American Popular Culture Commons^™

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

From Blues To The Ny Dolls: The Rolling Stones And Performance Of Authenticity, Mariia Spirina

Theses and Dissertations--Art and Visual Studies

Rock’n’roll has specific aesthetic — a set of invisible rules that each young rock musician accepts as a given. If one examines the history of rock’n’roll starting from 1950s, one will notice that there was a clear division in rock that separates the rock’n’roll of 1950s from rock of the second half of the 1960s and beyond—the rock that we know today. This thesis investigates how the visual aesthetic of rock’n’roll evolved from its origins in the 1950s blues tradition, how it was formed in the second half of the 1960s, and how it was modified in the first half …

From Weak Woman To New Woman And Back: The Long Struggle To Legitimize Women Athletes In The U.S., Rashaun Debord

Audre Lorde Prize

This paper details the complicated history of women in sport by looking at the changing popular image of women athletes from the late 19th century to today.

“No Other Agency”: Public Education (K-12) In Washington State During World War I And The Red Scare, 1917-1920, Jennifer Nicole Arleen Crooks

All Master's Theses

This paper examines the impact of World War I and the Red Scare upon public education in Washington State. Schools, expected to be the instruments of governmental policy, played an important role in the everyday lives of people on the American homefront. Although many helped in the war effort willingly, this wartime drive included both instilling nationalism and loyalty to American political and economic institutions as well as the assimilation of immigrants. While these forces existed well before World War I and the Red Scare, they strengthened and became more publicly acceptable in 1917-1920 as more people grew convinced that …

Shakespeare And Black Masculinity In Antebellum America: Slave Revolts And Construction Of Revolutionary Blackness, Elisabeth Mayer

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how Shakespeare was used by Antebellum American writers to frame slave revolts as either criminal or revolutionary. By specifically addressing The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas R. Gray and "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, this paper looks at the way invocations of Shakespeare framed depictions of black violence. At a moment when what it means to be American was questioned, American writers like Gray and Douglass turned to Shakespeare and the British roots of the English language in order to structure their respective arguments. In doing so, these texts illuminate how transatlantic identity still permeated …

"If You Want To Be The Man, You've Got To Beat The Man": Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990'S, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE’s on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …

Popular Culture Is Killing Writing, Bronwyn T. Williams

Faculty and Staff 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.

Rotten Bananas, Hip Hop Heads, And The American Individual: Teaching Eddie Huang’S Memoir Fresh Off The Boat And Its Tropes Of Literacy, Wilson C. Chen

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay focuses on Fresh Off the Boat as an eminently teachable coming-of-age story, provides critical contexts and directions for teaching this ideologically suggestive text, and sets forth the interpretive argument that the structures and themes of the memoir are fundamentally shaped by the literacy narrative at its core. As such, the text enters into conversation with other literacy narratives that have become so foundational in the teaching of multiethnic literature in the U.S. Moreover, Huang’s tropes of literacy draw from enduring, mythified Americanist discourses that are suggestive of a masculine individualism that, while not unique, is recognizable, instructive, and …

"It's Oil And Water": Race, Gender, Power, And Trauma In Vu Tran's Dragonfish, Quan-Manh Ha, Chase Greenfield

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes in-depth the interplay between race, gender, power, and trauma in Vu Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish. We argue that Dragonfish focuses on the relationships, desires, and conflicts among its three protagonists—Robert, Suzy, and Sonny—to highlight how their postwar interactions complicate race, gender, trauma, and remembrance. The three protagonists engage in an intense socio-political struggle for dominance and control, which is riddled with irony, heart-wrenching pain, and misleading appearances. They experience hardship and loss, but they rely on each other for recovery from past and present trauma, and to advance their own varying personal priorities and agendas: …

(Re)Mediating The Spirit: Evangelical Christian Young Adult Media, Tamara Watkins

Theses and Dissertations

"We are in the world, but not of the world," a maxim frequently spoken in evangelical Christian culture, provides insight into how these individuals view their relationship with secular culture. They presume to share the same temporal plane with secular culture, but do not participate in it. In this dissertation, I explore whether the division between evangelical Christian culture and secular culture is as clear as this aphorism implies. To facilitate this investigation, I examine media Christian content creators created for an American evangelical Christian young adult audience in the early twenty-first century, specifically focusing on novel-length fiction, comics and …

Negotiating Desire: Resisting, Reimagining And Reinscribing Normalized Sexuality And Gender In Fan Fiction, Charity A. Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

Fan studies has examined how fan fiction resists heteronormativity by challenging depictions of gender and sexuality, but to date, this inquiry has focused disproportionately on slash, to the exclusion of other genres of fan fiction. Additionally, scholars disagree about slash’s subversive effects by setting up a seemingly stable dichotomy—subversive vs. misogynistic—where one does not necessarily exist.

