Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

A Reason To Daydream, Corinne Schipull

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Sexism in American culture comes as no surprise. In 2017, the film industry saw an increasing number of powerful men within its ranks exposed and exiled for allegations of sexually predatory behavior. Many see this purging as a sign of changing times, but this view is optimistic: the tides of change ebb in and out, and this problem far exceeds the movie industry. Well before the onslaught of articles on the likes of Harvey Weinstein, my classmates and I resolved to craft our senior thesis film with a crew made up entirely of women: we simply saw the pool of …

Disoriented Nationalist Discourse Of The Wenxuan Group Amidst Manchukuo’S Anti-Modern Chorus, Chao Liu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Disoriented Nationalist Discourse of the Wenxuan Group amidst Manchukuo's Anti-Modern Chorus" Chao Liu analyzes the proposal of "native-land literature" made by left-wing Chinese writers in occupied northeast China. As it turns out, inheriting the nationalist discourse of the May Fourth Movement and further radicalizing it via a "new romanticism," those writers over-emphasized the socio-political function of literary production and took native-land literature as the most effective tool for nationalist mobilization. Accordingly, they repelled modern civilization as it was associated with the colonists, relying instead on natural wilderness and primitive force and thus adopting subject matters as well …

Pantheism And Escapism In Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' And 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives, Yasser K. R. Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Pantheism and Escapism in Abu Madi's 'Enigmas' and 'The Evening' From English Romanticism Perspectives" Yasser K. R. Aman investigates and analyses the possibilities of pantheism's encirclement of escapism in Elia Abu Madi's two poems from English Romanticism perspective. The article compares Abu Madi's fluctuating attitude towards escapism and pantheism to William Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour July 13, 1798," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," highlighting the affinities and differences. The …

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, And Environmental Narrative By Alexa Weik Von Mossner, David Tagnani

The Goose

Review of Alexa Weik von Mossner's Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative.

Throwing Our Voices: Ventriloquism As New Media Activism, Amber Day

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

In the fall of 2010, Chevron released an ad campaign designed to respond to consumer worries about the conduct of oil companies. Each ad depicted “customers” voicing rather nonspecific concerns about oil companies, answered by the “We Agree” slogan and information about something positive the company is doing in particular communities. Just before the campaign’s official roll-out, the anti-corporate activist group known as the Yes Men produced a series of sophisticated parody ads that spoke in more detail about the damage the company has done in specific countries. Designed to be mistaken for the real, the dummy campaign was distributed …

Heidegger And Hölderlin On Aether And Life, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

The Keepers: A Collaborative Constructive Narrative Podcast, Shay Carroll

Honors Projects

This is a fictional podcast series that presents a story that is completed through roleplaying. The structure follows that of a video game, with the main characters, or "players," interacting with a set plot while deciding their own course of action. I act as the narrator for the story, controlling the plot and setting as well as non-player characters, or "NPCs." For the purposes of consistency and making sure the characters do not do anything that would be considered too over-powered or unrealistic, I have chosen to use the rule guide and statistics modifier system presented by Wizards of the …

How Lucille Ball Fought The Patriarchy, While Lucy Ricardo (Indirectly) Contributed To Second-Wave (White) Feminism, Anam Rana Afzal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Author Stephanie Coontz argues that our most powerful visions of traditional families derive from images that are still delivered to our homes in countless reruns of 1950s television sitcoms. In actuality, the happy, homogenous families that we “remember” from America in the 50s were a result of the media’s denial of diversity. Also, women’s retreat to housewifery after working during WWII was in many cases, not freely chosen. In his study of sitcoms, Saul Austerlitz claims that once television arrived in American cities after the war’s end, its impact was immediate and incontrovertible, and no sitcom caught America’s eye as …

Sundance Film Festival 2018, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

Introduction to the Sundance Film Festival 2018.

Finding Meaning Through Video Games, Christopher T. Althoff

Student Works

The way video games combine elements from novels and films and then adds the element of interactivity makes them a unique and complicated medium that is difficult to completely understand. Video games create meaning by using and combining the visual and audio elements of Film Theory, the storytelling elements of Narratology, and the interactive elements of Ludology.

