Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Society Doesn’T Owe You Anything: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Video Games As Speculative Fiction, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular and scholarly commentators have been looking for speculative and/or dystopic literary works that might provide analogues for the Trump-era. Perhaps the most famous of these was the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In this regard, though, video games remain an underexplored fictional form. With its exaggerated and parodic satire of an America ruled by the corruption and greed of extreme right-wing populism, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) offers a speculative fiction that players can enact as well as imagine and simulate as well as prepare. Thus, reading the …

A Feel For The Game: Ai, Computer Games And Perceiving Perception, Marc A. Ouellette, Steven Conway

English Faculty Publications

I walk into the room and the smell of burning wood hits me immediately. The warmth from the fireplace grows as I step nearer to it. The fire needs to heat the little cottage through the night so I add a log to the fire. There are a few sparks and embers. I throw a bigger log onto the fire and it drops with a thud. Again, there are barely any sparks or embers. The heat and the smell stay the same. They don’t change and I do not become habituated to it. Rather, they are just a steady stream, …

The Prison-Televisual Complex, Allison Page, Laurie Ouellette

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In 2016, the A&E cable network partnered with the Clark County Jail in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to incarcerate seven volunteers as undercover prisoners for two months. This article takes the reality television franchise 60 Days In as a case study for analyzing the convergence of prison and television, and the rise of what we call the prison-televisual complex in the United States, which denotes the imbrication of the prison system with the television industry, not simply television as an ideological apparatus. 60 Days In represents an entanglement between punishment and the culture industries, whereby carceral logics flow into the business and …

#Metoo And The Politics Of Collective Healing: Emotional Connection As Contestation, Allison Page, Jacquelyn Arcy

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

Participants in the #MeToo movement on Twitter expressed emotions like rage, pain, and solidarity in their personal accounts of sexual violence. This article explores the digital circulation of these affects and considers how the outpouring of tweets about sexual harassment and abuse contribute to a feminist politics centered on collective healing. The particular emotions expressed in the #MeToo Twitter archive subvert the logics of quantification and visibility that undergird popular feminism and the attention economy, and produce an affective excess that works toward movement founder Tarana Burke’s original project of “mass healing.” At a moment wherein popular feminism emphasizes individual …

Twisting Facts To Suit Theories: In Defense Of Sherlock, Alicia Defonzo

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

In August 2011, the Albemarle County school board unanimously voted to remove Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet from the sixth-grade curricula. Over twenty students beseeched the board for the book to remain, and they were ignored. Teachers were afraid to voice their opinions on the matter. The novel has not been taught since in Albemarle, on any grade level, nor any other Sherlock Holmes texts.

Mediated Merchandise, Merchandisable Media: An Introduction, Elizabeth Affuso, Avi Santo

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

There are many reasons why film and media scholars ought to take merchandise seriously. That filmrelated merchandise is a lucrative part of the film business is only a starting point, but still a good place to start. In 2018, character and entertainment licensing accounted for 44.7% of retail sales of licensed merchandise, generating $121.53 billion in sales. [1] [#N1] This earned entertainment companies approximately $6.2 billion in royalties. [2] [#N2] Not surprisingly, five of the top ten licensors are entertainment companies, with Disney positioned at the top with $53 billion in merchandise sales. Universal Studios is ranked 4th ($7.3 billion), …

He Scores Through A Screen: Mediating Masculinities Through Hockey Video Games, Marc A. Ouellette, Steven Conway

English Faculty Publications

Hockey video games highlight the ways in which the video game medium shapes and conditions the experience of producing and/or performing the sport “in real life.” Indeed, the accumulation of advanced statistics in and through the constant evaluation, measurement, and surveillance which are inherent to video games—and increasingly seen as foundational for sport—reveals important contradictions not only in the way the embodied sport is played and understood, but also in terms of the proofs of masculinity upon which the sport is built. It then becomes clear that the building of masculinity and the empowerment of the character become one and …

Caption This: Police In Pussyhats, White Ladies, And Carceral Psychology Under Trump, Alison R. Reed

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Narratives Of Miami In Dexter And Burn Notice, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In popular discourse around television, a series’ relationship with place is often marked through the suggestion its setting is “like a character in the show”, but this article argues against adopting this as a framework for analyzing television’s relationship with space and place. It articulates the relationship between this discourse of “spatial capital” and hierarchies of cultural capital within the television industry, limiting the types of series that are deemed to warrant closer investigation regarding issues of space and place and lacking nuanced engagement with place’s relationship with television narrative in particular. After breaking down the logic under which these …

I’D Rather Teach Peace: An Autoethnographic Account Of The Nonviolent Communication And Peace Course, E. James Baesler

