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Articles 1 - 21 of 21
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Introduction To Game Design, Development, And Criticism (Game 201t), Kevin Moberly, Richard E. Ferdig (Ed.), Emily Baumgartner (Ed.), Enrico Gandolfi (Ed.)
Introduction To Game Design, Development, And Criticism (Game 201t), Kevin Moberly, Richard E. Ferdig (Ed.), Emily Baumgartner (Ed.), Enrico Gandolfi (Ed.)
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
The (Mis) Representation Of Racialized Minorities: Barbie Dolls As Social Problems In India, Namrata Ashvinbhai Bhadania
The (Mis) Representation Of Racialized Minorities: Barbie Dolls As Social Problems In India, Namrata Ashvinbhai Bhadania
English Faculty Publications
The relation between commodities and consumers is directly related to the transactional relationship between kids and their interaction with the toys. The paper aims to critique how female representation through Barbie Dolls in popular culture shapes female identity. Production and consumption of Barbie dolls in India became a way of socializing mechanism to educate young Indian girls on the concept of beauty. A notion of beauty is attached to blue eyes, skinny waist, and fair skin giving rise to “American Exceptionalism” (Madsen, 2009, p. 14), where the model nation conceptualizes itself though national identity where perceiver compels to transform themselves …
Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol
Park Blues Langston Hughes, Racial Exclusion, And The Park Ballad, Margaret Konkol
English Faculty Publications
This chapter draws attention to the lack of parks and nature recreation amenities during the 1920s and 1930s in predominantly African American city neighborhoods through Langston Hughes’s political poetry, specifically his blues-inflected ballad “Park Bench,” as well as “Chicago’s Black Belt” “Restrictive Covenants,” and “One Way Ticket.” Through the figure of the tramp/vagrant/bum, “Park Bench” voices a protest against inequality mapped into city space. Asserting that access to nature should be a fundamental condition of a democratic society, the poem situates the park bench as a charged site for public dialogue. The chapter argues that this poem and other Hughes …
"And Nothing She Needs": Victoria's Secret And The Gaze Of "Post-Feminism", Marc Ouellette
"And Nothing She Needs": Victoria's Secret And The Gaze Of "Post-Feminism", Marc Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
A study of the Victoria’s Secret catalogues, which frames the period 1996-2006, reveals that the models’ poses and postures manipulate the formulaic gaze of objectification with seemingly empowering themes. Instead of the indeterminate, averted looks that Berger (1972) and Mulvey (1989) considered in their analyses, the more recent versions of Victoria’s Secret photographs confront viewers with pouts, glares, and stares of defiance. In this essay, I contribute to current conversations regarding mixed messages that concern post-feminism and third-wave feminism (Duffy, Hancock, & Tyler, 2017; Glapka, 2017; McAllister & DeCarvalho, 2014; McRobbie, 2009). In this regard, the Victoria’s Secret catalogues constitute …
"Saying 'I Do' All Over Again": The Throwaway Ornamentalism Of Promises Weddings Vow To Break, Marc A. Ouellette
"Saying 'I Do' All Over Again": The Throwaway Ornamentalism Of Promises Weddings Vow To Break, Marc A. Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
This article details a project that involved collecting the necessary items to produce a set of wedding pictures. While photographs have long been understood as indexical signs, the process of collecting the items via trips to thrift stores reveals a host of additional indexical signs through the set of underlying contextual cultural constraints surrounding the difference between the rituals of the marriage rite and the wedding as a public, performative practice. Indeed, the second hand items leave indexical and material traces of the excess and the disposability of weddings, while the pictures offer the material connection to the ostentation of …
"If You Want To Be The Man, You've Got To Beat The Man": Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990'S, Marc Ouellette
"If You Want To Be The Man, You've Got To Beat The Man": Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990'S, Marc Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE’s on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …
Apportioned Commodity Fetishism And The Transformative Power Of Game Studies, Ken S. Mcallister, Chris Hanson, Judd Ethan Ruggill, Carly A. Kocurek, Tobias Conradi, Kevin A. Moberly, Steven Conway, Randy Nichols, Jennifer Dewinter, Marc A. Oullette
Apportioned Commodity Fetishism And The Transformative Power Of Game Studies, Ken S. Mcallister, Chris Hanson, Judd Ethan Ruggill, Carly A. Kocurek, Tobias Conradi, Kevin A. Moberly, Steven Conway, Randy Nichols, Jennifer Dewinter, Marc A. Oullette
English Faculty Publications
This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, and vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification.
