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Movies That Sell: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Product Placements In Marvel Movies, Andrew Nii Okai Okai Dec 2021

Movies That Sell: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Product Placements In Marvel Movies, Andrew Nii Okai Okai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The advancement of digital entertainment media has given audiences the ability to skip ads that do not interest them. Consequently, brands face the challenge of creating ads that can compel audiences and finding media outlets that can effectively reach target audiences. Brands today use product placements to promote their products because movie audiences are generally attentive to ads when they are incorporated in a movie’s narrative. Marvel Cinematic Universe is a globally recognized entertainment franchise that uses product placements strategically to promote brands in their movies and TV shows. In this study, I conduct rhetorical analyses of select product placements …


Recommended Reading: Book List Books And Middlebrow Tastemaking, Cheryl Read May 2021

Recommended Reading: Book List Books And Middlebrow Tastemaking, Cheryl Read

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The term “middlebrow” has historically been hurled as a pejorative to signify cultural objects and consumers of them which are watered down, inauthentic, and invested in quick social gain. I argue that the literary middlebrow can be better understood if its definition expands to include a mode of reading characterized by being mediated by cultural arbiters and purposeful in that literature functions as an instrument for self-improvement. In this dissertation, I use book list books, lists of recommended reading published as standalone books themselves, to trace the history of a middlebrow mode of reading from the late nineteenth century to …


Out Of Time: Temporal Performativity And Resistance In Popular American Film, Television, And Theater, Meghan Johnston Aelabouni Jan 2021

Out Of Time: Temporal Performativity And Resistance In Popular American Film, Television, And Theater, Meghan Johnston Aelabouni

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that religious world-making in popular culture can reveal and resist hegemonic times. Taking as my primary case study the United States in the 2010s, particularly the shift from the Obama to the Trump era, I analyze cultural constructions of time—as sacred history, destiny, and “the times”—that reflect and shape national identity and belonging in the American imagined community. In this context, such temporal constructions have privileged whiteness and heteronormative masculinity, positioning those who embody or approximate this norm as “of the times,” while also displacing BIPOC, women, and queer people as “out of time.” I posit time …


An American Pilgrimage: The 1968 Poor People's Campaign Mule Train As Prophetic Social Performance, Cheston M. Bush Jan 2021

An American Pilgrimage: The 1968 Poor People's Campaign Mule Train As Prophetic Social Performance, Cheston M. Bush

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In late spring of 1968, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched a nationwide demonstration known as the Poor People’s Campaign in an effort to overcome poverty. Nine caravans representing people from around the country converged in the Capitol to petition Congress for programs that would broaden opportunities for poor Americans. This work examines the Mississippi contingent of the campaign, the Mule Train caravan, that consisted of roughly 150 people who traveled in 15 covered wagons pulled by about 40 mules. The Mule Train left Marks, Mississippi on May 13 and arrived in Washington, D.C. in time for a June …


A Natural Fit For The Natural State: The Emergence Of Black Power Organizations In Arkansas From 1968-1975, Maurice D. Gipson Jan 2021

A Natural Fit For The Natural State: The Emergence Of Black Power Organizations In Arkansas From 1968-1975, Maurice D. Gipson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study seeks to explore how Black Arkansans on college campuses in rural towns navigated their local circumstances while embracing tenets of Black Power. By 1968, public PWIs in Arkansas were contending with an influx of Black students due to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Even though many of the universities had been integrated years and even decades earlier, they were still ill-equipped for the number of Black students that would enroll and descend upon the towns during this period.


The Significance Of The Automobile In 20th C. American Short Fiction, Megan M. Flanery Jan 2021

The Significance Of The Automobile In 20th C. American Short Fiction, Megan M. Flanery

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Midcentury American life featured a post-war economy that established a middle class in which disposable income and time for leisure were commonplace. In this socio-economic environment, consumerism flourished, ushering in the Golden Age of the automobile: from 1950 to 1960, Americans spent more time in their automobiles than ever before, and, by the end of the decade, the number of cars on the road had more than doubled. While much critical attention has been given to the role of the automobile in American novels, less has been given to its role in American short stories. The automobile has been featured …


Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken Jan 2021

Gestures Of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performance From Southern Women Writers During The Fin De Siécle, Elisa Fuhrken