On Guenther Anders, Political Media Theory, And Nuclear Violence, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

• Guenther Anders was a philosopher concerned with the political and social implications of power, both as expressed in the media and its tendency to elide the citizenry and thus the very possibility of democracy and the political implications of our participation in our own subjugation in the image of modern social media beginning with radio and television. Anders was particularly concerned with two bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II, and he was just as concerned with the so-called ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear power, i.e., what he named our apocalypse-blindness and the urgency of violence. To …

Queer: Good Gay, Bad Gay, Black Gay, White Gay?, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

"As Deadline .com bluntly put it, 'Kevin Spacey Apologizes to Anthony Rapp for Alleged Sexual Advances; Chooses to "Live As A Gay Man."' The outraged response of progressive intellectuals, activists, and cultural critics to Spacey’s twofold tweet has demonstrated, inter alia, the resilience of old school assumptions and expectations about coming out and about gay identity and gay identifications. These outraged responses have come especially from younger generations of intellectuals, activists, and critics, but also across generations, genders, and sexual orientations. Despite decades of attacks on models of gay identity that center on teleological narratives of coming out, and critiques …

Stranger Danger: The Inversion Of Suburban Stranger-Danger Symbolism In Stranger Things, Gregory Shea

The Graduate Review

A dramatic shift took place in the suburban conception of children in America during the early 1980s. The high-profile abductions and murders of a small number of children led to a profound shift in suburban thinking about child safety. Suburban parents embarked on a wild search for methods of safeguarding their children against the largely symbolic threats of stranger danger, but, in the end, many of the reactions to stranger danger only served to disempower children in the suburbs. In this paper, I contend that Matt and Ross Duffer’s Stranger Things enters into a symbolic discourse with the stranger danger …

No Laughing Matter: Failures Of Satire During The 2016 Presidential Election, Jamie Noelle Smith

Honors Theses and Capstones

The 2016 presidential election was so full of unusual characters and unprecedented scandals, that media outlets, from the nightly news to late-night, had to adjust to this new normal in politics. Indeed, not even the jokesters on the handful of political satire shows on television were immune to the necessary changes that all the media had to take in covering Donald Trump. Given how many people tuned into to these shows each week, it is no surprise that the role that political satire television may have played in the election results was fodder for those giving post-election hot takes. Many …

The Dmz Responds, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appeared in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea edited by Haerin Shin.

Democracy At Stake In The Digital Age: Engaging In The Net Neutrality Debate For The Preservation Of Free Speech And The Redemption Of Public Interest, Christina (Sung Min) Yoh

CMC Senior Theses

Net neutrality is currently one of the most topical government policies up for debate. In the following paper, I will examine three cases in which net neutrality has been threatened by internet service providers and the Federal Communications Commission and reinforced by public interest groups, major website companies, and the public. The online regime has been a critical instrument in the outcome of all three cases, highlighting the role and influence of internet users in the virtual and physical public spheres.

Some say that the battle is already lost. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and his Republican majority in the agency …

Jocks For Justice: How Sports Media Reflects And Propagates Societal Narratives, Laura Kathryn Reifsnyder

CMC Senior Theses

Sports presents one of the most popular forms of entertainment in society, and sports media continues to expand its billion-dollar influence through new television deal and broadcasting rights. But with a population of journalists who are overwhelmingly white, straight, and male, sports media is promoting the hegemony of said image by reproducing stereotypes in its broadcasts to audiences around the country. Mainstream media regurgitates these stereotypes in their coverage of minority athlete by portraying black players as unintelligent or “thug”-ish, women as “butch”, and gay athletes as effeminate. These representations allow for the perpetuation of the white, heterosexual male narrative …

21st Century Film Criticism: The Evolution Of Film Criticism From Professional Intellectual Analysis To A Democratic Phenomenon, Asher Weiss

CMC Senior Theses

Film criticism has changed since its inception and will continue to change moving forward. The evolution of film criticism has largely been a story of the shift from an elite field of intellectual exploration by a few knowledgeable experts to a democratic phenomenon where expert analysis is aggregated and averaged, and the lines are blurred between true expertise and the random opinions of the masses. This paper will address the transition from the birth of film criticism to its popularization through the 90s, to what it has become today. By exploring the nature of film criticism historically and reviewing the …

Reeling Backward: The Haptics Of A Medium And The Queerness Of Obsolescence, Travis L. Wagner

Student Publications

This article considers the haptics of queer activist footage shot on video, and more specifically footage shot on magnetic media. Despite ideal methods of care, magnetic media faces extreme concern from a preservation standpoint. As a format that is both subject to rampant deterioration (known colloquially as “sticky shed”) and obsolescence (with the ceasing VCR production), the queer activist videotape is an archival artefact irretrievably stuck in a liminal space. To play a tape is to contribute to its destruction, yet to not play the tape is to overlook potentially unique moments in queer history. As such, this article explores …

Identity Crisis In Gaslight, Savannah Weishaar

A with Honors Projects

In the film Gaslight (1944), the main character Paula (portrayed by Ingrid Berman) struggles with her sense of self after adolescence. After her aunt – who is also her guardian – is murdered, Paula is sent to Italy to learn to become a famous opera singer like her aunt. Paula spends several years in Italy where she meets a man named Gregory. She falls in love quickly and agrees to marry him after two weeks together. After their marriage, Gregory convinces Paula to move back to London to live in the townhouse her aunt had left her. During their time …