Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Redefining Representations Of Trauma & Modes Of Witnessing In Damon Lindelof’S The Leftovers, Mariana Delgado

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to better understand how and why traumatized subjectivity is framed by The Leftovers’ fictional narrative in a visual and sonic form that rejects these modes of representations of trauma that they themselves have become conventional tropes. This thesis proposes to further examine the way the moving image, specifically the televised image, contributes to our perceived notions of trauma aesthetics through The Leftovers’ use of monologues, along with how and why suffering is sonically framed by the exchange of silence and Max Richter’s minimalist score.

Modernist aesthetics have become the disruptive expectations of contemporary Western cinematic audiences as …

Plasticity In Animated Children’S Cartoons: The Neoliberal Transforming Bodies And Static Worlds Of Ok Ko And Gumball, Rachel E. Cox

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Through the study of OK KO! Let’s Be Heroes! and The Amazing World of Gumball, I argue that children’s cartoons represent and recreate anxieties toward money’s plasticity in the plasticity of the cartoon bodies and worlds. I closely examine the ambivalence towards abstraction’s plasticity in contemporary children’s cartoons to trace the neoliberal ambivalence towards money’s plasticity. While much scholarship has grappled with what can be understood as animatic plasticity, very little of it takes on the questions raised about neoliberal culture by televised children’s cartoons. Cartoons are important to study in this respect because their form allows for unbridled plasticity. …

Cool Moms & Cool Media: Returning To, Morgan Wallace

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I posit that contemporary fears about the effect electronic media has on us and our children is anything but new. Therefore, reminiscing about the "good ole days" and wanting to go back would not actually solve the problem. However, looking back to a time when there was also anxiety about electronic media and the shifting field of public and private may reveal new possibilities for relating to and with these media. Rather than flatly blame media as an apparently new cause of harm, it is essential to reveal media's historical and political conditions, only in this way can we better …