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project explores Southern women writers during the latter half of the nineteenth-century who asserted and crafted a modernized identity by turning to various modes of transgressive performance and performance spaces. For women of the nineteenth-century, this meant extricating themselves from a domestic, sentimental identity and apprehending a more fluid, dynamic type of being. The modes of performance, such as spectatorship, orality, and gesture, allowed these women to express and articulate an alternative feminine identity while also engaging with an embodied epistemology. This thesis looks at three Southern women writers: Sherwood Bonner’s novel Like Unto Like and her travel letters …


What Remains: Telling The Story Of Irene Taylor's Murder, Christian Leus Jan 2021

What Remains: Telling The Story Of Irene Taylor's Murder, Christian Leus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This written thesis serves as a companion piece to What Remains, a six-part audio podcast telling the story of Irene Taylor, a 19-year-old sharecropper’s daughter who was murdered in Altheimer, Arkansas, in 1939. The investigation of the murder, which garnered national press attention, ended with the conviction and execution of Sylvester Williams, a 22-year-old Black man also from Altheimer. This paper expands on the contextual research done in support of the podcast, including close readings of newspaper coverage and fictionalized magazine reports of the case; an examination of the Delta environment’s racialized history and its impact on the lives of …


"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker Jan 2021

"No Place In American History": Remembering And Forgetting The Sultana Disaster, Elias John Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the historical memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster of April 27, 1865. The Sultana, ferrying recently-released federal prisoners, exploded north of Memphis, killing over 1,700 in the nation’s worst maritime disaster. Contemporaries interpreted the disaster through a variety of lenses, finding evidence of recalcitrant rebels, the heroism of Union soldiers, and critiques of Republican emancipationist wartime policy. Steamboat safety advocates deployed the disaster’s memory to successfully press Radical Republicans for the 1871 Steamboat Act, establishing the nation’s first maritime safety code. The disaster’s survivors gathered at reunions and published personal narratives to secure the Sultana, and the …


The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge Jan 2021

The Meat Of The Gothic: Animality And Social Justice In United States Fiction And Film Of The Twenty-First Century, Amber Hodge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Meat of the Gothic: Animality and Social Justice in United States Fiction and Film of the Twenty-First Century— situates twenty-first century US gothic narratives in relation to animal studies, even as it illuminates how these narratives interrogate the effects of historic and ongoing global systems of human oppression: slavery, imperialism, and capitalism. Instead of reacting to bias by asserting a claim to a humanity perpetually imbricated in divisions of class, race, and gender, present-day authors and filmmakers create characters who form communities that include nonhuman actors as a means of generating empowerment and critique. My approach to these narratives …


The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet Jan 2021

The Black Petromodernism Of Zora Neale Hurston: Energy, Race, And Mobility, Stuart Mullet

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis situates Zora Neale Hurston and the folk communities in her oeuvre within the context of modernity’s dependencies on fossil fuels. Such a disciplinary context provides an energy footing for our understandings of African American migrations in the twentieth century—which radically transformed the nation on multiple levels—and it illuminates the communal values that undergird Black approaches to petromodern forms of mobility. Furthermore, by engaging the Black spaces of the South, my argument begins filling a gap in the energy humanities. Few scholars in this field engage deeply those populations and regions that disproportionately experience the underbelly of petromodernity and …


Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood Jan 2021

Masculinity And Cold War Fairy Tales: Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, And Ross Macdonald, Susan E. Wood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the use of fairy-tale allusions to explore masculinity in four novels published during the Cold War period. This notable focus on men and masculinity held in common across these four novels from four different decades is interesting because it suggests that the shift in focus to women and feminist ideals in fairy-tale revisions of the 1970s and after is even more stark a shift than has yet been recognized by scholars. This dissertation finds that Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), Donald Barthelme’s novel Snow White (1967), and Ross Macdonald’s novel …


Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman Jan 2021

Teaching Trauma In Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, Kat Shuman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, this thesis outlines how to ethically and effectively teach literature that deals with trauma. My personal teaching philosophy as well as the current pedagogy surrounding trauma literature preface a detailed syllabus, lesson plans, assessments, and activities that would be useful in teaching a course centered around literature that deals with trauma. This thesis highlights the merits of teaching trauma fiction in the literature classroom.