Southern Academic Review

2010·5.5 MB·English

Southern
Academic
Volume 2010
77

BIRMINGHAM-SOUTHERNCOLLEGE
5 0553 01239498 4
Southern Academic Review
A StudentJournal of Scholarship
Volume Seventy-Seven
Loree Killebrew, Editor-in-Chief
Allison Herren, Selections Editor
Kristen Lennard, Layout Editor
Amy
Dr. Cottrill, Advisor
SouthernAcademic Review (SAR) is published every spring by students of
Birmingham-Southern College. It is funded by the Student Government
Association and operates under the supervision of the Student Publications
Board. SAR seeks to publish material of scholarly interest to the students
and faculty of Birmingham-Southern College and the editorial scope
encompasses all disciplines. Fully annotated research papers and shorter
SAR
essays receive equal consideration for publication. accepts submission
from any currently enrolled student of the college. No submission wall be
considered if it has been previously submitted for academic credit at an
institution other than Birmingham-Southern. For more information, please
contact the Southern Academic Review Office at sar(a)bsc.edu.
Copyright 2010 by SouthernAcademicReview
And Birmingham-Southern College
Printed by Commercial Printing, Birmingham, Alabama

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Note
Each paper in thisjournal serves as an example of the scholarship being
produced by the students at Birmingham-Southern College. As such, it
attempts to reproduce each paper in the format of the discipline in which it
was created. Consequently, there are minor inconsistencies of style through-
out the publication. These have been retained as a subtle celebration of the
diversity that makes SouthernAcademic Review representative of the liberal arts
education found at Birmingham-Southern College.

Table of Contents
This Isn't Happening: Hyperreality and Unstable Identity in The Real World/
RoadRules Challenge by Laura Lee Price Burks
1
Quantum Sense by Ryan Melvin
13
The Pygmy Sculpin (Cottuspaulus): The Habitat, Life History, and Status of a
Threatened Species Endemic to Coldwater Spring in Calhoun County,
Alabama byJames Randolph
20
Asian Values: Reasonable Rejection of Universality or Strategic
Construction of Authority by Kathleen Smith
32
When "Try this" meets "Come With Me...we'll change the world";
The Leadership of Frances Willard by Kait Talley
45
"All Faces are Seen; Few Are Heard From": The Co-optation of Poverty in
Postmodern Fashion by Charlsie Wigley
61
Satire across Two Mediums: The Connections between William Wycherley's
The Country Wife and William Hogarth'sMarriageA LaMode
by O'Bryan Hewitt
72
Carolyn Chute as an Unconscious Feminist in The Beans ofEgypt\ Maine
by Kimmie Farris
80

Burks
1
This Isn't Happening: Hyperreality and Unstable Identity in
The Real World/RoadRules Challenge
by Laura Lee Price Burks
Authenticity is hard to come by in the disorienting world of reality tele-
vision, and I love The Real World/RoadRules Challenge precisely because it has
abandoned all pretense of portraying itself as any sort of plausible "reality."
The Challenge, a dramatic and bizarre mingling of physical competition and
interpersonal conflict, has mutated from its parent and feeder reality televi-
sion series, TheReal Worldand (the now-cancelled) RoadRules, into something
so self-referential and self-derivative that it has ceased to resemble any form
of authentic experience. And people are drawn in: this summer's season,
TheDuel 2, regularly won its time slot in both cable and broadcast ratings
among its 12-to-34-year-old target demographic (Vaughan 1). Though easily
dismissed as disposable, empty, or trashy and almost certainly meaningless
- there's something about the Challenge series that fascinates, and it's never
quite what's happening on-screen. The concept of an absurdly competi-
tive "reality game show" in which ex-Real Worlders are isolated together in
a resort with nothing to do but booze and strategize and occasionally "do
challenges" (play intensely physical games) is sometimes downright mesmer-
izing.
Why? Because it's not real. The Challenge has evolved so beautifully as
an illusionary game of the real that not even the man who denied the Gulf
War could deny its appeal to all kinds of postmodern theories and anxieties
of "the real" and how it's mediated. For this investigation of the Challenge,
the most directive theorists,Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco, look with
outsiders' eyes at America and Americans' relationship to the reality of our
postwar, late capitalist, consumerist culture. The theorists, French and Ital-
ian, respectively, have each commented at length on the origins and conse-
quences of this phenomenal American reality. Both men have used the term
"hyperreal" to describe their experiences: for Baudrillard, it means "the
generation by models of a real without origin or reality" {Simulacra 1), and
for Eco it's "instances where the American imagination demands the real
things, and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the
boundaries between game and illusion are blurred" (Eco 8). The most com-
mon reference for both writers is Disneyland and its disorienting, historically
inaccurate pastiche of time and place (Las Vegas, with its slew of mock-in-
ternational-city hotels, is also an apt reference), and both writers take it as a
metonym for American culture on the whole: without any history of its own,
without originality, without authentic reference.
In Simulacra andSimulation, Baudrillard differentiates between his two
title subjects by citing Littre: '"Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in
bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness pro-
duces in himself some of the symptoms'" (Simulacra 3). Though the two may
be almost superficially identical, the simulacrum is an empty assemblage of
images whereas the simulation manages to produce substance without au-
thenticity. Don't be surprised if this is an uncharted differentiation, because
after Baudrillard traveled through America in the late 1980s, he concluded
that 'Americans, for their part, have no sense of simulation. They are them-
selves simulation in its most developed state ... they are the ideal material for
an analysis of all the possible variants of the modern world" (America 39).
Thanks to participants' unstable personal identities, to the highly edited and
structured nature of the production, and to its delivery via multiple media
platforms, the Real World'/RoadRules Challenge series is the high-water mark of
America's ability to simulate realities so fantastic that they lose sight of the
boundaries of illusion and reality.
Over the course The Real World, which debuted in 1992 and is cur-
rently filming its 26th season ("The Real World"), "types" increasingly
seemed cast rather than "unique" personalities, the storylines became more
overtly produced and sleekly structured, and the series became more of a
reliably tasteless soap opera. The same is true for RoadRules. Both shows
became less "real," and the shows' production company now calls them
"reality-based docu-dramas" rather than "reality television" ("About Us").
Rather than apply on the grounds of ordinariness, participants audition on
the grounds of fitting a type, and they apply with aims far beyond acquir-
ing attractive roommates and a nice place to live for a few months. Many
contemporary RWand RR cast members hope that television exposure will
launch a career, predicated on their realiiy-TV personas, in their entertain-
ment area of choice. This isn't surprising; it would follow that people inter