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American Popular Culture Commons

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Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in American Popular Culture

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek) May 2017

Breaking The Cycle Of Silence : The Significance Of Anya Seton's Historical Fiction., Lindsey Marie Okoroafo (Jesnek)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the feminist significance of Anya Seton’s historical novels, My Theodosia (1941), Katherine (1954), and The Winthrop Woman (1958). The two main goals of this project are to 1.) identify and explain the reasons why Seton’s historical novels have not received the scholarly attention they are due, and 2.) to call attention to the ways in which My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman offer important feminist interventions to patriarchal social order. Ultimately, I argue that My Theodosia, Katherine, and The Winthrop Woman deserve more scholarly attention because they are significant contributions to women’s …


Sonic Intolerance : Aural Yellowface During The Golden Age Of American Radio., Greyson Perry Neff May 2017

Sonic Intolerance : Aural Yellowface During The Golden Age Of American Radio., Greyson Perry Neff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The position of the Asian in the American popular imagination has a long history, stretching back to nineteenth century vaudeville theatrical performances and remaining largely unchanged throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Portrayed as simultaneously cunning and ignorant, spiritual and corrupt, or submissive and sexualized, Oriental stereotypes have remained firmly entrenched in popular culture. While perceptions of race exist largely in a visual sense, a closer look at how people heard racial differences opens up new avenues for scholarly interpretation of the social construction of race and the shifting notions of citizenship. This thesis will investigate how listeners …


Dead Places : American Horror, Placelessness, And Globalization., Katherine Ashley Wagner May 2017

Dead Places : American Horror, Placelessness, And Globalization., Katherine Ashley Wagner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates particular American anxieties concerning cultural identity and place, particularly fears about America’s place (or lack thereof) within the global world, that can be seen throughout much of post-WWII American horror literature and film. More specifically, this project explores how an existent pattern of visual and narrative depictions of destroyed bodies and places illustrates larger tensions and fears about placelessness—the affect and effect of incomplete, partial, or inauthentic relationships with the places that provide cultural and individual identity and meaning. I argue that representations of placelessness within American horror texts become vehicles for addressing and signifying American fears …


Man/Boy., Nick Hartman May 2017

Man/Boy., Nick Hartman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Verisimilitude, or the appearance of being true, is a concept I turn upside down; relating it to a guise I wear as a contemporary male in a society dictated by learned social behavior and gender norms. Cultural iconography and expected gender norms are tropes I confront within my artwork. Drawings of seemingly everyday objects act as meditations or a fetishized repetition of supposed unobtainable objects and ideals that deal with masculine societal norms. Manliness, machismo, masculinity… it is all a culturally learned and expected pose placed on all men. Coming to the realization that I do not necessarily fit …


Popular Culture Is Killing Writing, Bronwyn T. Williams Jan 2017

Popular Culture Is Killing Writing, Bronwyn T. Williams

Faculty Scholarship

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of and antidotes to major myths in writing instruction. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute at WVU Libraries and in part by Inside Higher Ed.