In this project, I examine multiple genres of fan fiction—namely, slash arising from bromances; femslash from female friendships; incestuous fan fiction from dysfunctional familial relationships; and polyamorous fics. I chose fics from four televisions shows—NBC’s Revolution, MTV’s Teen Wolf, the CW’s The …

The Impact Of Burroughs's Naked Lunch On Chester's The Exquisite Corpse, Jaap Van Der Bent

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Impact of Burroughs's Naked Lunch on Chester's The Exquisite Corpse" Jaap van der Bent posits that although Alfred Chester was critical of most Beat writing, in Tangier in the early 1960s he associated not only with Paul Bowles, but also with William S. Burroughs. Van der Bent argues that The Exquisite Corpse, the experimental novel Chester wrote in Tangier, shows the influence of the city's geography and especially the content and form of Burroughs's Naked Lunch.

The Cultural Translation Of Ginsberg's Howl In Turkey, Erik Mortenson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Cultural Translation of Ginsberg's Howl in Turkey" Erik Mortenson examines three Turkish translations of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl in order to explore the ways in which Ginsberg's poem becomes redeployed in new cultural contexts. Orhan Duru and Ferit Edgü's 1976 translation presents a more politicized Ginsberg that draws on his anti-establishment credentials as a social activist. This comes as little surprise, since in pre-1980 coup Turkey rebellion was thought in purely political terms of right verses left. Hakan Arslan's 1991 update provides a less political and more familiar Ginsberg, in keeping with a society that left …

A Bounded Affinity Theory Of Religion And The Paranormal, Joseph O. Baker, Christoper Bader, F. Carson Mencken

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

We outline a theory of bounded affinity between religious experiences and beliefs and paranormalism, which emphasizes that religious and paranormal experiences and beliefs share inherent physiological, psychological, and ontological similarities. Despite these parallels, organized religious groups typically delineate a narrow subset of experiences and explanatory frames as acceptable and True, banishing others as either false or demonic. Accordingly, the theory provides a revised definition of the “paranormal” as beliefs and experiences explicitly rejected by science and organized religions. To demonstrate the utility of the theory, we show that, after controlling for levels of conventional religious practice, there is a strong, …

From Shtetl To Stardom: Jews And Hollywood, Vincent Brook, Michael Renov

Purdue University Press Books

The outsized influence of Jews in American entertainment from the early days of Hollywood to the present has proved an endlessly fascinating and controversial topic, for Jews and non-Jews alike. From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood takes an exciting and innovative approach to this rich and complex material. Exploring the subject from a scholarly perspective as well as up close and personal, the book combines historical and theoretical analysis by leading academics in the field with inside information from prominent entertainment professionals. Essays range from Vincent Brook’s survey of the stubbornly persistent canard of Jewish industry “control” to Lawrence …

From Shtetl To Stardom: Jews And Hollywood, Vincent Brook, Michael Renov

Purdue University Press Book Previews

The outsized influence of Jews in American entertainment from the early days of Hollywood to the present has proved an endlessly fascinating and controversial topic, for Jews and non-Jews alike. From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood takes an exciting and innovative approach to this rich and complex material. Exploring the subject from a scholarly perspective as well as up close and personal, the book combines historical and theoretical analysis by leading academics in the field with inside information from prominent entertainment professionals. Essays range from Vincent Brook’s survey of the stubbornly persistent canard of Jewish industry “control” to Lawrence …

Free To Play/Pay To Win: Consuming Competition Through Online Gaming In The Neoliberal Age, Brandon Jones

Honors Projects

This project examines online gaming in the context of decades of deregulation and privatization. In the piece, I examine American culture’s infatuation with the value of competition through a historical and hegemonic scope. Throughout the piece, I make connections between online gaming and the illusion that the populace must compete for unnecessarily scarce resources. The goal of this project is to illustrate how micro-transactions in online gaming is not beneficial for the consumer, but rather coercive reinforcements of the spontaneous philosophy of competition prevalent in the Neoliberal age.

Lin-Manuel Meets Moana, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this article originally published in Public Books, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner wonders whether a Disney musical and a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical want the same thing.

Part Of This World: A Personal Exploration Of Media And Queer Identity, Emilee Harrison

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This paper is a mix of research and personal narrative exploring the impact of television, film, and online media on identity formation. I look specifically at my own identity as a queer person and how it has been shaped by what I have seen and experienced as a young queer and as an educator. Topics discussed include homophobia in the classroom and workplace, the impact of social media on youth development and identity formation, and our changing culture as queer visibility increases. This piece is primarily a personal reflection that runs from early childhood to adulthood. It addresses social interactions …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …