Digital Commons Network^™

Futurama: An Immersive Experience Of America's Automotive Future, James Miller

Journal of Motorsport Culture & History

General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair offered a wildly popular immersive experience of American automobility twenty years in the future. The Fair proclaimed the “Dawn of a New Day” in “The World of Tomorrow” through comprehensive innovative architecture and design, which promoted the primary role of new technology, especially in the field of transportation. Futurama harnessed techniques of theatre and multi-media in unprecedented ways. Its narrow aim was to foster the construction of new highway systems hospitable to the growing population of modern cars. More broadly, Futurama sought to inculcate a new way of thinking …

Empirical Drawings: Utilizing Comic Essays In The Social Studies Classroom To Teach Citizenship, Angelo Letizia

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article posits that the comic medium, wedded with traditional essay assignments, may be a powerful tool for social studies teachers, those who prepare social studies teachers at the collegiate level and other teachers and professors who desire to teach about citizenship in an era of "fake news" and alternative facts.

“I Fixed Up The Trees To Give Them Some New Life:” Queer Desire, Affect, And Ecology In The Work Of Two Lgbtq+ Appalachian Artists/The Wildcrafting Our Queerness Project/The Queer Appalachia Preservation Project, Maxwell Mason Cloe

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The following essay and digital projects each engage both with a unique aspect of contemporary queer Appalachian art and culture as well as the ways in which oral history and digital humanities methodologies can be used to generate collaborative research possibilities. The first essay is an exploration of two LGBTQ+ Appalachian artists, Dustin Hall and Charles Williams, and the ways in which their work uses Donna Haraway’s “naturecultures” and Jose Muñoz’ understanding of queer futurity to rethink human relationships with non-human nature. The first digital project is an online exhibition of queer Appalachian artists and their work, bolstered by oral …

Fake Italian: An 83% True Autobiography With Pseudonyms And Some Tall Tales, Marc Dipaolo

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

In a city torn apart by racial tension, Damien Cavalieri is an adolescent without a tribe. His mother -who pines for the 1950s Brooklyn Italian community she grew up in- fears he lacks commitment to his heritage. Damien’s fellow Staten Islanders agree, dubbing him a “fake Italian” and bullying him for being artistic. Complicating matters, his efforts to make friends and date girls outside of the Italian community are thwarted time and again by circumstances beyond his control. When a tragic accident shakes Damien to his core, he begins a journey of self-discovery that will lead him to Italy, where …

Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry

Theses and Dissertations

Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.

The Infinite Crisis: How The American Comic Book Has Been Shaped By War, Winston Andrus

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis project argues that war has been the greatest catalyst for the American comic book medium to become a socio-political change agent within western society. Comic books have become one of the most pervasive influences to global popular culture, with superheroes dominating nearly every popular art form. Yet, the academic world has often ignored the comic book medium as a niche market instead of integrated into the broader discussions on cultural production and conflict studies. This paper intends to bridge the gap between what has been classified as comic book studies and the greater academic world to demonstrate the …

A World Of Infinite Possibilities: Recoding Popular Culture In Modern U.S. Ethnic Fiction, Todd Martinez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This project examines how the U.S. ethnic authors Ralph Ellison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz reflect the dynamic, reciprocal process of transculturation by decoding popular cultural forms. Using strategies made available by cultural studies, hemispheric theory and neoMarxism, critical attention will be directed to each author’s major literary work: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, and Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This dissertation further analyzes a hitherto overlooked area of U.S. multiethnic literary studies: the ethnic subject’s relationship to encoded popular culture forms and how they impact dentity formation. Recent scholarship has focused on the ethnic …

The Gender Epidemic: Intersecting Disease, Gender, And Sexuality In A Graphic Novel, Autumn Cejer

All NMU Master's Theses

For my thesis, I wrote a graphic novel set in a world where certain people possess powers that society tries to suppress by viewing them as a disease. The story focuses on two super-powered individuals on opposite sides of the law who handle this oppression very differently. Although these characters would easily be able to overpower the non-powered people in charge, they are too afraid to do so. Internalized guilt from possessing abilities they did not ask for adds an additional layer of conflict, just as women and disabled persons are constantly made to feel like they should apologize for …

From The Beqaa Valley To Deep Valley: Arab American Childhood & Us Orientalism In Children's Literature, Danielle Haque

Research on Diversity in Youth Literature

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Reviews of General Leonidas Polk, C. S. A., The Fighting Bishop. By Joseph H. Parks. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962. x, 408 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, critical essay on authorities, index. $7.50.); Josephus Daniels Says: An Editor’s Political Odyssey From Bryan to Wilson to FDR, 1894-1913. By Joseph L. Morrison. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. x, 281 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $7.50.); Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study of Political Leadership. By Alex Gottfried. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. xiii, 459 pp. Index. $6.50.); The South and the Southerner. By Ralph McGill. (Boston: Atlantic-Little, …

Socialist-Realist Art From The Perspective Of Gaze Theory: An Inquiry From Filmology To Iconology, Ying Lu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

"Socialist-realist gaze," linking gaze and socialist realist literary thoughts, refers to the visual communication of heroic figures on the external points off the screen in shooting Chinese revolutionary films. Such gaze, being invisible and with shared sight, returns to Jacques Lacan's gaze theory because of its intersubjective functioning. During its generation and function, socialist-realist gaze breaks the limitation of pictorial space, extends the boundary of screen as a "quilting point," and connects characters and audiences with ideological truth. As a performative image behavior, it arouses and strengthens the empathy between the viewers and the hero.

Ethnography Of Reading Comic Books, Azadeh Najafian

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This thesis explores why adults read comic books. This research used the ethnographic method and interviewing eleven people, four women, seven male, as its primary source. Based on information and common themes gathered from interviews, I built this thesis into one introduction, three body chapters, and a conclusion.

In the first chapter, I argued that comics could function the same as myths and explained this function and related examples under the “mythic effect” name. In the second chapter, I discussed how my informants use reading comics as a means to escape their everyday lives and how sometimes this escapism carries …

Japanese Popular Culture Influences In Contemporary Black American Rap And Hip-Hop, Rodrianna Gaddy

Senior Theses

Since hip-hop’s emergence in New York during the early 1970s, there has been an increasing amount of Japanese popular cultural references in Black American rap and hip-hop. This increase is made possible through globalization and innovations in communication technology. Most previous research on the trend has focused primarily on the impact hip-hop has had on Japanese culture, and how Afro-Asian collaborations have shaped music produced in the East and West. However, this thesis focuses on the influence various forms of Japanese media and history have had on contemporary Black American rap and hip-hop. I evaluate how artists can display these …

“He Who Laughs Last!” Terrorists, Nihilists, And Jokers, William S. Chavez, Luke Mccracken

Journal of Religion & Film

Since his debut in 1940, the Joker, famed adversary of the Batman, continues to permeate the American cultural mediascape not merely as an object of consumption but as an ongoing production of popular imagination. Joker mythmakers post-1986 have reimagined the character not as superhuman but as “depressingly ordinary,” inspiring audiences both to empathize with his existential plight and to fear his terroristic violence as an increasingly compelling model of reactionary resistance to institutionality. This article examines the recent history of modern terrorism in conjunction with the “pathological nihilism” diagnosed by Nietzsche in order to elucidate the stakes and implications of …

How Pop Cultures Makes For Better Teachers, Jason Olsen

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In this talk, I will discuss the benefits of pop culture for educators in two distinct but obviously connected ways: (1) how implementing pop culture in classroom curriculum (in both specific and general ways) can engage our students and improve their overall experience and performance and (2) how academic pop culture research and writing paves a path toward teaching excellence (even when the research is not pedagogically driven). As an Associate Professor of English at Utah State University, I can use examples from my own teaching and research (and how I have managed to merge them together), including how I …

She Lives: Bringing The Bride Of Frankenstein To Life In The Comics, Michael Torregrossa

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein recently celebrated its two-hundredth anniversary, and its story remains vibrant in popular culture, especially in the comics medium. I’ve done a number of conference papers in the past devoted to representations of the Creature and his creator, Victor Frankenstein, in comics and comic art, but I’ve only recently begun to look at how the character of the Bride of Frankenstein has been depicted. I’d like to use this opportunity to further that work and look more closely at continuations and recastings of her story. The Bride has no chance at life in Shelley’s novel, as she is …

“Meet The Fantastic Four”: The Origins And Innovations Of The Fantastic Four, William Nesbitt

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

No abstract provided.

“Back In The Saddle: Fallout: New Vegas And Real-World Tourism In Goodsprings, Nevada”, David Schwartz

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Fallout: New Vegas, a video role-playing game released in 2012, is set in Southern Nevada in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The action begins in Goodsprings, which is in effect the game’s tutorial space, as the player learns how to move, fight, and interact with others, as well as being exposed to the game’s world and the factions that inhabit it. The game’s Goodsprings was modeled on the real-life town of Goodsprings, with several locations directly modeled on real-life buildings. The Prospector Saloon’s real-world analogue, the Pioneer Saloon, has become a tourist site for the game’s devotees. This …

A Fat Imposter: The Embodied Intersection Between Race, Body Type And Fatness In Margaret Cho’S Comedy, Julia Cox

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Margaret Cho is a comedic goddess who, in her mockery, serves flaming hot social commentary about race, body image, and fatness. Within this thesis, I used critical discourse analysis to understand how Margaret Cho embodies Asianness, whiteness, and the body types and images prescribed respectively. While working on data analysis, I came across a common media trope of fat women: the use of indexically Southern (United States), Appalachian, and Working class indexicals in speech and lexical items. I connected the ideologies surrounding Southern and Appalachian language to the inequalities that fat women face. This voicing had not previously been written …