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Articles 1 - 30 of 63
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Trauma In Weird Literature: Weird Experiences And Neuropsychiatric Conditions, Mijin Cho
Trauma In Weird Literature: Weird Experiences And Neuropsychiatric Conditions, Mijin Cho
AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship
This study aims to explore the element of trauma or shock in weird fiction using H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space” as the focal text. I am interested in the cognitive estrangement and body disfigurement following encounters with the weird, which in this case would be the meteorite’s Colour, on the characters experiencing it in the story, including the Gardners and Ammi. The goal is to investigate our reactions to being pushed past our thresholds as human beings using analysis of characters, diction, and rhetoric in weird fiction stories and non-fiction patient narratives to better understand how weird …
“I Know What Nothing Means”: Nostalgia, Hope, And The Postmodern Search For The Sublime, Kathryn L. Donati
“I Know What Nothing Means”: Nostalgia, Hope, And The Postmodern Search For The Sublime, Kathryn L. Donati
Theses and Dissertations
Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary …
An Arbitrary Aesthetic: Cultural Reproduction And Hegemonic Canonical Formations In The Western Theatrical Academy, Sim C. Rivers
An Arbitrary Aesthetic: Cultural Reproduction And Hegemonic Canonical Formations In The Western Theatrical Academy, Sim C. Rivers
Theses and Dissertations
Theatre as an artistic practice has often been celebrated as an art of and for the people, being a modality that in theory the common person has access to learn, explore and experience. In recent years I have become preoccupied with the growing rarification and privileging of this art form, particularly in how it is cognized and taught in the academic world. As such, I set out to investigate the mechanisms at work at levels structural, artistic, and personal that determine how theatre is taught and understood within the western academy.
This thesis seeks to examine and unpack the perceived …
Marketing Reimagined: The Effect Of Tiktok’S Success On Social Media Advertisement, Ryan Roberts
Marketing Reimagined: The Effect Of Tiktok’S Success On Social Media Advertisement, Ryan Roberts
AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship
In 2021, the average TikTok user spent 19.6 hours a month on the platform, equivalent to the time spent by users on the leader of Social Media, Facebook (Sweeney, 2022). This year, TikTok is projected to triple its global advertisement revenues to 11.6 billion dollars, surpassing the 10.44 billion dollars global advertisement take of Snapchat and Twitter combined (Sweeney, 2022). TikTok is one of the most recent and successful social media platforms. It has gained worldwide renown for its unique, rapid presentation of content and addictive structure that has engaged a large audience in a short time. With attention increasing …
Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson
Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …
Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv
Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv
Theses and Dissertations
In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …
Olympia, Wilderness, And Consumption In Laird Barron’S Old Leech Cycle, John Glover
Olympia, Wilderness, And Consumption In Laird Barron’S Old Leech Cycle, John Glover
VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications
This book chapter considers the cosmic horror fiction of Laird Barron through a blended ecocritical/postcolonial lens, focusing on its representation of the Pacific Northwest and Olympia, Washington. Wilderness and consumption are both strongly represented concepts in Barron’s Old Leech Cycle of stories, aligning with colonial perceptions of the American West as a largely unpeopled space ripe for exploitation. The eldritch horrors of these tales align with well-established traditions in weird fiction, and they are also perfectly suited to locations historically identified with resource extraction.
