Gustav Verhulsdonck - Rhetoric & Professional Communication

Essays

Verhulsdonck, G & Morie, J.F. (Under review). Body/Persona/Action! Emerging Non-Anthropomorphic Interaction and Communication in Virtual Worlds. International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology 2008. Yokohama, Japan, Dec 2008.
Verhulsdonck, G. Issues of Designing Gestures into Online Interactions: Implications for Communicating in Virtual Environments. Proceedings of Special Interest Group Documentation and Online Communication 2007, El Paso, TX, October 29-31, 2007. New York: ACM Press. pp.26-33.
Verhulsdonck, G. (2007). Digital Spaces, Different Roles, Different Faces: The Importance of Gestures for Task-Oriented Communication & Performance in Virtual Environments. (Poster Presentation). Proceedings of IEEE Professional Communication Conference 2007. Seattle, WA, Oct 1-3. (CD-Rom), October 2007, Computer Society Press, October 2007.
Verhulsdonck, G. (2007). Collaborative Virtual Environments: How Philosophical Perspectives May Integrate E-Learning and Online “Places” in Reformation: The Teaching and Learning of English in Electronic Environments (eds. Richard Matzen, Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine, and Ying-hsueh Hu). Taiwan: Bookman.
Verhulsdonck, G., & Jeffery, C. (2005). Remembrance of things past: Using maps and routes to navigate through virtual environment experiences. To appear in Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Hawai’i International Conference on Systems Science.
Verhulsdonck, G. (2005). Disciplinary mapping of Collaborative Virtual Environments: Integrating a multi-user perspective in the creation of online places. In 2005 Computers and Writing Conference Proceedings. Stanford, CA: Bedford/ St Martin’s.

Rhetoric

Incommensurability, Metaphors of Science, and the Feyerabend-Kuhn Debate: Does Argument exist in Science?

This essay deals with how Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method posit different notions on rhetoric as argument in the development of new scientific theories.
Extending the (Aristotelian) Argument: Perelman, Rorty, and the Value Rhetoric and Dialectic

Both Chaim Perelman and Richard Rorty’s work is located in a desire to see philosophy as an ahistorical, universal truth-making discipline that should be replaced by the historicized praxis of rhetoric and dialectic. In this is essay, I use their work to argue that Perelman and Rorty extend Aristotle’s argument by arguing in favor of the utility of rhetoric and dialectic in practical human matters, which historically reinvests rhetoric and dialectic with renewed importance.

Critical Theory

Late Capitalism in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus

This essay explains that instead of the emphasis on completeness, unity, that the Oedipal figure represents, Deleuze and Guattari focus on the incompleteness of the subject and how this can facilitate various new social, economic and cultural infrastructures (the idea of the rootless "rhizome").

Literature

Immanence, Indeterminacy, Relativity: Towards a Post/modernist Reading of Samuel Beckett’s Watt

Though many would say postmodernity came after World War II and the post-nuclear age, in this essay I draw a connection between the various epistemological conundrums introduced by Quantum theory and their reflection in Samuel Beckett's Watt, which deals with similar crises of representation by having to renegotiate the aesthetic models of modernism and postmodernism.

Science Fiction

Cyberpunk: Ontology, Epistemology, and (Post-)Humanism in William Gibson's Neuromancer (Thesis).

In this thesis I argued that humanism as a dominant philosophical idea should be discarded with in order to discover the post-human direction that technology is taking us. Using such theorists as Donna Haraway, Fredric Jameson, Scott Bukatman, Leo Marx, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I argued that Gibson's novel is a prime example of a new literary realism that describes the new post-human epistemological and ontological notions advanced by technology and technological innovations, and is more inclusive of the post-humanist notions of subjectivity, knowledge, and self.
Alternate Universes: Probability, Marxism, and Feminist Utopias in Joanna Russ's The Female Man

Written while I was at WVU for Dr. Robert Markley's Science Fiction course. This essay is about Joanna Russ's feminist utopian novel, The Female Man. Using the Marxist framework of Fredric Jameson, as well as the probabilistic theories of Heisenberg and others, I analyze the alternate universes that are conjured up by Russ's narrative and how they critique various gendered forms of social and economic organization.

Video Games

The “Rhetorics of Play”: Grand Theft Auto, Agency And the Politics of Identity in the Age of Symbolic-Analytic Production

This essay is my attempt at synthesizing some of my research interests in computer technology, rhetoric, new media, and epistemology. In exploring Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto III, I examine the political, social, and economic logic behind this game, thus making the point that computer games can be informative and critical of current socio-political developments.