Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Andy & Edie, Warhol & Sedgwick, Sabine Paris

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall

Theses and Dissertations--English

Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …

Playing The Fool: Analyzing The Phenomena Of Iurodstvo In Contemporary Russian Cinema And Civil Society., Colby Silva Santana

Honors Projects

Of Russia's cultural and religious icons, the holy fool (iurodivy) is quite possibly the most significant one of contemporary times. The holy fool – a historical and cultural character that feigns insanity to produce moral and spiritual reflections and hide the purity of their souls – has left its traces over a significant portion of Russia's literary history, postmodern tradition, and socio-political thought. In its uniquely positioned role as a powerful form of institutional critique, today taking shape in modern-day political protest performance culture, the holy fool has often been utilized to interrogate the intertwined relationship of the Russian state …

Steve Mcqueen, The Filmmaker, And Kant’S Sensus Communis, Livia Melamed Margon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects on the ways in which art reinforces community and reduces political polarity by stimulating shared feelings, namely through Kant's idea of sensus communis. To illustrate its argument, this thesis analyzes the work of Steve McQueen, a politically aware, ethically engaged, and broadly recognized filmmaker and artist.

Grappling With The Aftereffects Of Modernism In American Literature And Culture: Spiritual, Political, And Ecological, Joseph Neary

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Joe Neary examines various texts within contemporary American culture, including David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon,” Harmony Korine’s film, Spring Breakers, Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory, and Bruce Holsinger’s book of criticism, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror.

Recoding Postmodernist Art Criticism: The Debate Between Anti-Pluralism And Pluralism, Juanjuan Yang

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

While pluralism is considered politically correct today, this article tries to describe the trajectory of anti-pluralist criticism through some famous authors of October, specifically Hal Foster, who edited the seminal Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. In the beginning of the 1980s, Foster categorized two types of postmodernism, one being the postmodernism of reaction and neo-conservatism, the other being postmodernism of resistance and post-structuralism. Aligning with the latter of the two types, major authors of October published a series of important essays to criticize “mainstream postmodernist art, ” especially neo-expressionist paintings. However, during the same period, Arthur Danto claimed“the end of …

The Writing For Healing And Transformation Project, Heather Elizabeth Osborn

Education Doctorate Dissertations

As a qualitative action research study, the purpose of The Writing for Healing and Transformation Project was to facilitate more inclusive writing strategies and to promote individual and collective healing on issues of social suffering and oppression (Kleinman, Das, & Lock, 1997; Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016) for diverse students at a community college located in the northeastern United States. The 18 participants in the study included students in my English II literature and composition course. The theoretical framework encompassed Pennebaker’s (2016) “writing for healing” paradigm, advocating the use of expressivist writing and “social suffering theory,” examining how power structures affect …

Borderless Flows In Federspiel’S Die Ballade Von Der Typhoid Mary, Charlotte Melin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Jürg Federspiel’s novel Die Ballade von der Typhoid Mary (1982) offers a fictionalized account of the notorious heroine’s life that ultimately sympathizes with her plight as an immigrant who faced exclusionary cultural barriers. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” and recent approaches developed by material ecocriticism theory, my essay reinterprets this work from an environmental humanities perspective. The interpretation focuses on the interconnection of discourses related to disease, food, and pollution flows. Exploration of these themes leads to the conclusion that Federspiel’s work was prescient in its parallel engagement with both immigration issues and the emerging environmental concerns …

Recurring Scream: Trauma In Wes Craven's Slasher, Ben Muntananuchat

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates trauma representation in the horror film trilogy Scream, by director Wes Craven and based on the story and characters by screenwriter Kevin Williamson. The franchise is a satirical body of work that uproots the formulaic narrative aspects of the slasher film subgenre, of which it belongs to. Craven and Williamson’s method of critiquing the subgenre employs the usage of its cinematic tropes, though elevating them to a level of postmodern parody. I analyze traumatic representation within the franchise’s layers of mediation and postmodern narrative elements, which are often highlighted in academic discussion. The trauma observed revolves around …

Super Heroes V Scorsese: A Marxist Reading Of Alienation And The Political Unconscious In Blockbuster Superhero Film, David Eltz

Kutztown University Masters Theses

As superhero blockbusters continue to dominate the theatrical landscape, critical detractors of the genre have grown in number and authority. The most influential among them, Martin Scorsese, has been quoted as referring to Marvel films as “theme parks” rather than “cinema” (his own term for auteur film). Despite this, these films often possess considerably challenging views in regards to social justice, and continue to interface with the pervading theme of alienation in increasingly abstract and progressive ways.

This thesis considers four films (1978’s Superman, 2000’s X-Men, 2013’s Captain America: Winter Soldier, and 2018’s Black Panther) from a Marxist perspective, viewing …

Are Postmodernism And #Metoo Incompatible?, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

Scott Ortolano, Ed. Popular Modernism And Its Legacies: From Pop Literature To Video Games. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018., Lauren Rosales

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Scott Ortolano, ed. Popular Modernism and Its Legacies: From Pop Literature to Video Games. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 277 pp.

