Digital Commons Network^™

Listening Spaces: Audiophiles, Technology And Domestic Music Listening, Brian O'Neill

Conference Papers

This paper examines the interrelationship of technology, space and identity as exhibited in the domestic music listening practices of the audiophile. Music listening in domestic contexts provides both a physical and imaginary space of cultural consumption. The paper describes work in progress into phenomenological aspects of listening, practices of audio technology use in domestic contexts, and features of identity formation based on a qualitative study of hi-fi listeners. Technological and cultural change in the production of aural soundscapes and processes of reception provide the backdrop to the current study. Three main issues are addressed. Firstly, the promise of digital technology …

'Who Are You?': Alien/Woman As Posthuman Subject In Alien Resurrection, Ximena Gallardo C.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Traditionally considered a monster in outer space series, the four films comprising the Alien saga: Alien, Aliens, Alien³, and Alien Resurrection, contain a vision of the Alien creature as an agent of human evolution that, taken to its logical extreme in Alien Resurrection, produce an uncommon posthuman subject: the Alien/Woman protagonist named Ripley. In the following article, Ximena Gallardo C. explores the introduction of the series' conception of human evolution through fusion with the Alien as a driving theme in Alien. It then briefly follows through Aliens and Alien^{3, …}

From Butler To Buffy: Notes Towards A Strategy For Identity Analysis In Contemporary Television Narrative, Rob Cover

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Given the increasing significance of questions of identity, subjectivity and selfhood in contemporary postmodern western cultures, it is important to begin acknowledging how these questions are reflected in contemporary media and television and to develop new strategies by which to analyse television characters in terms of identity and subjectivity. The scope for analysing television series' characterizations through recent postmodern and poststructuralist theories of non-essentialist, non-foundationalist subject/identity performativity has not yet been considerably explored. It is my contention here, however, that such a method both reflects the representation of self and identity transformation in new television series as well …

Casablanca: Judgment And Dynamic Enclaves In Law And Cinema, Shulamit Almog, Amnon Reichman

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

By interpreting the narrative and imagery of the film Casablanca, this article seeks to explore the concept of law as enclave. An enclave is a domain-physical, virtual-emotional, conceptual, social or other-defined by certain boundaries and rules of entrance and exit. We argue that Casablanca is about constructing and reconstructing such enclaves. The structure of a pending journey between enclaves organizes the events taking place in Casablanca and constitutes their dynamic nature. Enclaves, we argue, are central to the structure and operation of the law. Recognizing the enclitic nature of law allows us a better grasp of the ethical dimensions of …

Illusions Of Idle Prattle: Disney, Voice And The Little Mermaid, Veronica Diaz-Cox

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis examines the social and economic impact of Disney's gender roles, and the recurring motif of singing in both Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid and Walt Disney's film adaptation.

Teaching 9/11 And Why I'M Not Doing It Anymore, Louise Spence

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

Offers information on Reading Seminar in Media and Cultural Theory, a course which tackles advanced work in the theoretical and critical context of the mass media as a social phenomenon. Issues about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. covered in the course; Psychological implications of the terrorist attacks; Social relevance of the course and the instructor's reasons for ending the course.

Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film is an indictment of the key American myth that anyone can succeed through self-reliance. Baker finds that sports films, in general, comprise a site in which the myth is represented and reproduced. Baker's focus, though presented from multiple analytical perspectives, is singular in its purpose. That said, Baker does concentrate on what he considers the four core American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Approximately ninety movies, from the silent era to the present day, provide the content of the analysis, but several are exemplary and are cited repeatedly in the book's …

Reel Baseball: Essays And Interviews On The National Pastime, Hollywood And American Culture, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

The editors of Reel Baseball begin by acknowledging the roots of their collection, which explores the intersection between movies and baseball. Since 1989 the National Baseball Hall of Fame has hosted the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. Since 1997, McFarland has published all papers presented at the symposium. Reel Baseball, then, functions both as a document and as an artifact of the "integral" place of baseball movies in American culture. Indeed, the book not only includes essays presented at the symposium, it has two foreword sections: one written by Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey and the …

"Two Guns, A Girl And A Playstation™": Gender In The Tomb Raider Series, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This article considers the combination of game play and narrative which combine to produce cross-gender identifications in video games, a previously underexamined potential for the production of alternate genders, one which calls into question the stability of gender, particularly masculinity, as a construct.

On Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film And Stephen C. Wood And J. David Pincus's Reel Baseball: Essays And Interviews On The National Pastime, Hollywood And American Culture, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Aaron Baker's Contesting Identities: Sports in American Film is an indictment of the key American myth that anyone can succeed through self-reliance. Baker finds that sports films, in general, comprise a site in which the myth is represented and reproduced. Baker's focus, though presented from multiple analytical perspectives, is singular in its purpose. That said, Baker does concentrate on what he considers the four core American sports: football, baseball, basketball and boxing. Approximately ninety movies, from the silent era to the present day, provide the content of the analysis, but several are exemplary and are cited repeatedly in …

Of Technology And Apocalypse, Or Whose Independence Day?, Christopher Keep

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The scene is now familiar. The cities of the world are in ruins. The Empire State Building obliterated. The White House reduced to rubble. The remnants of humankind gather in the desert, scrounging together what remains of their air defence systems for one last effort to repulse the alien invaders. Haggard but determined, the last American President prepares to lead his motley crew of resistance fighters into the fray. He takes the hand mic, tests it once or twice, and his voice crackles over the speakers. In less than one hour, he announces, aircraft from here will join …

The Political Economy Of The Indie Blockbuster: Fandom, Intermediality, And The Blair Witch Project, James Castonguay

Communication, Media & The Arts Faculty Publications

The primary focus of this chapter is on what could be broadly described as The Blair Witch Project's political economy. This includes a consideration of the film's relationship to patterns of ownership and the economic structures of film production, distribution, and marketing within the structure of the entertainment industry and in the context of its critical and popular reception. The second half of the essay historicizes BWP in relation to film production and exhibition in the 1890s, and concludes with an examination of its mythic status as an independent film that threatened to undermine Hollywood's blockbuster paradigm. By placing …

Images Of Confinement : Power Relations, Cultural Industries And The Individual, Sohan Ariel Hayes

Theses : Honours

No abstract provided.

Kodak's Worst Nightmare Super 8 In The Digital Age: A Cultural History Of Super 8 Filmmaking In Australia 1965-2003, Keith Smith

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This project charts the extraordinary history of the Super 8 film medium, a popular amateur home movie format first introduced in 1965 and largely assumed to have disappeared with the advent of home video technologies in the early 1980's. Kodak's Worst Nightmare investigates the cultural history of the Super 8 medium with an emphasis on its (secret) life since 1986. lt asks how (and why) an apparently obsolete consumer technology has survived some 35 years into a digital future despite the emergence of technologically-advanced domestic video formats and Eastman Kodak's sustained attempts since the mid-80s to suppress, what is for …

Review Of How A Film Theory Got Lost And Other Mysteries In Cultural Studies, By Robert B. Ray, Alan Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Selected Definitions For Work In Communication And Media Studies & Selected Bibliography Of Publications In Comparative Media Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Toward A Framework Of Audience Studies In Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Have Lamb Will Martyr: Samson As A Rustic Christ-Figure In Cecil B. Demille's Samson And Delilah (1949), Anton Karl Kozlovic

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Cecil B. DeMille [1] (1881-1959) was a seminal founder of Hollywood who helped turn a Californian orange grove into a world class centre that became the synonym for film making (DeMille & Hayne, 1960; Edwards, 1988; Essoe & Lee, 1970; Higashi, 1994; Higham, 1973; Koury, 1959; Ringgold & Bodeen, 1969). Not only was the affectionately known C. B. an important film pioneer, producer and director, but he also became known as the master of the American Biblical Epic, and was variously tagged King of the epic Biblical spectacular (Finler, 1985, p. 32), the high priest of the religious …