Of Sonnets And Archives: Robert Graves, Laura Riding, And The Erasure Of Modern Poetry, Margaret Konkol
Of Sonnets And Archives: Robert Graves, Laura Riding, And The Erasure Of Modern Poetry, Margaret Konkol
English Faculty Publications
In the nearly eighty years since Laura Riding and Robert Graves ceased their collaborative endeavors there has been much speculation as to the nature and extent of their literary partnership. Graves retold the past to his biographers, constructing Laura Riding as a queen yogi figure wielding an almost sinister influence. In response to these accusations Riding returned fire with volley after volley of “corrective” letters which she sent to Graves’s biographers as well as any magazine or student that she found to be sympathizing with Grave’s account of the creative partnership. At the time of her death in 1991, Riding …
Nobody Here Does Anything For Nothing: Reciprocity And Gender In The Wings Of The Dove, Marc A. Ouellette
Nobody Here Does Anything For Nothing: Reciprocity And Gender In The Wings Of The Dove, Marc A. Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
The article discusses the work of author Henry James in his novel "The Wings of the Dove." It discusses the comment of aristocrat Lord Mark on heroine of the novel Milly Theale who summarizes the central themes of the story, social exchange. It informs that social exchange is a perspective that motivates people that maximize benefits and minimize costs in their relationships with others.
There Is No Word For Work In The Dragon Tongue, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly
There Is No Word For Work In The Dragon Tongue, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly
English Faculty Publications
The past decade or so has witnessed a relatively steady stream of scholarly interest in the mundane medieval—in labor, local economies, and their influence upon wider cultural production.1 Despite this interest (and perhaps as a reaction to it), popular medievalism has continued to emphasize versions of the medieval that are decidedly more heroic—productions that are simultaneously (and paradoxically) more “realistic” and more “fantastic.” Labor plays, at best, a supporting role in these fantasies: while not absent, it rarely, if ever, has the same productive presence as it does in recent scholarly treatments of medieval economies. Inasmuch as popular medievalism …
Married, With Children And An Xbox: Compromise In Video Games Play, Marc A. Ouellette
Married, With Children And An Xbox: Compromise In Video Games Play, Marc A. Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
(First paragraph) In a home with two children under six, managing to find the time and the games that allow for play with a partner who has completely different tastes and capabilities produces compromises both inside and outside the game, as well as a hybrid form that spans the two. This last point highlights the fact that compromise remains a popularly studied topic in considerations of games, but only within very discrete boundaries that do not necessarily have anything to do with play or with players. Said another way, compromise appears in studies that foreground games as promoting aggression and …
"We Should Have Brought The Tank": Hypermediated Interactivity In Red Vs. Blue, Marc A. Ouellette
"We Should Have Brought The Tank": Hypermediated Interactivity In Red Vs. Blue, Marc A. Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
Machinima, the practice of adapting recorded video game play into short films, highlights an often unacknowledged but significant shift in the consumption of video games and represents a key and underexplored intersection between the two leading theoretical camps. Considering the landmark series Red vs. Blue through the lens of Bolter and Grusin's propositions about "new" media's relationships with other forms offers an entry point for theorizing not only machinima but also the intersections between the ludology and narratology positions in games studies.
