What the FDU Website Says About Me

Academic vita

Awards and Honors

Course Syllabi

Personal Details

The BA in Communication Studies at FDU

The MA in Corporate and Organizational Communication

The Atlantic Journal of Communication

The Professors: Gary's Rock and Blues Band

Umberto Eco and Gary Radford, October 17, 2002

Selected Writings

Dr. Marie Radford's Web Site

Howard Radford, 1934-2007

"If only it were that easy. That's not 'reality.' You see: the deeper reality is made out of language."

Zeta said nothing.

"People don't understand this. And even if they say it, they sure as hell don't know what that means. It means there is no such thing as 'truth.' There's only language. There's no such thing as a 'fact.' There is no truth or falsehood, just dominant processes by which reality is socially constructed. In a world made out of language, nothing else is even possible."

Zeta searched in the dirt. She picked up a rusty nail. "Is this language?"

"Yep. That's a 'rusty nail,' as the conceptual entity called a 'rusty nail' is contructed under our cultural circumstances and in this moment in history."

"It feels real. It still gets my fingers all dirty."

"Zeta, listen to me. This part is really important. 'Even though her father loved her, the little girl died horribly because she stepped on the rusty nail.' That's language too."

Zeta's face crumpled in terror. She hastily flung the nail away into the darkness.

"There is no objective reality. There might be a world that has true reality. A world with genuine physics. But because we're in a world that's made out of language, we'll never, ever get to that place from here. There's no way out of a world that's made of language. We can never reach any bedrock reality. The only direction we can move is into different flavors of the dominant social discourse, or across the grain of the consensus narrative, or - and this is the worst part - into the Wittgenstein empty spaces where things can't be said, can't be spoken, can't even be thought . . . Don't ever go there, okay? You can never come out of there. It's a black hole."

"How come you know so much of this stuff, Dad?"

"I didn't use to know any of it. I was just living my life. I just liked to go live at the edge of the system, where things were breaking off and breaking down. It took me a long time to figure out what I was really doing, that I was always in some place where the big story was turning into little weird counterstories. But now I'm wising up to my situation, because I'm old now, and I know enough to get along in the world."

Starlitz sighed. "I don't know all that much, really. There are just a few people in the world who understand how reality works. Most of them don't speak English. They speak French. Because they're all language theorists. Semioticians, mostly, with some, uh, you know, structuralists and poststructuralists. . . Luce Iragaray. . . Roland Barthes. . . Julia Kristeva. . . Louis Althusser. . . These are the wisest people in the world, the only people with a real clue." Stalitz laughed morosely. "And does it help them? Hell, no! The poor bastards, they strangle their wives, they get run over by laundry trucks. . . And after Y2K their whole line of gab is gonna be permanently out of fashion. It'll be yesterday."

"How come they know so much?"

"I don't know how they know. But you can tell they know what's really going on, because when you read what they say, it sounds really cool and convincing, until you realize that even though you know it, you can't use that knowledge to change anything. If you can understand reality, then you can't do anything. If you're doing anything, it means that you don't understand reality. You never heard of any of those French people? I bet you never heard of any of them, right?"

Bruce Sterling (2000). Zeitgeist. New York, NY: Bantam Books, pp. 151-153.

Gary P. Radford, Ph. D.

2006 Recipient, National Communication Association Top Paper Award, Semiotics and Communication Division.

2005 Recipient, Fairleigh Dickinson University Distinguished Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship.

Professor of Communication Studies
Editor, The Atlantic Journal of Communication

Telephone: 973-443-8378 / FAX: 973-443-8713
E-mail: gradford@fdu.edu

Welcome to my website. Please use the links on the left to explore this site and to learn more about me. Some of the small pictures at the top of the page also link to surprise pages!

Teaching Highlights

I joined Fairleigh Dickinson University in September 1999. I teach courses in interpersonal communication, communication theory, and communication philosophy as part of the BA in Communication Studies.

In 2003, I was selected as the Teacher of the Year by the Maxwell Becton College of Arts and Sciences, Fairleigh Dickinson University. The award was presented on May 20, 2003.

