Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Mother Monsters And Monster Mothers From Dracula To Stranger Things, Melissa Dinsman

Publications and Research

Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things is an homage to 1970s and 1980s sci-fi and horror, including Alien and Aliens, Carrie, the Star Wars trilogy, and Poltergeist, as well as buddy adventure films like Goonies and Stand by Me. But it is also, in its obsessive presentation of monsters as mothers and mothers as monsters, a show that takes its 1980s mothering cues straight out of Bram Stoker’s 1890s. Despite its 2016 production date, the Duffer Brother’s Stranger Things presents viewers with very old fashioned ideas of mothering, with Joyce Byers (Wynona Ryder) as the single, but exceedingly pro-active mom from …

A Static Code Analysis And Pattern Recognition Algorithm-Driven, Quantitative, Mathematical Model-Oriented Risk Assessment Framework Of Cloud-Based Health Information Applications, Dennis B. Park

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to a survey, the healthcare industry is one of the least cloud-adopting industries. The low adoption reflects the healthcare industry's ongoing concerns about the security of the cloud. Business applications, according to another survey, are among the most vulnerable components of business information systems. Many risk assessment frameworks available today, particularly for health information applications, require significant customization before they can be used. This study created a new framework to assess cloud risks specifically for their health information applications, utilizing data-driven risk assessment methodologies to avoid surveys, interviews, and meetings for data collection. For the feasibility study, the open-source …

Beirut/The Other Side Of The City: The Impact Of Visual Texture Production Of The Lebanese Postmemory Generation, 1989 - Present, Mohamed Moustafa Gameel Ebada

Theses and Dissertations

In 1989, after the Ta'if agreement, the war in Lebanon started to fade, which ended years of one of the most destructive civil conflicts in the region with no decisive winner or loser. The year also marked the birth of a new Lebanese generation who did not experience the war in person. It is a generation of postmemory, a term Maria Hirsch coined to describe the reminisces of those who did not have a personal encounter with past traumatic events. However, it was not before February 2005, when Rafic Al-Hariri's violent assassination occurred, when the postmemory generation started to question …

"Knowing It's Real Means You Gotta Make A Decision": Depictions Of Post-Traumatic Disorders And Coping Mechanisms In The Punisher And Jessica Jones, Megan M. Rutter

English Department Masters Theses

Post-traumatic disorders have been included in some of the most popular narratives in mainstream culture. Though the early decades of movies included 1948’s The Best Days of Our Lives is an award-winning movie that follows three veterans home from World War II and depicts their struggles with reacclimating to society it became more popular after Vietnam veterans and their allies fought and protested for an appropriate diagnosis for PTSD after decades of it not being seen as a legitimate psychological disorder. Since then, post-traumatic disorders have been included in media as popular as the series finale of M*A*S*H in 1983, …

Autism-As-Machine Metaphors In Film And Television Sound, Erin Felepchuk

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Around the turn of the millennium, there was an outpouring of autistic representation in literature, film, and television. These resulted in a multitude of new cultural texts that reinforced damaging metaphors about autism that had previously emerged in medical discourse. In film and television, autistic people are portrayed through a variety of metaphors: as impenetrable fortress, missing puzzle pieces, confusing aliens, and as malfunctioning robots or supercomputers. In this paper, I examine the role of film and television sound in reinforcing the metaphor of autistic people as “unfeeling machines.” The unfeeling machine metaphor is personified through sound tracks that deploy …

The Free Arena Of Literature: Science Fiction Films’ Critiques Of Capitalism In The United States, John (Jack) Michael Bilello

History

Capitalism is an inherently flawed system. The ideologies of Karl Marx have remained relevant for their critiques of the system, yet socially, his ideas are not accepted in the capitalist United States. Capitalism, as the dominant economic system of western civilization, has become synonymous with patriotism in the U.S. This has proved incredibly harmful to criticisms of capitalism, as they are met with questions of allegiance and patriotism rather than a careful reconsideration of ideals. Through science fiction films, these ideas that are usually difficult to express become much more palatable to a capitalist society. But to fully appreciate the …

Starless Nights, Deepak Rauniyar

Theses and Dissertations

A film about the filmmaking process and the life of a filmmaker. But it's also a story about immigration, home, and negotiation. We constantly negotiate in our lives to maintain our relationships, opportunities, and dreams.

The Disappearance Of The French New Wave, Emir Kulluk

CISLA Senior Integrative Projects

The French New Wave is considered to be one of the most influential waves within cinema history, starting from the end of the 1950s, going all the way through the 1960s. Thanks to the directors of this era, there have been a myriad of movies that challenged the norms of filmmaking, redefining the techniques used and the stories told within cinema. However, if this era was so fruitful and is deemed to be so valuable for cinema in general, then why did it not continue? In this paper, I will be taking a look at French society, external influences, as …

Fractured Selves, Gearoid Dolan

Theses and Dissertations

Fractured Selves is a self-portrait that examines the histories and points of conflation and diversion of my four public personas. In the style of a Zoom meeting, they chat with a host against animated backgrounds. Interactivity creates non-linear consuming of the content and user directed navigation through four timelines

Signal To Noise: Harmonic Temperaments And Patterns Of Interference, Dylan A. Marcheschi

Theses and Dissertations

An audio/visual exploration of historical tuning systems. Most contemporary Western audiences will seldom if ever encounter harmony outside of post-Renaissance tuning conventions. This presentation highlights some of those pre-orthodox harmonic relationships which existed throughout most of history. The corresponding paper documents correlates in recent advances of acoustic ecology.

