American Film Studies Commons^™

Ex Machina: Notes For Viewing, Bob De Smith

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"The film is engaging and disconcerting, and looks at what it means to be human in an age of the machine."

Posting about questions raised in the movie Ex Machina from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/ex-machina-notes-for-viewing/

Graverobber, Individualized Chorus: The Greek Chorus Reinterpreted In Repo! The Genetic Opera, Grace Markulin

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

The rock opera film Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) provides its audience with details regarding the film’s setting and perspectives on the morality of the film’s plot through the character Graverobber, whose sung dialogue expresses this information. Graverobber’s penchant for scene-setting and moralizing within the film classifies the character as a Greek chorus according to the parameters of the Greek chorus in antiquity and modern interpretations of the chorus in twentieth-century musical theater, but the character’s visual distinctiveness, preexisting relationship with an established character, and prominent use of solo vocal lines throughout his sung dialogue demonstrates a degree of individuation …

Mountain Men On Film, Kenneth Estes Hall

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: The mountain man of American folklore and history is a man between cultures. Like Janus, the doorkeeper god of the Romans, he is bifrontal, looking back at European, white civilization, and forward toward Indian civilization and culture.

Marilyn Monroe’S Star Canon: Postwar American Culture And The Semiotics Of Stardom, Amanda Konkle

Theses and Dissertations--English

Although Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous American film stars, and a monumental cultural figure, her film work has been studied far less than her biography. Applying C.S. Peirce’s semiotic categories of icon, index, and symbol, this research explains how Monroe acquired meaning as an actress: Monroe was a powerful, but simplified, public image (an icon); an indicator of a particular historical and social context (an index); and an embodiment of significant cultural debates (a symbol).

Analyzing Monroe as an icon reveals how her personal life, which contradicted her official publicity story, generated public sympathy and led to …

Female Anti-Heroes In Contemporary Literature, Film, And Television, Sara A. Amato

Masters Theses

The anti-hero character has steadily become more popular in contemporary literature, film, and television. Part of this popularity is due to the character's appeal to the audience. This character type often commits acts that challenge the regulations of society. These acts, however, can become wish fulfillment for some audience members, making the acts of the character a vicarious experience as well as making the character more relatable because of the character's flawed nature.

This study will trace some of the evolution of the female anti-hero by discussing an ancestral character of the female anti-hero—Hester Prynne the protagonist of Nathanial Hawthorne's …

Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey

Theses and Dissertations--English

Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …

Strong, Independent, And In Love: Fighting Female Fantasies In Popular Culture, Allison P. Palumbo

Theses and Dissertations--English

During the late 1970s and 1980s, feminist critics like Janice Radway began to reconsider so-called women’s genres, like romance novels and soap operas and melodramas, in order to address the forms of subversion and expressions of agency they provided female audiences. However, in spite of greater willingness to consider the progressive potential in romance narratives, there has been little such consideration given to stories of romance for the fighting female character—defined as a protagonist who uses violence, via her body or weapons, to save herself and others. The fighting female has received a good deal of attention from critics like …

Come Together: Desire, Literature, And The Law Of The Sexual Revolution, Eir-Anne E. Edgar

Theses and Dissertations--English

While some scholars have viewed the Sexual Revolution as a “war” with winners and losers, this project finds that all Americans were subject to the fantasy of liberation. This fantasy takes different forms during the era, including relaxed sexual strictures against pre-marital sex, the availability of birth control, and an increased focus on sexual pleasure. However, the seemingly liberatory quickly becomes conservative, coming into focus through the analysis of court cases and legal mandates that protected the declining structures of marriage and heteronormativity. Beginning with widespread fears about interracial mixing in the early 1950’s, escalated by the end of segregation …

Maternal Melodrama And Modern Horror: Genre Hybridity In Southern Film, Sara Marcella Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation establishes the groundwork for a new genre of Southern film – a hybrid genre that I call Southern maternal horror. By integrating key elements from the genres of maternal melodrama and modern horror into Southern narratives, Southern maternal horror uses the central ambivalence found in both genres – manifesting as a desire to both return to and escape from one’s maternal origins – to challenge Southern nostalgia. Specifically, within its distinctly Southern framework, this hybrid genre frequently disrupts the romanticized notions of the Old South typically found in classic Southern films such as Gone With the Wind: idealizations …