Spirituality Countering Dehumanization: A Cypher On Asian American Hip Hop Flow, Brett J. Esaki
Spirituality Countering Dehumanization: A Cypher On Asian American Hip Hop Flow, Brett J. Esaki
Journal of Hip Hop Studies
Flow—an artistic connection to the beat—is essential to the experience and cultural mix of Hip Hop. “Flow” is also a term from positive psychology that describes a special out-of-body state of consciousness, first articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. When Hip Hop performers get into artistic flow, they sometimes become immersed in psychological flow, and this article examines the combination for Asian American Hip Hop. Based on my national survey of Asian Americans in Hip Hop, I argue that dual flow inspires spiritual transformation and mitigates the dehumanization of social marginalization. However, the combination of terms presents problematic possibilities, given that Hip …
Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms From Influencers To Multi-Level Marketing Schemes, Frankie Mastrangelo
Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms From Influencers To Multi-Level Marketing Schemes, Frankie Mastrangelo
Theses and Dissertations
I define girlboss feminism as emergent, mediated formations of neoliberal feminism that equate feminist empowerment with financial success, market competition, individualized work-life balance, and curated digital and physical presences driven by self-monetization. I look toward how the mediation of girlboss feminism utilizes branded and affective engagements with representational politics, discourses of authenticity and rebellion, as well as meritocratic aspiration to promote cultural interest in conceptualizing feminism in ways that are divorced from collective, intersectional struggle. I question the stakes involved in reducing feminist interrogations and commitments to discourses of representation, visibility, and meritocracy. I argue that while girlboss feminism may …
The Living Theatre Of Horror: Examining How Centuries Of Western Theatrical Practice And Theory Inform The Modern-Day Haunted House, Scott Dittman
The Living Theatre Of Horror: Examining How Centuries Of Western Theatrical Practice And Theory Inform The Modern-Day Haunted House, Scott Dittman
Theses and Dissertations
This work will discuss the growing modern phenomenon of theme park and regional haunt events in the United States. In it, we will explore the history of how horror has been presented on stage, the themes within horror that creators grapple with, and how by using traditional theatrical elements creators of modern haunt events are able to make the audience a part of the story, transforming them from passive observers of the scenarios presented to complicit participants. How does the history of horror theatre inform the production of modern haunt events (and how has a global pandemic affected them), what …
Reanimator/Reflection: Creating Mirrors Through Time With Ai, Sound, Video And Live-Generated Art In The Dark Age Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Eric Millikin
Theses and Dissertations
For my MFA thesis exhibition entitled Reanimator/Reflection, I used artificial intelligence to create three new works of sound and live-generated video art, each based on mirror reflections and 100-year-old racist post-pandemic horror literature by early 20th century American author H. P. Lovecraft. The themes of these writings mirror the issues of our current time. The primary works of Lovecraft that I referenced in the exhibition are “Herbert West: Reanimator,” (1922) a serialized tale about graduate school experiments which attempted to return the dead to life during a plague, and “Nyarlathotep,” (1920) a prose poem that suggests even our dreams …
"With The Commodity In The Hand": A Practical Investigation Of The Intersection Of Material Culture With Performance Theory, Katharine M. Given
"With The Commodity In The Hand": A Practical Investigation Of The Intersection Of Material Culture With Performance Theory, Katharine M. Given
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the intersection of performance theory and material culture through the practices of garment reconstruction. In chapter 1, I examine key theorists in the fields of material culture and performance studies and articulate the connections between the two fields. In chapter 2, Using practice as research, I recount the experience of building reproduction garments from the eighteenth century using historically appropriate tools and methods, as well as the experience of wearing those garments. Finally, in Chapter 3, I walk through a possible historical examination of my encounter with these reconstructed garments, and consider the way in which feminine …
Recovering Lost Voices: The Rappahannock Tribe And The Jamestown Festival Of 1957, Woodie L. Walker Ii
Recovering Lost Voices: The Rappahannock Tribe And The Jamestown Festival Of 1957, Woodie L. Walker Ii
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis employs the interdisciplinary methodologies of ethnohistory and oral history to examine the legacy of the 1957 Jamestown Festival through the experiences and memories of Rappahannock people. “Recovering Lost Voices: The Rappahannock Tribe and the Jamestown Festival of 1957” adds to the historiography of Virginia Natives by revealing that Rappahannock participation in the Jamestown Festival was the culmination of centuries of cultural preservation, greatly influenced and made immediate by their experiences in “Jim Crow” Virginia during the twentieth century. This research establishes that the enduring legacy of the Festival for the Rappahannock Tribe was political influence, culminating in state …
Robert Cowley: Living Free During Slavery In Eighteenth-Century Richmond, Virginia, Ana F. Edwards
Robert Cowley: Living Free During Slavery In Eighteenth-Century Richmond, Virginia, Ana F. Edwards
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the life of Robert Cowley, a formerly enslaved man living free during slavery in eighteenth-century Richmond, Virginia. The first chapter examines Cowley’s enslaved life through the records of others. The data collectors and historians of early America did not intend to capture the truth of Black people’s American experiences, except as defined their enslavement--people in service to the wealth-building capacity of the nation. Yet the lives of Black people who lived in proximity to prominent whites can be glimpsed in a variety of records and writings from account books to deeds, from private letters to newspaper advertisements. …