How Bojack Horseman Got Too Real: Audience Engagement And A Critique Of Capitalism, Camille Le Pioufle

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

What can a cartoon tell us about the state of capitalist societies? This study examines the case of Netflix adult animated TV show BoJack Horseman (2014-2020) with the aim of understanding the mechanisms at play in the formation of the critique of capitalism. It investigates the narrative and cinematographic devices employed by the show to construct a realistic portrayal of American capitalist system and its harmful consequences on individuals and society in general.

Through the analysis of realism, self-referentiality and intertextuality, the star system, and processes of subsumption and commodification, this work comes to the conclusion that BoJack Horseman ‘got …

Time Decay: Assets, Authoritarianism, And Anxiety About The Future, Jack Davies

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article identifies a basic formula in the Freudo-Marxist take on twentieth-century authoritarianism. This is the incommensurability of inherited past development with the pace and demands of industrial social life, damming up a tremendous excess that seeks reactionary outlet. Authoritarianism, here, breeds in the contradiction between the symptoms of the Oedipal drama and the commodity form. The implicit “repressive hypothesis” for sexuality and developmentalist teleology make this theorization of authoritarian formations untenable today. This article, however, identifies moments of promise in this literature, and turns to materials available to these thinkers—specifically interwar psychoanalytic theory on anxiety and economic theory on …

Defending “Western” Values: Reactionary Neoliberalism In The Americas, Gabriela Segura-Ballar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Right-wing populism and authoritarianism are on the rise globally after the financial crisis of 2008. This reactionary trend has widely channeled anxieties created by neoliberal insecurities into cultural and nationalistic backlash against the ostensible enemies of “Western” values (e.g., immigrants, racial and sexual minorities, feminists, and leftists). President Jair Bolsonaro’s “Brazil above everything, God above everyone” and President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” are the most conspicuous examples of the resurgence of a populist reactionary right in the Americas. This continental trend promotes ultra-nationalism and more coercive neoliberalization processes combined with a reactionary authoritarianism that celebrates essentialized “Western” values, …

Incipient Fascism: Black Radical Perspectives, Alberto Toscano

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The sordid twilight of the Trump presidency raised the stakes of the debate on fascism. While much of the discussion has been magnetised by the legitimacy of analogies with the 1930s, this article argues that a rich and complex tradition of Black radical critique of right-wing authoritarianism provides a vital resource for thinking through the problem of US fascism beyond analogy – beginning with the DuBoisian insight that a racial fascism forged by chattel slavery and settler-colonialism anticipated the ascendancy of European fascisms. The article homes in on Black radical theories of fascism developed in the wake of the movements …

Neo-Authoritarianism And The Contestation Of White Identification In The Us, Justin Gilmore

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Justin Gilmore’s article "Neo-Authoritarianism and the Contestation of White Identification in the US" examines how the political forces around Donald Trump are often interpreted as an external attack on American democracy, and how the dynamism of these attacks is thought to emanate from various sites of white chauvinism. This article argues that such an interpretation is partial. The upsurge associated with “Trumpism” represents a distinctive contestation of an alternative type of white identity, one that has been elemental for a progressive form of neoliberalism. Although the neoliberal construction of white identification is distinctive, and indeed kinder, its material basis rests …

Neo-Authoritarianism Without Authority, Massimiliano Tomba

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines two aspects of neo-authoritarianism. The first is mainly diagnostic and concerns the nature of authoritarianism as a phenomenon of transition. The article investigates tensions and conflicts between temporalities. It pays attention to the asynchronous nature of change which, alongside the social structural level of changes, also the psycho-social level, intervene politically in different forms. There are social strata that are strangers in their own country and do not share the same present with others. For them, looking to the past is the only way to imagine a different future. If they are looking for values and authority, …

A Trumpian Mechanism, Emmett Peixoto

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In 2016, a liar made a hypocrite appear worse and thereby won the US presidency. How did a liar, which is traditionally deemed something worse than a hypocrite, manage to do this? This article offers an answer. It does so by uncovering a peculiar mechanism, a Trumpian mechanism, at the heart of Trump’s relations with his critics. The mechanism explains how Trump benefited from wrong-footing his critics and is thus essential for understanding Trump’s success. The article offers a few key examples of this mechanism working against Trump’s political opponents, e.g., Trump’s (first) impeachment. It then shows how the mechanism …

Authoritarianism And Ideology, Asad Haider

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Authoritarianism and Ideology,” Asad Haider approaches the problem of authoritarianism by considering the classical question of tyranny, as framed by Spinoza, and how this can be traced to the Marxist theory of ideology. A fundamental axis of the debate over ideology in twentieth century Marxism was the phenomenon of fascism, theorized in highly influential but also markedly different ways by figures like Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno. A close reading of two major texts—Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism and Adorno's contributions to The Authoritarian Personality—provides a basis for conceptually elaborating different directions that can be taken in the study …

Introduction: New Faces Of Authoritarianism, Asad Haider, Massimiliano Tomba

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

A Gap In The Narrative: Exploring The Experiences Of Trans Dancers Today, Erica Best

Dance Independent Study Projects

The scarcity of trans dancers in dance history, dance spaces, and dance research suggests a need for greater understanding of this group and how their needs are and are not being met in dance. This qualitative study explores the experiences of transgender, nonbinary, and otherwise gender-nonconforming dancers in concert, commercial, and social dance forms. Interviews with 10 participants from the US and Australia emphasize dance as a valuable space for gender exploration, but also highlight a lack of media representation for this population and argue that what representation does exist is often objectifying and tokenizing. Participants also shed light on …