Commodifying Scarcity: Society, Struggle, And Spectacle In World Of Warcraft, Kevin Moberly
Commodifying Scarcity: Society, Struggle, And Spectacle In World Of Warcraft, Kevin Moberly
English Faculty Publications
Overrun by monsters and tyrants, and ravaged by fanaticism, excess, and greed, World of Warcraft offers players a chance to struggle metaphorically against that which oppresses them: the excesses of late capitalism as they are represented by the game’s spectacular antagonisms. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, however, players must employ the very thing through which their oppression is manifested. Interpellated into the game as fetishized images, players must construct themselves and function in accordance with the limitations imposed upon them by the race and class of their characters. Players, as such, are incorporated into World of Warcraft’s …
Sati In Philadelphia: The Widow(S) Of Malabar, Jeffrey H. Richards
Sati In Philadelphia: The Widow(S) Of Malabar, Jeffrey H. Richards
English Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
"When A Killer Body Isn't Enough": Cross-Gender Identification In Action-Adventure Video Games, Marc Ouellette
"When A Killer Body Isn't Enough": Cross-Gender Identification In Action-Adventure Video Games, Marc Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
While sports games try to recreate the atmosphere of a stadium or of television broadcasts of games, role-playing and action adventure games attempt to duplicate cinematography through animation. For Tomb Raider, the virtual reality created by the cinematic animation of the game produces an environment for male-to-female cross-gender identification, a topic that has received little critical attention. The sense of identification intended in this chapter comes from psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, who describe identification as a "psychological process in which a subject assimilates an aspect, a property, a characteristic of another and transforms himself [or herself] totally or …
"It'll Pass": Nypd: Blue's Sipowicz And Mundane Masculinity, Marc Ouellette
"It'll Pass": Nypd: Blue's Sipowicz And Mundane Masculinity, Marc Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
(First paragraph) The development of the character of Det. Andy Sipowicz, on the ABC drama, NYPD: Blue, effectively demonstrates that the obstinance of traditional forms of masculinity may ultimately be a key factor in their undoing. Rather than effecting a superficial change based on consumer choice, as concurrent characters do, Sipowicz undergoes a transformation of his social behavior. Sipowicz regularly behaves in a manner consistent with Robert Connell’s definition of “hegemonic masculinity”: he resorts to violence, he resists change and he resents women and minorities (131). His alcoholism and quick temper tend to hinder his ability to adapt. However, change …
Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film [Book Review], Marc Ouellette
Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film [Book Review], Marc Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film is an indictment of the key American myth that anyone can succeed through self-reliance. Baker finds that sports films, in general, comprise a site in which the myth is represented and reproduced. Baker's focus, though presented from multiple analytical perspectives, is singular in its purpose. That said, Baker does concentrate on what he considers the four core American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Approximately ninety movies, from the silent era to the present day, provide the content of the analysis, but several are exemplary and are cited repeatedly in the book's …
Reel Baseball: Essays And Interviews On The National Pastime, Hollywood And American Culture, Marc Ouellette
Reel Baseball: Essays And Interviews On The National Pastime, Hollywood And American Culture, Marc Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
The editors of Reel Baseball begin by acknowledging the roots of their collection, which explores the intersection between movies and baseball. Since 1989 the National Baseball Hall of Fame has hosted the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. Since 1997, McFarland has published all papers presented at the symposium. Reel Baseball, then, functions both as a document and as an artifact of the "integral" place of baseball movies in American culture. Indeed, the book not only includes essays presented at the symposium, it has two foreword sections: one written by Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey and the …
Holy Fools, Secular Saints, And Illiterate Saviors In American Literature And Popular Culture, Dana Heller
Holy Fools, Secular Saints, And Illiterate Saviors In American Literature And Popular Culture, Dana Heller
English Faculty Publications
In her article, "Holy Fools, Secular Saints, and Illiterate Saviors in American Literature and Popular Culture," Dana Heller identifies and analyzes characteristics of the holy fool figure in American literature and culture. Heller defines the holy fool, or divine idiot, as a figure central to U.S. myths of nation. One encounters such figures in American literature as well as in American folklore, popular culture, and mass media. In American culture, the Divine Idiot is a hybrid form which grows out of the crossings of numerous literary and historical currents, both secular and non-secular. This unwieldy hybridity -- the fact that …
Why Are Those Women So Angry? (Alienating People Of Good Will), Janet Bing
Why Are Those Women So Angry? (Alienating People Of Good Will), Janet Bing
English Faculty Publications
(First paragraph) Until quite recently, I dismissed criticisms of "angry feminists" as a sexist stereotype. I was tired of hearing people say, "I believe in equal pay for equal work, but I dislike those bra-burning feminists!" Perhaps I'm too young, but almost all of my friends are feminists, and I have yet to meet anyone who has burned her bra, so this comment always strikes me as bizarre. However, recently I have begun to think seriously about the power of stereotypes and the ability of people to disregard messages they do not want to hear. I now realize that feminists …
Marge Piercy's Small Changes: Welcome To The Sexual Revolution, Nancy Topping Bazin
Marge Piercy's Small Changes: Welcome To The Sexual Revolution, Nancy Topping Bazin
English Faculty Publications
Marge Piercy's novel Small Changes is encyclopedic in its incredibly detailed, all-encompassing feminist analysis of female and male behavior in the late 60's and early 70's. The behavior of the younger generation is compared and contrasted with that of their parents. The overall impression given by the novel is that, despite the very different life-styles of the two generations, very little change has, in fact, occurred. At the end of the novel, sexism prevails and no significant threat to male control of the power structure has developed. From examination of the title, Piercy seems to place her emphasis not upon …