Modern America
Not surprisingly, those who have recognized the need for a more intricate defense against these binary assumptions are those who have more fully experienced the destructive qualities of the oppressive paradigm. In the last century, marginalized groups of Americans have produced texts that rewrite the Edenic myth and showcase the inequality embedded in the narrative in an effort to discredit the standards that they did not meet. The artists and authors who make the most progress toward a equitable view do so either by working to redefine the characteristics of an established medium or by working with mixed media, and even though some created their texts before Jonathan Culler proposed his theories of the naturalization of images, all of the authors and artists work to “make explicit the rules, the conventions…and the procedures of interpretation that enable them to have the meaning they do” (viii) as he says they must in order to understand the impact of the text on society. Many of those rules and conventions are dictated by the medium through which the authors of the text chose to present their ideas, and in each case, as Marshall McLuhan has put it, “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 107) or at the very least, the context for the message.