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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Society Doesn’T Owe You Anything: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas & Video Games As Speculative Fiction, Marc A. Ouellette
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 …
The House And The Infected Body: The Metonomy Of Resident Evil 7, Alan Mcgreevy, Christina Fawcett, Marc A. Ouellette
The House And The Infected Body: The Metonomy Of Resident Evil 7, Alan Mcgreevy, Christina Fawcett, Marc A. Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
Resident Evil 7, in articulating the threat of infectious mold, situates the illness with the feminine: Historical, cultural, and physiological connections between mold and women gives the game license to limit, objectify, and render the female characters monstrous. First-person immersion brings us into contact with the infection, as mold and Molded threaten the buildings of the Bakers, while mold growing in their brains threatens the Bakers themselves. Through the form of infection, the disease is invasively feminine, reflected in the Bakers and their homes.
"If You Want To Be The Man, You've Got To Beat The Man": Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990'S, Marc Ouellette
"If You Want To Be The Man, You've Got To Beat The Man": Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990'S, Marc Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE’s on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …
Holy Fools, Secular Saints, And Illiterate Saviors In American Literature And Popular Culture, Dana Heller
Holy Fools, Secular Saints, And Illiterate Saviors In American Literature And Popular Culture, Dana Heller
English Faculty Publications
In her article, "Holy Fools, Secular Saints, and Illiterate Saviors in American Literature and Popular Culture," Dana Heller identifies and analyzes characteristics of the holy fool figure in American literature and culture. Heller defines the holy fool, or divine idiot, as a figure central to U.S. myths of nation. One encounters such figures in American literature as well as in American folklore, popular culture, and mass media. In American culture, the Divine Idiot is a hybrid form which grows out of the crossings of numerous literary and historical currents, both secular and non-secular. This unwieldy hybridity -- the fact that …