Party On, Derrida!: A Queer, Deconstructionist Look At Wayne's World, Glam, And The Losers Of Rock And Roll, Michelle A. Arp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What do you get when you mix a girl from Long Island, critical theory, a movie based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, David Bowie, and alternative rock of the early 2000s? A lot of losers, a lot of queerness, and plenty of room for deconstruction.

Part performance studies, part queer studies, and part memoir, this study is a cross-genre and experimental analysis of postmodern ideologies, rock and roll, and comedy. More specifically, I use Jacques Derrida’s notion of “the slash” (Of Grammatology, 1967) in relation to high and low culture via comedies, such that of Wayne’s World …

Both Into And Out Of The Cage: New Media, Transgression, And The Remaking Of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999, Casey Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation addresses an absent history of late twentieth-century postmodern literature. Namely, I trace the shifts between 1980s postmodernism, described by Fredric Jameson as encapsulating a “wan[ed]”“affect,” and the emergence of 1990s post-postmodernism, marked by an exaggeration of affect. My dissertation posits that this reinvention of feeling was due to shifts in communication technologies and new media art during the 1970s and 1980s competing with, and eventually rendering obsolete, avant-garde literary techniques for “connection.” These latter strategies were encapsulated in the postmodern “encyclopedic” novel, a form miming the logic of new media, yet incapable of fully addressing new programmatic shifts, …

Epic And Genre: Beyond The Boundaries Of Media, Luke Arnott

FIMS Publications

Noting the resurgence of popular and academic interest in epics across disparate media, this essay proposes a theory of the epic genre that transcends particular media and cultures. It seeks to reconcile discussions of the epic in Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, and Northrop Frye, arguing that traditional definitions of epic narrative are instead subsets of a greater generic structure. The epic is, following Gregory Nagy and Franco Moretti, among others, a literary “super-genre” that encompasses as many other kinds of narrative as possible. The essay explains how epic narrative, disembedded from earlier oral poetry, is …

Matteo Garrone's Reality:The Big Brother Spectacle And Its Rupture, Anna Paparcone Bronner

Faculty Journal Articles

In Garrone’s film, Reality, the protagonist Luciano Ciotola becomes obsessed with his participation in the reality TV show Big Brother to the point that his whole life turns into a spectacle. In Italian cinema studies no other scholar had yet analyzed this film, despite its success and the very engaging and up-to-date topic. In my article, at the diegetic level, I show that the spectator experiences an overlap and a (con)fusion between Luciano’s everyday reality and his life as a member of the reality TV show. However, keeping in mind Guy Debord’s seminal work The Society of the Spectacle and …

Genre, Justice & Quentin Tarantino, Eric Michael Blake

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The films of Quentin Tarantino have held a significant influence on modern cinema, and therefore on cinema studies. As such, studies on the social and philosophical implications of his work have appeared over the years, mostly in regards to content. However, with the exception of references to his use of cinematic violence, studies of his technique—i.e., his cinematic style—have been rare, and rarer still have been studies of the social implications that arise from the patterns of his style as well as those his subject matter.

The following thesis seeks to use the concept of Auteur Theory—specifically, that Tarantino …

Narrative Epic And New Media: The Totalizing Spaces Of Postmodernity In The Wire, Batman, And The Legend Of Zelda, Luke Arnott

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Narrative Epic and New Media investigates why epic narratives have a renewed significance in contemporary culture, showing that new media epics model the postmodern world in the same way that ancient epics once modelled theirs. It demonstrates how the epic genre recurs across different cultures and subcultures, even as each instantiation of the epic remains unique to its particular society.

The dissertation draws upon genre theory from critical discourse analysis and from observations made by various critics about the epic’s status as a literary “super-genre,” which encompasses as many other kinds of narrative as it can. It extends genre theory …

What We’Ve Got Here Is A Failure To Communicate: A Postmodern Analysis Of Representations Of Higher Education In Cinema, Carlos E. Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The primary purpose of this study was to explore representations of higher education in film. In order to achieve that objective this study consisted of a narrative analysis of the themes that emerged in films regarding higher education. This study focused on films from the 1950s to the present. The narratives that emerged from the analysis of the films were compared and contrasted to the scholarly literature regarding higher education. The analysis of the films also included juxtaposing the film narratives to the work of postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault in order to inform the claims made by the …

I Am With You: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Fans, And The Harmful Effects Of Californication, Alexander Macphail-Fausey

English Seminar Capstone Research Papers

This is my capstone paper from English Seminar and my English degree. The paper is an analysis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Californication and its relation to the fan base of the band. It explores the influences on the creation of the album within a postmodern context, using the theories of Katherine Hayles, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault. Through these theories, the paper explores the postmodern impact on the Cult of Celebrity and the American Dream and how those affected the lives of Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante from the Peppers. Finally, the paper shows how the album …

