Digital Commons Network^™

Unveiling Mississippi's Artistic Souls: A Documentary Journey, Sandip Rai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This MFA thesis presents a short documentary film focusing on the lives and artistic processes of four distinct artists residing in Mississippi: Andrew Bryant, Anne Scott Barrett, Jared Spears, and Stephen Brown (5th Child). The film delves into the intricacies of each artist's creative journey, capturing their unique perspectives and offering invaluable insights into their artistic endeavors.

Over the course of more than a year, this documentary underwent numerous revisions and refinements to ensure its significance both to the public audience and, most importantly, to the featured artists themselves. As an artist, the filmmaker was deeply motivated to unravel the …

“The Hard Work Is Done In The Looking”: Analyzing Representations Of And Responses To Appalachia In Popular Culture, Elizabeth Rose Barnes Trollinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For many Americans, the concept of Appalachia as a singular place has been created through images in popular culture, often stereotypical. This thesis presents an evolution of Appalachian representations—or, more appropriately, a chronology of images in stasis, as they seem to have remained fairly unchanged over time. Responses to those images, however, have changed greatly. Most importantly, responses from within Appalachia have transformed, with regional people gaining power over the types of images of the region in popular culture. There is, however, a paradoxical dualism in the responses from within the region, as some Appalachians grow weary of being stereotyped …

The Darker Angels Of Our Nature: The South In American Horror Film, Steven Clayton Saunders

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How does one make a region horrific? For well over half of a century, the American South has functioned as a site for national anxieties over race and modernization. This study uses an inter-disciplinary approach in order to understand the various forces involved in the construction of the South in American horror cinema. Particular attention is paid to the influence that images of the civil rights movement have had on the development and evolution of the South as a horrific and terrifying space for the rest of the nation. It focuses on four main subcategories of the genre: the white …