Nigga Is Historical: This Is Not An Invitation For White People To Say Nigga, Sandy Williams Iv
Nigga Is Historical: This Is Not An Invitation For White People To Say Nigga, Sandy Williams Iv
Theses and Dissertations
Over the past several years I have been on a quest to locate a world beyond the one I’ve been presented. I am interested in the history of atomic particles - like everything that radiates off of a monument (both literally and those things that are metaphorically reified) - invisible things, and the ways in which these things insect beyond our knowledge systems. This inquiry takes many forms. Mine is a conceptually based practice linked to record keeping and time, and the ways in which these concepts find plurality within our culture; or more pointedly, the importance that we attach …
The Mountains At The End Of The World: Subcultural Appropriations Of Appalachia And The Hillbilly Image, 1990-2010, Paul L. Robertson
The Mountains At The End Of The World: Subcultural Appropriations Of Appalachia And The Hillbilly Image, 1990-2010, Paul L. Robertson
Theses and Dissertations
There is an aversion within the field of Appalachian Studies to addressing the cultural formulations of the Appalachian/hillbilly/mountaineer as an icon of aggressive resistance. The aversion is understandable, as for far too long images of the irrationally and savagely violent mountaineer were integral to the most gross popular culture stereotypes of Appalachia. Media consumers often take pleasure or comfort in these images, which usually occur in a reactionary context with the hillbilly as either a type of nationally necessary savage OR as an unregenerate barbarian against whom a national civilization will triumph and benefit by the struggle.
I bookend my …
The Prodigal Daughter: An Edition Of An Anonymous Text, Paige Deans
The Prodigal Daughter: An Edition Of An Anonymous Text, Paige Deans
Theses and Dissertations
The Prodigal Daughter (1736) is a poem that, on the surface, appears to be an approachable text that was likely geared towards a children’s audience during New England’s first Great Awakening, within the approachable format of a chapbook. However, when explored further, The Prodigal Daughter reveals a complicated textual history during a time of theological and social revival in New England. This thesis considers the historical context of The Prodigal Daughter’s narrative, as well as the poem’s publication history. The text’s transmission is carefully examined and encapsulated in this edition—giving the reader a transcription that is the result of …
Always Already Imprisoned: The Panoptic Power Of Capitalism In American Literature, 1900-1940, Andrew Spencer
Always Already Imprisoned: The Panoptic Power Of Capitalism In American Literature, 1900-1940, Andrew Spencer
Theses and Dissertations
Abstract
ALWAYS ALREADY IMPRISONED: THE PANOPTIC POWER OF CAPITALISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1900-1940
By Andrew Blair Spencer, Ph.D.
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Virginia Commonwealth University, 2019
Director: Dr. Richard Fine, Professor, Department of English
By applying the theories of control that Michel Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish to the capitalist system, I argue that capitalism functions in much the same was as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in that it perpetually imprisons individuals who live under its purview. As I see it, capitalism works on …
Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin
Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin
Theses and Dissertations
Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.
In Media Res, Christopher Andrew Sisk
In Media Res, Christopher Andrew Sisk
Theses and Dissertations
We are inundated by a constant feed of media that responds and adapts in real time to the impulses of our psyches and the dimensions of our devices. Beneath the surface, this stream of information is directed by hidden, automated controls and steered by political agendas. The transmission of information has evolved into a spiral of entropy, and the boundaries between author, content, platform, and receiver have blurred. This reductive space of responsive media is a catalyst for immense political and cultural change, causing us to question our notions of authority, truth, and reality.
Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber
Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber
Theses and Dissertations
Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.
Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence
Black Lives Examined: Black Nonfiction And The Praxis Of Survival In The Post-Civil Rights Era, Ariel D. Lawrence
Theses and Dissertations
The subject of my thesis project is black nonfiction, namely the essay, memoir, and autobiography, written by black authors about and during the Post-Civil Rights Era. The central goals of this work are to briefly investigate the role of genre analysis within the various subsets of nonfiction and also to exemplify the ways that black writers have taken key genre models and evolved them. Secondly, I aim to understand the historical, political, and cultural contributions of the Post-Civil Rights Era, which I mark as hitting its stride in 1968. It is not my desire to create a definitive historical framework …
Reception Claims In Supernatural Horror In Literature And The Course Of Weird Fiction, John Glover
Reception Claims In Supernatural Horror In Literature And The Course Of Weird Fiction, John Glover
VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications
This chapter explores H. P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," considering the ways in which Lovecraft attempted to construct favorable conditions for the reception of his own work. The writing of the essay was a pivotal moment in Lovecraft's career and authorial self-fashioning. Both it and he went on to influence the development of weird fiction in Lovecraft's lifetime and subsequently, lasting well into the current period of reevaluation of the author's legacy and person.
