Digital Commons Network^™

Circulating Emotion: Race, Gender, And Genre In Crash, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

Crash (Paul Haggis, 2005) follows a range of diverse but intersecting characters who, in their entirety, are meant to represent a social landscape: modern American urban existence. Through an ensemble cast and a multi-story structure, the film depicts a circuitous society in which one part affects other parts that, in turn, affect all parts.

The film is structured by means of three entangled, sometimes complementary, sometimes competing, cultural discourses. The first discourse is race. In a deeply troubling way, race is most overtly what the film is “about.” In the world of the film, virtually every character is at some …

Review Of Monsters, Gender, And Sexuality In Medieval English Literature By Dana Oswald, Jeff Massey Ph.D.

Faculty Works: ENG (1995-2016)

The perceived gender, overt sexuality, and frightening reproductive potential of medieval monsters are placed under the cultural mico- and macro-scope in this revised dissertations, an ambitious and provocative (if sometimes self-limited) addition to the growing field of monster studies. As with most recent explorations in the filed, Dana Oswald's argument (repeated with force and regularity throughout) relives heavily on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, focusing on monsters as embodiments of cultural anxiety. However, the haunting traces of monstrosity collected by Oswald lead her to proclaim that not only does the monster always escape (as theorized by Cohen), but that …