Selected Bibliography For The Study Of Central And East European Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Constructivism And Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Selected Journals Of Media And Communication Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Breaking The Mimetic Contract: Notes On Ideology, Intersubjectivity, And Film Theory, Giorgio Bertellini, C. Paul Sellors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In this essay we would like to sketch out a few notes outlining historical and theoretical trajectories of the confusing, and often confused, relationships between ideology, history and subjectivity in Marx, Marxism and post-Marxism. Marx and Engels' approach to ideology in The German Ideology (1845-46), spawned and influenced a variety of interpretations and philosophical positions from not only the numerous schools of Marxism proper, but also structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis up to the very raison d'être of discourse theory and new historicism. This reaching influence occurs only at the cost of contradiction, however, between Marxist factions -- disagreements …

Bolshevism And The Avant-Garde: Marxist Ideology And The Aesthetics Of Soviet Film, 1923-28, Garrett H. Booker

History Theses & Dissertations

When Eisenstein's Strike burst onto the cultural scene in 1925, Soviet cinema began a creative odyssey that left to posterity a brilliant collection of films that redefined the manner in which audiences viewed them. Not only was the form of these films dynamic and innovative, but their content captured the heroic actions of a new historical subject, the revolutionary proletariat. As the Soviet State assumed control over the production of films, politics imprinted its indelible mark on the content of these films, especially as Stalin tightened his grip over all aspects of artistic life. The author of this project will …

Harold Innis And 'The Bias Of Communication', Edward Comor

FIMS Publications

Fifty years after his death, Harold Innis remains one of the most widely cited but least understood of communication theorists. This is particularly true in relation to his concept of ‘bias’. This paper reconstructs this concept and places it in the context of Innis’ uniquely non-Marxist dialectical materialist methodology. In so doing, the author emphasizes ongoing debates concerning Innis’ work and demonstrates its utility in relation to contemporary analyses of the Internet and related developments.

Teaching Video Production In The Secondary Art Classroom: An Educational Travel Log, William Lee Daggett

All Graduate Projects

This project is intended to serve as a model and resource for secondary teachers seeking to incorporate video production into their curriculum. A central premise of the project is that video production can serve as a valuable learning tool when it is part of an integrated, project based instructional program. The sample model used here is an educational travel log. A secondary art students' trip to Europe was undertaken. The various steps in how the trip was set up and how the curriculum was organized is the focus of the project. Students' roles, responsibilities, and activities are described, along with …

Getting The Insider's Story Out: What Popular Film Can Tell Us About Legal Method's Dirty Secrets, Rebecca Johnson, Ruth Buchanan

Articles & Book Chapters

In this paper, the authors seek to use the insights gained by viewing and thinking critically about a range of Hollywood films to better illuminate the disciplinary blindspots of law. Both law and film are viewed as social institutions, engaged in telling stories about social life. Hollywood films are often critical of law and legal institutions. Law is dismissive of its representation within popular culture. However, the authors argue that law disregards cinematic cynicism about itself at its peril and that there is much to learn by taking cinematic portrayals of law very seriously---not as representations of the truth of …

A Critical Linguistic Analysis Of A Popular Comic Genre In Japan, Angela Rawson

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This research will focus on the issue of power and gender in the language of Japanese comics (manga). Comics in Japan are enormously popular and are read by a wide audience. They are aimed at specific audiences and it is my argument that the language of manga helps to reinforce certain social stereotypes - particularly the inferiority of women and the dominance of males. The language of children's manga will be analyzed using the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which concerns itself with the relation between ideology and power in discourse. The analysis will be at various levels including …

Style Guide Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Copyright Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture ©Purdue University, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

The Gendered World Of Disney: A Content Analysis Of Gender Themes In Full-Length Animated Disney Feature Films, Beth A. Wiersma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research has focused on the gender messages portrayed in television programs, cartoons, advertisements, literature, picture books, and fairy tales. One venue that has not received as much attention in the research is the Disney 1 full-length animated feature films. This is a qualitative study of the gender themes and portrayal of gender roles in full-length animated feature films by The Walt Disney Company. The findings in this research indicate there has been little change in the stereotyped portrayals of Disney characters from the release of the first full-length animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 to …