English Language and Literature Commons^™

Flipping The Jane Austen Classroom, Lynda A. Hall

English Faculty Articles and Research

The contemporary Austen classroom might appreciate cultural and racial diversity, examine popular culture’s distortions of the original texts, and consider multimodal ways of reading. This paper reflects on a course that “flipped” the research process in order to “find” Austen and her works in the popular culture and to evaluate our understanding in the twenty-first century. Students discovered the commodification and distortion of “Jane Austen” and conducted research for creative projects to learn more about the social, cultural, and historical contexts of the written texts.

Facebook: The Alienation From Oneself, Kaitlin F. Knapp

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

We live in the Age of Information: a time when technology has advanced in speed and the number of ways people can communicate has increased. Social media is one such advancement; this thesis will focus specifically on the consequences of the site Facebook. The mission statement of the Facebook company is “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” While Facebook serves as a document of its users’ lives, through its unique process of documentation, Facebook alienates the user from the image of herself that she intended to create. This thesis uses the …

Apportioned Commodity Fetishism And The Transformative Power Of Game Studies, Ken S. Mcallister, Chris Hanson, Judd Ethan Ruggill, Carly A. Kocurek, Tobias Conradi, Kevin A. Moberly, Steven Conway, Randy Nichols, Jennifer Dewinter, Marc A. Oullette

English Faculty Publications

This chapter explores the ways in which the field of Game Studies helps shape popular understandings of player, play, and game, and specifically how the field alters the conceptual, linguistic, and discursive apparatuses that gamers use to contextualize, describe, and make sense of their experiences. The chapter deploys the concept of apportioned commodity fetishism to analyze the phenomena of discourse as practice, persona, and vagaries of game design, recursion, lexical formation, institutionalization, systems of self-effectiveness, theory as anti-theory, and commodification.

The Commodification Of Queer Virgins In Shakespeare, Spenser, And Keats, Laura M. Ortega

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to explore selected works from William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Keats, in order to expose textual instances of feminist thought. This analysis was aided with feminist theorists falling under the main strains of queer theory, materialism, and gender performance. Specifically, this thesis focused on the ways in which women, particularly virgin daughters, were viewed as property by their male kin. It also looked at how these women engaged in various symbolic masquerades and/or actual cross-dressing as a response to the aforementioned phenomenon. Finally, the thesis exposed how these masquerades can be construed as …

Batwoman And Catwoman: Treatment Of Women In Dc Comics, Kristen Coppess Race

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

DC Comics has existed through the first, second, and third waves of feminism, publishing popular female characters who appeal to a mass market. By focusing on depictions of Batwoman and Catwoman, this paper examines the contrast between the social and political progress forms of feminism promised for women and the increasingly violent treatment of female characters in DC Comics, focusing on Batwoman and Catwoman. M. Thomas Inge maintains that male "comic book heroes [...] tend to fit most of the classic patterns of heroism in Western culture" (142). These heroes are designated by their completion of quests or missions, their …

Blank Power: The Social And Political Criticism Of Blank Fiction And Cinema, Ashley Minix Donnelly

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores a style of literature known as "blank" fiction that became popular in the United States in the mid-1980s, focusing on its stark, limited form, its minimal plots, its focus on commodification, and its scenes of graphic violence. The author presents the argument that filmmakers were producing pieces of cinema during the same time period that are similar in both form and content to the works of blank fiction. These films are a part of a style she labels "blank" cinema.

Blank fiction and cinema are politically charged and highly critical of the social and political situation in …