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

This autoethnography narrates the story of how I taught the Nonviolent Communication and Peace course to undergraduate students at an urban university in the midst of a densely populated military region in the U.S. I describe what it feels like to be in the peace class from the student and professor’s points of view. I invite readers to consider creative options for teaching and learning about peace, including: insight meditation, cultivating peace attitudes/behavior from readings about inspirational peace people, developing nonviolent communication skills, and connecting students with their local world through a personal and creative peace project. Finally, I include …

Mobile Production: Spatialized Labor, Location Professionals, And The Expanding Geography Of Television Production, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

This article addresses the spatial challenges facing television laborers amid an increasingly expansive and contingent environment of local production incentives. Pushing away from the term runaway production and its limited engagement with local, spatialized dynamics of labor, I argue for a consideration of “mobile production,” wherein television series are capable of being executed in an increasingly wide range of locations—not necessarily Los Angeles—and capable of being moved should changes in an incentive system create the need to do so. Through personal interviews and analysis of industry discourse, this case study of location professionals considers how the mobility of production affects …

Veronica Mars Kickstarter And Crowd Funding, Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles Mcnutt, Luke Pebler

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

This conversation among Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles McNutt, and Luke Pebler about the Veronica Mars (2004–7) Kickstarter campaign to fund a film assesses the implications of crowd sourcing and fan labor.

Eat It: Sex, Food And Women's Writing [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Simply put, Eat It: Sex, Food and Women's Writing surpasses its rather immodest claims. This is no mean feat, for the editors allow that they have collected short stories, nonfiction shorts and poetry that, as the back claims offers, hinge "on the carnal." More than that, the gathered works purportedly address the ways in which experiencing food entails nothing short of "power, biology, social obligation, experimentation, nourishment, pain and pleasure." The authors treat the topics, ranging from the politics of potatoes to tricks for field dressing deer, with a blend of seriousness and humour befitting the material. What becomes clear …

Introduction: A Game's Study Manifesto, Jason C. Thompson, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

In the epigraph to this collection, we return to a foundational text of the western literary canon, Homer’s Odyssey, and see in Penelope’s “bow contest” an illustrative moment in the history of game culture. Having fought in the Trojan War and having survived his ten-year trek home, the weary Odysseus cannot simply show up—the returning hero must rout the odious suitors whom Penelope has forestalled. In order to buy more time for vengeance, Odysseus disguises himself as an old beggar; in order to buy more time for deferral, Penelope creates an unwinnable game: she will marry the suitor able …

Gay For Play: Theorizing Lgbtq Characters In Game Studies, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Despite, and perhaps because of, popular press reactions to stereotypical depictions of beefy boys and busty babes in video games, the realm of gender, sex, and sexuality remains a lacuna in the emerging field of game studies. Of particular interest is the notion of performance and the ways this impacts both on gender and on game play. The combination might be expected to offer a very interesting way of approaching LGBTQ characters in digital games, especially given the recent inclusion of such characters in some popular and well-studied game franchises, including Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar 1997-present), Jade Empire (BioWare 2005-08) …

Gaming Matters: Art, Science Magic And The Computer Game Medium [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

The singular—maybe more aptly put as the pre-eminent—image that occurs when reading Gaming Matters is that of duelling dualisms. While this is a tried-and-true method of covering a topic, from the dissoi logoi to “The Owl and the Nightingale” and beyond, it is the site and the subject of these apposites that makes for an intriguing if (intentionally) unsettling read. The very title of the book makes the exercise of reading (and likely of writing) a part of and apart from this process. Gaming Matters stands as both call and catalogue. Gaming matters, most certainly, in terms of its audience, …

Editor's Introduction: Playing For Keeps: Games And Cultural Resistance [Special Issue], Marc A. Ouellette, Jason Thompson

English Faculty Publications

This edition is as much about Game Studies as it about the games being studied. At its heart there are really two impulses behind the collection of critical thought we have been fortunate enough to gather for this issue of Reconstruction. First, there is the sense that games can’t do anything. Second, there is the sense that games don’t do anything. Their origin (and the underlying biases) makes these sentiments particularly intriguing. In the simplest terms, these premises delineate competing camps, as well. Roger Ebert notoriously asserts that video games will never be art (Ebert). Similarly, and yet quite differently, …

Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Expertise As Knowledge And A Technocratic Generation, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This project stems from two intersecting strands. The statement, "I can always find out," neatly summarizes the intersection. Not surprisingly, it has two distinct but simultaneous meanings. The first, in which "always" means "every time," considers the ways in which the ability to find knowledge has become synonymous with expertise and examines the elements that have fostered this situation. In this regard, factors such as the range of software and hardware-from Wikipedia and FAQs to cellphones and Ipods-which anticipate or "think" for the user but also require constant updating are both rationale and outcome for their youthful consumers. When combined …

About The (W)Hoopla: A Few Pedagogical Thoughts About The Super Bowl Ritual, Tim Anderson

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In an era of fragmentation it's the only media program left that has any kind of mass ritual component. Which, of course, is not only why so many debate its contents but why and how we, as scholars, should approach the program.

