Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Dark As Day, Rachel Keady

CMC Senior Theses

“All works, no matter what or by whom painted, are nothing but bagatelles and childish trifles... unless they are made and painted from life, and there can be nothing... better than to follow nature." - Caravaggio

In the fall of 2021, I registered to take “Italian Baroque Art” with Professor Gorse at Pomona College, for the spring of 2022. Professor Faggen, one of my advisors, encouraged this and piqued my interest in the characters of this world. After some casual online research, I was transfixed by one artist in particular: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. How could I not be struck …

Adapting To Adaptation: Turning Ya Literature Into Television, Adam Weinreb

English Honors Theses

I have always loved film and television, whether for casual consumption or academic pursuits. Throughout my time as an English and American Studies double major (and almost a Media and Film Studies minor), I have opted to study film and TV at every chance I could. In my junior year I began writing my own film, and I completed that film in the first half of senior year. When entering my final year of the English major and faced with making a decision surrounding my capstone, I was simultaneously deciding whether or not to pursue graduate studies in screenwriting. As …

Disrupting” The Broadcast: Female Showrunners As 21st Century “Fangirl” Feminist Rhetors, Veronica Diaz

Department of Writing and Communication Theses

Despite being considered a female-driven discipline, previous scholarship and personal testimonies indicate that composition remains solidly a “boys’ club.” Popular media is male-dominated as well, resulting in on-screen representations of women that, written from the male perspective, tend toward one-dimensionality. Recently, more women are permeating Hollywood writers’ rooms and producing multi-layered stories that offset the aforementioned portrayals.

This thesis examines how showrunners Marti Noxon, Jenji Kohan, and Shonda Rhimes have redefined female representation on-screen—and subsequently, perceptions of women in real life—by crafting nuanced, female-driven narratives. Elements analyzed include: themes present in Noxon’s Sharp Objects (2018) and Dietland (2018), Kohan’s Weeds …

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided …

The Circuit: An Original Television Series, Grace T. Ding

CMC Senior Theses

Between good and evil there's a whole lot of gray: Welcome to The Circuit.

A shady private security firm recruits criminals straight out of prison and sells its services to the highest bidder, saint and sinner alike (mostly sinners). Through the trials and tribulations of a diverse ensemble cast, the show explores some of my absolute favorite themes in storytelling: gray morality, found families, and unlikely heroes. Follow our gritty and guarded lead Shaye as she struggles to tame a group of talented and contentious ex-cons under the shadow of her ambitious and manipulative father, all the while struggling to …

Kids Will Be, Thomas E. Moran

LSU Master's Theses

This is the pilot episode of a television series, which explores a young girl’s descent into suburban drug culture. In this episode, the main character, Ally, follows her disaffected love interest, Marco, to the squat, an abandoned building inhabited by runaways and addicts.