Domestic Violence In Lac Su’S I Love Yous Are For White People: A Sociological Criticism Approach, Quan-Manh Ha

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This article employs sociological criticism to examine domestic violence, parenting, and communication behavior in Lac Su’s Vietnamese American memoir. The book debunks the seemingly positive myth of Asian Americans as a model minority, substantiates certain negative stereotypes of Asian men, and challenges some of the classic Asian values that apparently have shaped the Asian American identity. I argue that Su’s memoir is a critique of structural inequalities, urban poverty, unemployment, inaccessibility to a support network, and the intersection between class, gender, and race in the contexts of war and its aftermath.

The Legends Of Bigfoot: Or How I Regained My Manhood, Blaine Mccarty

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Masculinity is a culturally defined identity that exists with no single way to express it. However, the cultural politics police masculinity to appear natural and non-changing, but masculinity changes over history influenced by events and the culture from which it gets its definition. Because of this twofold influence on the identity, there is a constant struggle of the appropriate ways to express masculinity in its attempt to normalize itself by defining what is and is not masculine. This work examines how Bigfoot, the hairy fabled monster, embodies conversations about masculinity during a shift in the masculine identity in a constantly …

Panic At The Drive-In: Affordance, Moral Panic, And Drive-In Theatres, Maria Chatzifilalithis

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

Review Of Pioneer Girl, By Bich Minh Nguyen, Quan-Manh Ha

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

DNA

From Raw To Cooked: Amy Tan’S “Fish Cheeks” Through A Lévi-Straussian Lens, Susan K. Kevra

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In "Fish Cheeks" a scant 500 words short story, Amy Tan serves up a coming of age story about an Asian American teenage girl. Tan’s setting of Christmas for a traditional Chinese dinner, shared with the American boy on whom the protagonist, Amy, has a crush, emphasizes the girl’s dual identity as an Asian American, a reality she is confronting head on. Forced to see her family traditions through the eyes of a white, Christian boy, she finds those traditions distasteful. Rather than delighting in the dishes her mother has lovingly prepared, she is revolted by them, fixated instead on …

A “Monstress” Undertaking: An Interview With Lysley Tenorio, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Volume Six: An Identity Rebus, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Volume 6 Cover, Mark P. Brada

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

A Light In Darkness, Oscar Micheaux: Entrepreneur Intellectual Agitator, Airic Hughes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Oscar Micheaux was a luminary who served as an agent of racial uplift, with a unique message to share with the world on behalf of the culturally marginalized African Americans. He produced projects that conveyed the complexity of the true black experience with passion and creative courage. His films empowered black audiences and challenged conventional stereotypes of black culture and potential. The legacy of Oscar Micheaux is historically unparalleled among his contemporaries. He transcended traditionally held perspectives about what black people could accomplish. The consciousness within his work still heavily influences black entertainment today. This study seeks to add to …

Past Traumas, Present Griefs: Exploring The Effects Of Colonialism, Microaggressions, And Stereotyping From Wild West Shows To Indigenous Literature, Kimberly Dawn Allen

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Native Americans have long been, and continue to be, victims of racism, microaggression, and stereotyping. This continued exposure to violence, degradation, belittling, and discrimination work in the forefront to historical trauma and unresolved grief which has led to an increase in the numbers of individuals suffering from mental illness within the Indigenous population. Colonization created a long history of trauma and genocide that effects generations of Native American people, not just the individuals on which the horrific sins were committed. Using the lens of disability studies, this project will examine the ways in which portrayals of Native American people in …

Fame Gone Wild (2015: An Era Of Self-Invention), Stephanie E. Kang

Graduate School of Art Theses

Entertainment has become one of the fueling fires of society. In today’s world of nonstop broadcasting and streaming, many begrudgingly trudge through their 9 to 5’s only to live for their few post-work hours of leisure, which have been reserved for this week’s latest items on the viewing queue. Netflix and Hulu have become the opium of the masses. Consequently, this obsession with constant entertainment has now morphed into a shared yearning for the people that are watched and followed religiously through the screen – the celebrities. In this cultural moment, the concept of fame has become a vital element …