habits of President George W. Bush, Americans are left with what we call a post‐rhetorical presidency. This is an anti‐democratic condition wherein presidential discourse is n…
Turning Silence into Speech and Action
Based on almost 50 years of combined experience as prison activists and prison teachers, the authors offer three case studies of prison activism and pedagogy in action. The first case study, by Hartnett, details the “artistry of agency” as enacted in poetry workshops in prison and in public poetry events, thus illustrating artistic communication. The second, by Wood, examines how friendship becomes political in the epistolary communication betwee…
Four meditations on the search for grace amidst terror
This essay examines how grace confronts terror, how it expresses both the personal and political consequences of living amidst terror, and how it seeks to create alternative visions of provisional eloquence. As an introductory historical framework, it considers the responses of Hanns Eisler, Woody Guthrie, and Joseph Welch to McCarthyism. The essay then explores a philosophical framework for understanding terror via Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic The…
Postcolonial remembering in Taiwan
This essay examines the contested dynamics of postcolonial remembering in Taiwan. Focusing on the long-suppressed 228 massacre in particular and the White Terror period in general, we bring Taiwan’s postcolonial remembering into international and intercultural communication studies by analyzing two contemporary sites: Taipei’s 228 Memorial Museum and the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park. As our case studies demonstrate, Taiwan’s postcolonial remember…
The Folly of Fighting for Providence, or, the End of Empire and Exceptionalism
This article provides an overview of U.S. exceptionalism, the rhetorical habit of portraying the United States as God's chosen city upon a hill, and thus as a nation better than, stronger than, and more righteous than all others. Linking post-World War II reactions to Communism to post-9/11 reactions to terrorism-with a detour through Mark Twain's critique of the Spanish-American War and John L. O'Sullivan's celebration of the Mexican-American Wa…
To “Dance with Lost Souls”
This essay addresses China's Nobel Peace Prize-winning and now imprisoned dissident, Liu Xiaobo, and his movement-launching manifesto, Charter 08, as test cases of the fate of democracy in China. By examining how the Chinese Communist Party attacked Liu and how international nongovernmental organizations and political allies rallied to his cause, the essay probes the limits of human rights discourse in an age of globalization, wherein transnation…
Tonight Another Man Will Die”
Merging our work as grassroots activists and scholars, we map the master tropes of contemporary arguments both for and against the death penalty. This rhetorical work is preceded by analyses of who uses the death penalty and why, noting especially the overlap between lynching and capital punishment; the status of exonerations, moratoriums, and contested scientific evidence; and recent court cases affecting executions. In addition to providing thi…
War Rhetorics
Research Article| January 01 2006 War Rhetorics: The National Security Strategy of the United States and President Bush's Globalization-through-Benevolent-Empire Stephen John Hartnett; Stephen John Hartnett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Laura Ann Stengrim Laura Ann Stengrim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2006) 105 (1): 175–205. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-105-…
The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism
Analyse de la construction de l'ideologie au moment historique de l'ascension du fascisme, ainsi que des strategies semiotiques d'Ezra Pound dans sa production de sens textuels. Reevaluation des termes fascisme et ideologie
Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin
Fredric Jameson characterizes cultural postmodernism as a pastiche of regurgitated signifiers that have been wrenched from their historical context and wielded as blank parody. These severed elements of a once-local project are here seen as the glossy sheen on a global cultural project specifically geared toward the excess consumption of commodities not only in the classical Marxian terms of projected use value, but also in the contemporary sense…
Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin
Fredric Jameson characterizes cultural postmodernism as a pastiche of regurgitated signifiers that have been wrenched from their historical context and wielded as blank parody. These severed elements of a once-local project are here seen as the glossy sheen on a global cultural project specifically geared toward the excess consumption of commodities not only in the classical Marxian terms of projected use value, but also in the contemporary sense…
The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism
Analyse de la construction de l'ideologie au moment historique de l'ascension du fascisme, ainsi que des strategies semiotiques d'Ezra Pound dans sa production de sens textuels. Reevaluation des termes fascisme et ideologie
Imperial Ideologies
Journal Article Imperial Ideologies: Media Hysteria, Racism, and the Addiction to the War on Drugs Get access Stephen Hartnett Stephen Hartnett 1Loyola University Chicago and Ball State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 45, Issue 4, December 1995, Pages 161–169, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1995.tb00760.x Published: 07 February 2006
Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio
Four meditations on the search for grace amidst terror
This essay examines how grace confronts terror, how it expresses both the personal and political consequences of living amidst terror, and how it seeks to create alternative visions of provisional eloquence. As an introductory historical framework, it considers the responses of Hanns Eisler, Woody Guthrie, and Joseph Welch to McCarthyism. The essay then explores a philosophical framework for understanding terror via Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic The…
“National security, and all that it implies ...”
Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. xxv + 299 pp., $19.95. Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. xii + 242 pp., $15.95. Don DeLillo, Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. 827 pp.: $16.00. James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War. Cambridge, MA: Blackw…
Fanny Fern's 1855 Ruth Hall , the cheerful brutality of capitalism, & the irony of sentimental rhetoric
In order to reconstruct the historical, rhetorical, and political implications of Fanny Fern's 1855 sentimental novel, Ruth Hall, this essay engages in three critical maneuvers. First, as a means of situating Fern both in and against contemporary scholarly views of sentimentalism, the essay addresses arguments offered by Edwin Black and Stephen Browne. Second, as a means of expanding our understanding of sentimentalism, it reconstructs both the e…
And the Poetics of Complicity
Visiting Mario
The Whole Operation of Deception
Based on analyses of seven pre-war intelligence documents, we demonstrate that estimates of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs were laced with ambiguities and contradictions. Yet President Bush turned this contested intelligence into a heroic rhetoric of certainty, hence dragging the U.S. into war on the basis of lies. Based on a comprehensive critique of their post-9/11 speeches and testimonies, we offer a four-step rhetor…
Tonight Another Man Will Die”
Merging our work as grassroots activists and scholars, we map the master tropes of contemporary arguments both for and against the death penalty. This rhetorical work is preceded by analyses of who uses the death penalty and why, noting especially the overlap between lynching and capital punishment; the status of exonerations, moratoriums, and contested scientific evidence; and recent court cases affecting executions. In addition to providing thi…
War Rhetorics
Research Article| January 01 2006 War Rhetorics: The National Security Strategy of the United States and President Bush's Globalization-through-Benevolent-Empire Stephen John Hartnett; Stephen John Hartnett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Laura Ann Stengrim Laura Ann Stengrim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2006) 105 (1): 175–205. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-105-…
A Discovered Dissembler Can Achieve Nothing Great”; Or, Four Theses on the Death of Presidential Rhetoric in an Age of Empire
Because of the explosion of mass media, we have entered a new age of white noise; because of the disastrous extension of U.S. imperial ambitions, we have entered a new age of political deception; when these two historical factors are combined with the peculiar communicative habits of President George W. Bush, Americans are left with what we call a post‐rhetorical presidency. This is an anti‐democratic condition wherein presidential discourse is n…
Walking Amidst Heroes; or, Celebrating the Enlightenment and the Persistence of Democracy
Buddy Goodall's A Need to Know and the Long Road From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
This short article is the text of a speech offered as part of a public tribute to Buddy Goodall's A Need to Know; as the text of a speech offered before friends and colleagues, it employs colorful language not usually found in academic publications. The speech/essay pursues three arguments, one regarding questions of silence and decorum, one about the personal damage caused by state repression, and one criticizing Goodall's cavalier comments (app…
An Ugly and Sickening Business,' or, the Bush 'Legacy' and the Decimation of Iraq
Interweaving five meditations on imperial power, this article appraises the consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. By including excerpts of poetry from the U.S./Mexican War, the Vietnam War, Plato, the Iraq War, and ancient Buddhist texts, the article raises larger questions about the ethics of resistance, the dilemmas of complicity, and the possibility of hope
Turning Silence into Speech and Action
Based on almost 50 years of combined experience as prison activists and prison teachers, the authors offer three case studies of prison activism and pedagogy in action. The first case study, by Hartnett, details the “artistry of agency” as enacted in poetry workshops in prison and in public poetry events, thus illustrating artistic communication. The second, by Wood, examines how friendship becomes political in the epistolary communication betwee…
Google and the “Twisted Cyber Spy” Affair
The "twisted cyber spy" affair began in 2010, when Google was attacked by Chinese cyber-warriors charged with stealing Google's intellectual property, planting viruses in its computers, and hacking the accounts of Chinese human rights activists. In the ensuing international embroglio, the US mainstream press, corporate leaders, and White House deployed what I call the rhetoric of belligerent humanitarianism to try to shame the Chinese while makin…
Working for Justice
This book documents the efforts of the Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education collective (PCARE) to put democracy into practice by merging prison education and activism. Through life-changing programs in a dozen states (Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin), PCARE works with prisoners, in prisons, and in communities to reclaim justice from th…
To “Dance with Lost Souls”
This essay addresses China's Nobel Peace Prize-winning and now imprisoned dissident, Liu Xiaobo, and his movement-launching manifesto, Charter 08, as test cases of the fate of democracy in China. By examining how the Chinese Communist Party attacked Liu and how international nongovernmental organizations and political allies rallied to his cause, the essay probes the limits of human rights discourse in an age of globalization, wherein transnation…
Tibet is Burning
The unprecedented wave of immolations sweeping through Tibet and ethnic-Tibetan-majority areas in China and India has re-ignited a global debate about China's actions in Tibet. Whereas the Chinese claim they have liberated Tibet from Buddhist feudalism and are modernizing the nation, many Tibetans argue they are the victims of a Communist-driven holocaust. In an attempt to map the communicative dynamics of this crisis, this essay analyzes the rhe…
The Folly of Fighting for Providence, or, the End of Empire and Exceptionalism
This article provides an overview of U.S. exceptionalism, the rhetorical habit of portraying the United States as God's chosen city upon a hill, and thus as a nation better than, stronger than, and more righteous than all others. Linking post-World War II reactions to Communism to post-9/11 reactions to terrorism-with a detour through Mark Twain's critique of the Spanish-American War and John L. O'Sullivan's celebration of the Mexican-American Wa…
Sovereign Tropes
The South China Sea is the world’s busiest and most important waterway, serving as the crossroads of global capitalism and the connective tissue of Southeast Asia. With shipping routes, underwater resources, and hundreds of small islands claimed by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and others, the area stands among the world’s most contested regions. Since 1945, the United States …
Investigative Poetics
In his Beat‐inflected manifesto, Investigative Poetry , Edward Sanders argued that “the essence of investigative poetry” is to create “lines of lyric beauty [that] descend from data clusters,” hence both seducing and empowering readers with “a melodic blizzard of data‐fragments.” As illustrated in America , his epic collection of data‐fragment‐strewn poems, Sanders hoped to merge poetry with the pedagogical imperative to teach his readers their n…
Notes on, Confessions about, and Hopes for Globalization
1984/85: When I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, I applied for an exchange program with the University of Southampton, England. Like so many Americans, I was monolingual, so going abroad meant Engl
Political science (28 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Art (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Literature (17 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works)