On May 2, 2003, I was presented with the Equal Opportunity Fund (EOF) Outstanding Faculty Award at their 29th Annual Awards Ceremony at Fairleigh Dickinson University. This award is presented to the "faculty members who have provided exceptional service to the students enrolled in their classes. Faculty awardees are selected by the EOF student body."

On October 17, 2002, I had the enormous pleasure of meeting one of my all time heroes, Dr. Umberto Eco. Click here to read the full story!

Professional Service

• Editor-in-Chief, The Atlantic Journal of Communication
  
• Vice-President, Semiotics and Communication Division, National Communication Association
  
• Executive Board Member, The New Jersey Communication Association
  
• Past-President, The New York State Communication Association
• Executive Board Member, The New Jersey Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators

In 2003-2004, I was the Theory and Methodology Interest Group Conference Planner for the 95th annual conference of the Eastern Communication Association. The conference was held in Boston, MA, April 22-25, 2004.

Research and Scholarship Highlights

My paper "The Author Should Die: Semiotics and the Regime of Communication" was selected as the Top Paper received by the National Communication Association (NCA), Semiotics and Communication Division. I presented the paper at NCA's annual conference in San Antonio, TX, on November 17, 2006.

In June 2006, I was part of a panel invited to debate the proposition: Information literacy: A waste of librarians' time and talent?. My remarks were presented at the Association of College and Research Libraries President's Program at the Annual Conference of the American Library Association, New Orleans, LA, on June 26, 2006, before an audiene of between 400 and 500 people.

In 2005, I published a paper co-authored with Dr. Marie Radford entitled "Structuralism,post-structuralism, and the library: de Saussure and Foucault" in the Journal of Documentation (Volume 61, Number 1, pp. 60-78). Click on the the link to read a PDF version of the published article.

In November 2005, I was the respondent on the panel of the top three papers submitted to the Semiotics and Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA). I presented these remarks at the NCA's Annual Convention in Boston, MA, on November 18, 2005.

On September 28, 2005, I had the honor of being the recipient of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Distinguished Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship. You can link to the citation that was read on stage by University Provost Willard Gingerich, a description of the convocation ceremony at which I received my award, and the press release that FDU sent to the local, national, and international media.

My latest book, entitled On the Philosophy of Communication, was published in 2004 by Wadsworth Press. The book is available from Amazon.com.

My previous book is a treatment of the work of Italian semiotician Umberto Eco and is entitled On Eco (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003). The book is available on Amazon.com.

I am also the co-editor of the book Transgressing Discourses: Communication and the Voice of Other (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997). The book is available on Amazon.com.

My paper "Casting a Mist Before Our Eyes: John Locke and the End of Communicaton" was selected as a Top Paper by the Theory and Methodology Interest Group of the Eastern Communication Association (ECA) and was presented at ECA's 94th annual conference held in Washington, DC, on April 26, 2003.

My paper Beware of the Fallout: Umberto Eco and the Making of the Model Reader was selected as the Top Paper by the Theory and Methodology Interest Group of the Eastern Communication Association and was presented at ECA's 93rd annual conference held in New York City, NY, April 24-28, 2002.

I also received a Top Three Paper Award by the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association at its annual conference held in Washington, DC, May 2001. The paper, co-authored with Dr. Marie L. Radford, was entitled "Michel Foucault and the Discourse of Fear: Representations of Libraries in Modern Popular Culture."

Fun Stuff

For fun I play a wailing lead guitar for a blues/rock band called The Professors; yes, we have a website! Check us out at www.theprofessors.net. The Professors are the only band I know that have had an article published in a blind reviewed scholarly journal. The citation to the article is below. You can read the article by clicking on the link.

Radford, G. P., Cooper, S. D., Kubey, R. W., McCurry, D. S., Millen, J. and Barrows, J. R. (2002). Collaborative musical expression and creativity among academics: When intellectualism meets twelve bar blues. American Communication Journal [Online], 6(1). Available: www.acjournal.org.

I hope you enjoy your visit to my site.

Gary