Better Living Through Reality Tv: Television And Post-Welfare Citizenship [Book Review], Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

The very first thing I can say about Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship is that I cannot wait for the authors to consider adding a Canadian version – more on that later – since they include British reality shows. Admittedly, many of these last shows have been successful enough to lead to Americanized versions. In considering reality television, the Laurie Ouellette (no known relation) and James Hay seem to sacrifice one of the oldest, and currently largely underexamined as such, varieties of the reality television, the game show. This is not to say that "new" game …

“I Hope You Never See Another Day Like This”: Pedagogy & Allegory In “Post 9/11” Video Games, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Although critics and scholars have considered the extent to which the terror attacks of 11 Sept. 2001 influenced subsequent media productions, video games comprise a largely unexamined form. This oversight also applies to related forms of media production and among those who study video games is in part attributable to the ongoing debate regarding the relationship(s) between narrative and play. Even so, as early as 1997, JC Herz was investigating the role of video games in the military-entertainment complex. That said, the focus of this paper will not be the obvious games which draw settings and plots directly from the …

The Jazz Critic As Flâneur, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

“I love to watch you play,” a reporter once said to Duke Ellington during a television interview. As Ellington gracefully moved up and down the keyboard, he replied, grinning wistfully, “Playing? I’m not playing . . . I’m dreaming!”1 For the poet Jacques Réda, whose most famous works such as Les ruines de Paris (1977) and Amen (1988) chronicle his experiences as a modern flâneur in a Paris which is sometimes overtaken by what Marc Augé has labeled surmodernité,2 or an anaesthetizing over-abundance of technology and empty modern spaces, Réda has also led another life as a jazz critic, …

"Everybody Else Ain't Your Father": Reproducing Masculinity In Cinematic Sports, 1975-2000, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This essay stems from two cultural strands, which intersect in one cultural form, the sports film. The first of these is the figure of the "star," as opposed to hero, who is interested only in self promotion. The second strand, masculine nurturing, provides a direct counterpoint to the first. Sociologist Robert Connell explains that "In historically recent times, sport has come to be the leading definer of masculinity in mass culture" (54). In North America, sport plays an important and increasing role in our culture. Each of the four major sports leagues added teams in the last decade of the …

Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Recognizing the growing importance (at least for consumers) of video games as a popular form of narrative fiction, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska situate their collection, ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/interfaces as a text which is corrective, informative and explorative. In the first case, the editors sought essays which would move the critical discourse on video games away from the more familiar but reductive debates surrounding the "effects" of video games (especially on children) and their modes of representation (especially of the female form and violence). Indeed, these have become the sine qua non of video game criticism and one feeds the other …

Film And Television After 9/11 [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

One of the necessary compromises a book such as Film and TV After 9/11 must make is the amount and variety of examples it can provide. In order to be the first book to cover the subject, the book sacrifices the types of materials covered and the variety of themes they depict. Although the editor, Wheeler Winston Dixon, does not do so, the book’s twelve essays slot into four basic categories: analogies, productions altered to suit the "post-9/11" mindset, post-9/11 productions with metaphorical rather than literal linkages to the event and pre-9/11 productions whose viewing must now take that day …

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

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 …

"Two Guns, A Girl And A Playstation™": Gender In The Tomb Raider Series, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This article considers the combination of game play and narrative which combine to produce cross-gender identifications in video games, a previously underexamined potential for the production of alternate genders, one which calls into question the stability of gender, particularly masculinity, as a construct.

"See Me, Touch Me, Feel Me": (Im) Proving The Bodily Sense Of Masculinity, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Ultimately, this paper stems from two cultural strands which intersect in one cultural form, self-improvement advertising aimed at men. The first of these is the figure of the "new man," which appeared in the mid-1980s. The novelty lies in the positioning of masculine bodies precisely for the purpose of being seen. The available criticism was not equipped to account for these positionings. The second cultural strand, the proliferation of technologies which alter the body itself, as opposed to its coverings, makes the gap in the criticism more apparent. The two cultural trends intersect most noticeably in the advertisements for the …

'There Shall Be No Discernible Traces Left': The Invisible Butler In Ishiguro's "The Remains Of The Day", Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This paper draws its title from an anecdote Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day (1989), recounts to illustrate the primary attribute for servants: the ability to perform duties without leaving any discernible traces. Mrs. D.C. Webster, an American married into British “old money,” expresses astonishment at the treatment of servants during an interview for the documentary, The Secret World of Fame and Fortune. Mrs. Webster “had a staff of twelve . . . They would do everything for you. If you took a sweater off, it would disappear. If they were too loud or if they were …