National Allegory And Postmodernism In Chinese Cinema, Kyra A. Saniewski

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Making Thought Matter : Postmodern Models For Material Thinking, James Kenneth Belflower

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Making Thought Matter: Postmodern Models for Material Thinking, crosses disciplines to trace the aesthetic contexts of Postmodern American artists whose work employs the senses to make legible creative and critical modes of synthesis. I contend that in practicing a material thinking—the artistic mobilization of the intimate and affective qualities of conceptual and physical surfaces—these artists reinsert perceptual knowledge and bodily agency into Postmodernism’s “emptied” surfaces. Consequently, their work opposes late theorists of Postmodernity who characterized contemporary artistic forms as immaterial, abstract, and emotionally deficient. To assess contemporary syntheses I develop Philip Johnson’s late International Style Glass House into an analogy …

On Familiarity And Defamiliarization In The Use Of Appropriated Material In Film, And Its Consequences On Narration : A Study Of Artavazd Peleshian's Our Century, Johan Grimonprez's Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y And Adam Curtis' It Felt Like A Kiss, Maureen Anderson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The text presented here is a study of the editing and appropriation techniques of three constructivist films and their affect on narrative: Artavazd Peleshian's Our Century, Johan Grimonprez's dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and Adam Curtis' It Felt Like a Kiss. An analysis of these techniques is done through the lens of the Russian Formalists, Victor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin and their respective concepts of defamiliarization and familiarization. Attention is paid to formal analysis in relation to historical context.

A Postmodern Sense Of Nostalgia: Demonstrating Through A Textual Analysis Of Twin Peaks How Cult Membership Can Be Inculcated., Nicholas G. Albanese

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

This paper explores a “cult” following in television, by looking at various aspects of the program Twin Peaks. It seeks to answer the questions of how a television show that aired for only two seasons over two decades ago was and still is able to garner such a loyal fandom, and is there some primary factor for developing this cult status? In order to answer these questions, aspects of media studies such as narrative complexity, authorship and the cult status of a show, as well as elements from the show itself, such as postmodernism and manufactured nostalgia must be teased …

The Orphan As Mirror: Postmodern Alienation And Societal Crisis In Japanese Film, Leann Wolley

Global Tides

This paper discusses the cultural significance of orphans in the post-modern media, using as a case study two Japanese films: Grave of the Fireflies and Nobody Knows. Through comparing the films and examining their approach to the orphan storytelling this paper attempts to gain insight into post-modern Japanese attitudes about social issues. By analyzing the appeal of the films to Japanese and international audiences, it also attempts to explain their popularity by drawing parallels between the main characters of each motion picture and the average postmodern citizen.

Playing With Postmodernism: Morita Yoshimitsu’S Family Game, Aaron Gerow

Aaron Gerow

[Introduction To] The Postmodern In Latin And Latino American Cultural Narratives: Collected Essays And Interviews, Claudia Ferman

Bookshelf

In Latin America the postmodern debate contains two big areas of controversy, which are deeply rooted in history and which have profound cultural and political significance. First, the postmodern debate encompasses a series of aesthetico-cultural subjects, such as questions related to literary genre, the processes of literaturization and deliteraturization or the questions of gender associated with textual production. Secondly, the postmodern debate relates to considerations about the processes of the transnationalization of economic and cultural production, and their complex implications concerning questions of identity and cultural production in Latin America.

“I Want To See Seijun’S Films Once More Before I Die”—The Suzuki Seijun Incident And Postmodern Spectatorship / 「清順の映画、もう一度見て死にたい」——鈴木清順問題とポスト・モダン観客性, Aaron Gerow

Aaron Gerow

Seduction, Control, & The Search For Authenticity: Madonna's Truth Or Dare, E. Deidre Pribram Ph.D.

Faculty Publications: Communication

Maddonnas' 1991 film Truth or Dare, based on her 1990 “Blond Ambition” tour—itself a combination of pop music and performance art— defies easy categorization. It is a “docudrama” of sorts: part documentary, part concert film, part dramatic enactment. By combining various filmic styles and traditions. Truth or Dare recreates certain long-standing cultural dichotomies between, for instance, onstage and offstage, public and private, reality and appearance, or truth and artifice. The film replicates such oppositions only to then question their continuing validity. Binary distinctions in Truth or Dare prove more apparent than real, more fleeting than differentiating. Ultimately, I believe, …

[Introduction To] Politica Y Posmodernidad: Hacia Una Lectura De La Anti-Modernidad En Lationoamerica, Claudia Ferman

Bookshelf

Me propongo aquí bosquejar brevemente el recorrido argumental que dio sustancia al presente trabajo. Me gustaría empezar citando a Cortázar. La obra de Cortázar encarna de alguna manera un conjunto de debates que se produjeron en las décadas del 60 y 70 en gran parte del mundo, y de los que nosotros hemos querido dar cuenta desde la nueva perspectiva que abrieron los 80. Más adelante nos ocuparemos de eso, ahora vayamos a dar Ia vuelta a los mundos del 60.