The firm, the park and the university: Fear and trembling on the postmodern trail

Abstract

Sheldon Hackney, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has called for a “national conversation” on “the meaning of American pluralism.” Analysis of The Firm and Jurassic Park is intended to make a contribution to this conversation by exploring the rhetorical textures of incivility that contemporary audiences generally appear to share and enjoy as entertainment but abjure and revile as politics. These postmodern performances celebrating public absence and flight to the private realm are accorded expanded forms of cultural play wherein the risks and rules, the attractions and costs, of mass‐mediated negative aesthetics are placed into discussion among contemporaneous generational perspectives. The essay concludes that the cultivation of an enlarged sense of productive, critical play is important to Speech Communication as afield of inquiry and to the University as a public institution.