Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Pocahontas Looks Back And Then Looks Elsewhere: The Entangled Gaze In Contemporary Indigenous Art, Monika Siebert

English Faculty Publications

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, various genres of visual art in North America feature Indigenous subjects looking from the canvas or the screen at the viewers to interpellate them as implicated in the gaze framing the artwork. In this article, I provide an historical genealogy of this returned gaze, starting with Simon van de Passe’s 1616 engraving, Matoaka als Lady Rebecca. I show how subsequent depictions of Pocahontas depart from the reciprocal gaze of de Passe’s portrait and how contemporary art returns to this theme of the returned gaze, using Shelley Niro’s video work The Shirt (2003) …

The Meaning Of The Soldier: In The Year Of The Pig And Hearts And Minds, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Hearts and Minds (1974)—the first an Academy Award nominee, the second an Academy Award winner—are the two best-known Vietnam War documentaries of their time. They are works that could hardly be more different—one a cool, intellectual take on the origins and then-current state of the war, and the second a highly emotional appeal to end the war. By viewing them together it is possible not only to connect the dots between the contrasting intellectual and filmic traditions from which each emerged, but also to see, through the viewpoints of each film, how …

The Divided Reception Of The Help, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

The reception of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) calls to mind the reception of two other novels about race relations by southern white writers: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Like Gone With the Wind, The Help has been a pop culture phenomenon— prominent in bookstores and box offices, and the “darling of book clubs everywhere.” In January 2012 when I asked students in my Women in Modern Literature class what was the best book they had recently read by a woman, most named either The Help or The Hunger …

Inside And Outside Southern Whiteness: Film Viewing, The Frame, And The Racing Of Space In Yoknapatawpha, Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Though neither film nor film viewing is ever named in As I Lay Dying, both the apparatus of cinema and what we might term its sociohistorical effects are evoked powerfully by and in the novel. These include the passing before the reader’s “gaze” of the discrete, separate “frames” of the various characters’ monologues, as well as, in particular section, a fascination with watching machinery that resembled the interest of early film biewers in the cinematic apparatus (see Doane 108).

If Vardaman and his family are not explicitly depicted as film viewers, they nevertheless show signs of what has been …

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 …

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 …

Saving "Cinderella": History And Story In Ashpet And Ever After, Elisabeth Rose Gruner

English Faculty Publications

An orphan is mistreated by a cruel surrogate family. The orphan is special, however, and with the intervention of kind and magical parental substitutes, rises to dizzying heights and achieves a happy ending. It’s a familiar tale, from “Cinderella” to Harry Potter —the difference is all in the details. In two fairy tale films of the 1980s and 1990s, those details remove the Cinderella story from the realm of fantasy. Ashpet and Ever After take pains to “realize” Cinderella—to remove almost all elements of magic and fantasy and to imagine, instead, what might make such a story real. Both incorporate …