I Am An Author: Performing Authorship In Literary Culture, Justin R. Greene
I Am An Author: Performing Authorship In Literary Culture, Justin R. Greene
Theses and Dissertations
Authorship is not merely an act of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard; it is a social identity performance that includes the use of multiple media. Authors must be hyper- visible to cut through the dearth of information, entertainment options, and personae vying for attention in our supersaturated media environment. As they enter the literary world, writers consciously create characters and narratives around themselves, and through the consistent and believable enactment of these features, authors are born. In this dissertation, I analyze the performance of authorship in U.S. literary culture through an interdisciplinary framework. My work pulls from …
Good Game, Greyory Blake
Good Game, Greyory Blake
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …
Patterns Of Enslavement And Economic Oppression Of Central Virginia, Hannah Bedwell
Patterns Of Enslavement And Economic Oppression Of Central Virginia, Hannah Bedwell
Undergraduate Research Posters
I address how anthropologists can identify the patterns and development of slavery and economic oppression through archaeology and the visualization of Virginia enslavement. I focus on the enslaved people of James Madison's Montpelier. I use 3D modeling as a foundation for integrating enhanced visuals with the goal of presenting a tangible understanding of the enslaved individuals in relation to the artifacts and history of the archaeological sites. I intend to show a common theme in economic oppression by comparing modern themes in slavery and examining Fraser D. Neiman's synthesis of the evolutionary perspective of slavery, and how little has changed …
(Re)Mediating The Spirit: Evangelical Christian Young Adult Media, Tamara Watkins
(Re)Mediating The Spirit: Evangelical Christian Young Adult Media, Tamara Watkins
Theses and Dissertations
"We are in the world, but not of the world," a maxim frequently spoken in evangelical Christian culture, provides insight into how these individuals view their relationship with secular culture. They presume to share the same temporal plane with secular culture, but do not participate in it. In this dissertation, I explore whether the division between evangelical Christian culture and secular culture is as clear as this aphorism implies. To facilitate this investigation, I examine media Christian content creators created for an American evangelical Christian young adult audience in the early twenty-first century, specifically focusing on novel-length fiction, comics and …
Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, Nikki D. Fernandes
Relocations Of The 'Outraged Slave': Transatlantic Reform Conversations Through Douglass's Periodical Fiction, Nikki D. Fernandes
Theses and Dissertations
Through their editorial arrangements of African-American, Euro-American and European poetry, fiction and news, Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery periodicals (The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper) imagine a cosmopolitan discourse that predates the segregated realities of the antebellum United States. In spite of Southern blockades against the infiltration of Northern texts, Douglass’s material space uniquely capitalized on the limited restrictions of his reprinting culture to relocate the voice of the ‘outraged slave’ onto a global stage. From the poems of Phillis Wheatley and William Cowper to Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Douglass’s own novella “The Heroic Slave,” this project considers how …
Negotiating Desire: Resisting, Reimagining And Reinscribing Normalized Sexuality And Gender In Fan Fiction, Charity A. Fowler
Negotiating Desire: Resisting, Reimagining And Reinscribing Normalized Sexuality And Gender In Fan Fiction, Charity A. Fowler
Theses and Dissertations
Fan studies has examined how fan fiction resists heteronormativity by challenging depictions of gender and sexuality, but to date, this inquiry has focused disproportionately on slash, to the exclusion of other genres of fan fiction. Additionally, scholars disagree about slash’s subversive effects by setting up a seemingly stable dichotomy—subversive vs. misogynistic—where one does not necessarily exist.
In this project, I examine multiple genres of fan fiction—namely, slash arising from bromances; femslash from female friendships; incestuous fan fiction from dysfunctional familial relationships; and polyamorous fics. I chose fics from four televisions shows—NBC’s Revolution, MTV’s Teen Wolf, the CW’s The …
The Color Of Memory: Reimagining The Antebellum South In Works By James Mcbride Through The Use Of Free Indirect Discourse, Janel L. Holmes
The Color Of Memory: Reimagining The Antebellum South In Works By James Mcbride Through The Use Of Free Indirect Discourse, Janel L. Holmes
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who …