How do academics survive the bureaucracy, the petty jealousies, the absurdities of operating in the university? More important, how do they, as humans, cope with the darker shadows that enter professional lives - illness, sorrow, death? Coyote, The Trickster, a well known figure in the American Indian world, is also the icon for communication scholar Tom Frentz. Frentz uses the survival strategies of The Trickster in his articulate, amusing, and often emotional autoethnography of striving for quality through the worlds of academia and medicine.

How do academics survive the bureaucracy, the petty jealousies, the absurdities of operating in the university? More important, how do they, as humans, cope with the darker shadows that enter professional lives-- illness, sorrow, death? Coyote, The Trickster, a well known figure in the American Indian world, is also the icon for communication scholar Tom Frentz. Frentz uses the survival strategies of The Trickster in his articulate, amusing, and often emotional autoethnography of striving for quality through the worlds of academia and medicine.

Part human, part machine, the cyborg is the hero of an increasingly popular genre of American film and a cultural icon emblematic of an emergent postmodern mythology. Using the cyborg film as a point of departure, the authors examine how we rework Western myths and initiation rites in the face of new technologies. Through in-depth examinations of six representative films - "Jaws", "The Deer Hunter", "The Manchurian Candidate", "Blade Runner", "The Terminator", and "Terminator 2" - the authors track the narrative's thread from the hunter to his technological nemesis, demonstrating how each film represents an unfolding hunter myth. For each movie, Rushing and Frentz show how uninitiated male hunters slowly lose control over their weapons. In "Jaws", a "soft" man, dominated by technology, can re-acquire the heroic hunter qualities he needs by teaming up with a "savage" man and a "technological" man. In doing so, he can still conquer the prey. "The Manchurian Candidate" charts how technology can turn a human into a weapon; "Blade Runner" perfects the artificial human with its manufactured replicants who are "more than human"; and "The Terminator" introduces a female hunter who leads humanity in its struggle against technology.

Part human, part machine, the cyborg is the hero of an increasingly popular genre of American film and, as Janice H. Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz so provocatively suggest, a cultural icon emblematic of an emergent postmodern mythology. Using the cyborg film as a point of departure, Rushing and Frentz examine how we rework Western myths and initiation rites in the face of new technologies.
Through in-depth examinations of six representative films--"Jaws, The Deer Hunter, The Manchurian Candidate, Blade Runner, The Terminator," and "Terminator 2"--Rushing and Frentz track the narrative's thread from the hunter to his technological nemesis, demonstrating how each film represents an unfolding hunter myth.
For each movie, Rushing and Frentz show how uninitiated male hunters slowly lose control over their weapons. In "Jaws," a 'soft' man, dominated by technology, can re-acquire the heroic hunter qualities he needs by teaming up with a 'savage' man and a 'technological' man. In doing so, he can still conquer the prey. "The Manchurian Candidate" charts how technology can turn a human into a weapon; "Blade Runner" perfects the artificial human with its manufactured replicants who are "more than human"; and "The Terminator" introduces a female hunter who leads humanity in its struggle against technology.