American Popular Culture Commons^™

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 1

Human-Machine Communication

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 1.

American Novels Amidst The Rise Of New Media: Emergent Publics And Forms, Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines long-term shifts in the quantities and demographics (namely the race and educational attainment) of twentieth-century American literary readers alongside the rise and popular consumption of new media (namely television and the internet). The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are testament to a great expansion in the numbers and demographics of literary readers, and in turn an increase in the variety and intended audiences of literary publications. Examples include the rise of “middlebrow” readers and books in the 1940s and the rise of African-American, feminist, and countercultural small presses in the 1960s and 1970s. However, even as the variety …

If It Looks Like Scholarship..., Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Death Of Kobe Bryant: Fallen Icons And Heart Of Popular Culture, Justin Bailey

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"It was one more reminder that control is an illusion, that life is fragile, and that each day with loved ones is a gift."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­reactions to the death of Kobe Bryant from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/the-death-of-kobe-bryant-fallen-icons-and-heart-of-popular-culture/

Woodie Guthrie And Billie Holiday- Revolutionizing Music And Society In The Great Depression, Mark Naison

Occasional Essays

No abstract provided.

Shows That Shape Us: Saved By The Bell, Erin Olson

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"No one really watches sitcoms because they think they’re truly representative of reality, but we also don’t want them to reinforce common misperceptions."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the television program Saved by the Bell from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/shows-that-shape-us-saved-by-the-bell/

Noise Over Signal: Phonography Culture As Participatory, Patrick Williams, Jason Luther

Librarian Publications

While participatory culture has been of special interest to scholars for nearly three decades, much of the focus has centered on digitally networked contexts. The digital age has indeed transformed our approaches to listening to music and how we operate as fans of music; these approaches can weave together the new and the old, and are enacted among a variety of spaces, objects, and relationships. We explore how the re-emergence of one such object in the digital age — the LP — has produced social arrangements that perhaps excavate older listening practices but do so in ways that have been …

Shows That Shape Us: The Office, Justin Bailey

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Laughter might express a diagnosis of what’s wrong with the world, or it might point the way to things somehow being made right."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­the television series The Office from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/shows-that-shape-us-the-office-beauty-in-ordinary-things/

Shows That Shape Us: Asking The Right Questions, Justin Bailey

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"God’s word can be translated into every cultural situation, becoming intelligible for us even as it brings a critique of our cultural idolatries."

Posting about ­­­­­­­­interpreting popular culture from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/shows-that-shape-us-asking-the-right-questions/

Somewhere Between Distance And Intimacy: Vija Celmins In California 1962-1981, Jessie Lebowitz

Theses and Dissertations

During her nineteen years spent in California (1962-81), the young Vija Celmins formulated a distinct landscape informed by California’s physical topography as well as the stylistic and materialistic advances resulting from the city’s newfound cultural awakening. With an intimate technical application, Celmins engages viewers with the spatial and optical facets of desert, sea, and sky.

Dirty, Bloody, Money: Menstruation Education For Young American Women In The 20th Century, Amelia Defrancis

American Studies Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Heroism And Indeterminacy In Oliver Stone's Jfk And Don Delillo's Libra, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Creating A Place For Monstrosity: The Forced Liminality And Limited Mobility Of Codified Monstrosity In Leigh Bardugo's King Of Scars, Kaylee Brooke Lambert

Online Theses and Dissertations

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) outlines the purpose of young adult (YA) literature as addressing the unique needs of adolescents, which are “distinguished by unique needs that are – at minimum — physical, intellectual, emotional, and societal in nature” (Cart “Value” para. 8). This unique period in life is liminal, a time between childhood and adulthood. Adolescents search for meaning in the world around them, with literature as one avenue for self-discovery and affirmation. Mental health is one area teenagers seek answers, and YA literature has attempted to provide spaces to navigate those questions in popular contemporary works …

Conceptualizing The Unspeakable: A Conceptual Metaphor Theory Analysis Of Sexual Assault Trauma In Creative Nonfiction, Ariana Ciamaricone

West Chester University Master’s Theses

This paper explores the use of conceptual metaphors (CMs) in two works of creative nonfiction, namely Laurie Halse Anderson’s (2019) Shout and Elissa Washuta’s (2014) My Body is a Book of Rules. Anderson’s (2019) poetic memoir centers on her experiences with sexual assault throughout her childhood and the process of writing her young adult novel Speak (1999). Washuta (2014) writes on her experiences with rape and mental illness via prose. Both memoirs detail their authors’ reckoning with the experience of sexual assault, and this paper investigates how trauma narratives attempt to “resolve what cannot be resolved, to generate meaning, …

The Golden Ratio Of Algorithms To Artists? Streaming Services And The Platformization Of Creativity In American Television Production, Annemarie Navar-Gill

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In this article, I examine how and why “platformization” was initially made sense of by writers in the American television industry. As streaming platforms entered the production space and became important homes for the commissioning of longform television content, they sought to build brand images as places that were both “data-driven” and characterized by work cultures of “creative freedom.” At least for a time in the mid-2010s, they succeeded in selling this conceptual link to the professional culture of Hollywood television screenwriters. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews from 2017 as well as a longer ranging analysis of trade press, I …

Diversifying Representation In Film: An Examination Of Racial And Ethnic Inclusivity In Black Panther And Crazy Rich Asians, Alexandria Hatchett

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Although Hollywood films are distributed globally, they have historically featured white actors and reflected Western life. As Hollywood influences one’s understanding of race in the United States, Black Panther (2018) and Crazy Rich Asian’s (2018) inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities combat racism and xenophobia and reveal alternate ways in which power is manifested in society. This thesis project utilizes critical rhetoric as its method to give a voice to communities of color that have been marginalized due to colonization and persistent structural racism. It employs Critical Race Theory, postcolonialism, and Afrofuturism as its theoretical lenses to explain how race …

Hear Me Roar, Abigail R. Seethoff

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hear Me Roar, a compilation of personal essays interspersed with short forms, grapples with the nuances of compliance versus autonomy in the context of the male gaze, beauty standards, and pop culture. The collection also explores what it means to treasure something—another person, an object—and how to express and deepen that affection.

The Cast Of A Giant's Shadow, Angela Kay Steineman

Masters Theses

Adapting fairy tales and folklore has been an ongoing endeavor by storytellers and artists since the very first story was repeated. The evidence can be seen in the many versions of fairy tales like those of the sleeping beauty, from Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia” to Walt Disney’s Maleficent. However, unlike their European counterparts, adaptations of American tales outside of children’s literature are not as ubiquitous. My writing rectifies this by adding to the resurging interest as seen in recent retellings like Matt Bell’s Appleseed: The Monstrous Birth (2019).

In an effort to reframe the American tall tale …

Introduction To Volume Ten: Aiiieeeee! At 45, Tara Fickle, Wei Ming Dariotis

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

The editors of the special issue on Aiiieeeee! locate the seminal anthology within the history of Asian American literature as a scholarly discipline and contextualize contributor's responses to the personal and cumulative effects of Aiiieeeee! on the Asian American literary landscape.

Cypher [How An Anthology Helped A Mixed-Race Filipino American Writer Draft A Novel], Brian Ascalon Roley

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In this work of creative nonfiction, Brian Ascalon Roley, the author of American Son (W.W. Norton, 2001) recounts the cultural landscape of the late 20^thc. America for Filipino American and mixed-race writers as he recounts some of the events that influenced his novel’s conception and explains how stumbling upon an anthology helped him to revise the draft. It was one of the first novels to feature mixed-race Filipino American characters, and would go on to receive the Association of Asian American Studies Award.