My turn

Lily’s own description in class, of her personal founding mothers of Comm, made me realize how my initial reaction to her question was to go through a mental inventory of theorists I’ve read and/or read about with respect to the field and its history. Her story made me realize that I took the question too much at face value, forgetting to think imaginatively. Does this episode of my lack of imaginative thinking exemplify the brainwashing metaphor of graduate education, mentioned in some earlier class? I worry about it, you know. But, I know, things are not so black and white, as usual.
Nevertheless, thanks to Lily, my ability to think in a non-linear way about a personal history that led me to Comm was (at least temporarily) restored. So, to that initial linear list of founding fathers and mothers (because, even though incomplete and too “academic,” it still means something), which includes, among others, Chomsky, Ong, Bordo, Foucault and Butler, I want to add the teachers (both institutional and metaphorical) who introduced me to the works of these people – I’d like to name some here, as my founding mothers and fathers: Sava Tintor, Zoran Paunovic, Danijela Stojanovic, Aleksandar Bogdanic, Polly Gannon, Tom de Zengotita, Mimi McGurl, Heather Lukes... the list goes on. Additionally, a few writers influenced me in ways that go beyond the Comm discipline per se, but are prominent factors in the way I think about the field nevertheless: Laza Lazarevic, Mesa Selimovic, Mihail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, not to mention Dostoevsky, and many many others. Then, there is also Yugoslav cinema, especially the Black Wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the way these films went about “communicating” something completely new and different. And there’s also the inescapable Hollywood, and that scene between Robert de Niro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, when they are forced to play Russian roulette and are in a state that is beyond words and beyond fear. That could be my “founding scene” for reasons too complex to elaborate on here. ☺
So, I’ll stop with that, because a non-linear list is usually also a non-finite list.