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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Polymediated Narrative: The Case Of The Supernatural Episode "Fan Fiction", Art Herbig, Andrew F. Herrmann Aug 2017

Polymediated Narrative: The Case Of The Supernatural Episode "Fan Fiction", Art Herbig, Andrew F. Herrmann

Andrew F. Herrmann

Modern stories are the product of a recursive process influenced by elements of genre, outside content, medium, and more. These stories exist in a multitude of forms and are transmitted across multiple media. This article examines how those stories function as pieces of a broader narrative, as well as how that narrative acts as a world for the creation of stories. Through an examination of the polymediated nature of modern narratives, we explore the complicated nature of modern storytelling.


Fighting Over The Founders: How We Remember The American Revolution, Andrew Schocket Jan 2015

Fighting Over The Founders: How We Remember The American Revolution, Andrew Schocket

Andrew M Schocket

The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and revised in computer games. As the nation’s founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in U.S. history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation’s aspirations. Americans’ increased fascination with the Revolution over the past two decades represents more than interest in the past. It’s also …


Profiles Of Selected Mormon Actors, J. Michael Hunter Dec 2014

Profiles Of Selected Mormon Actors, J. Michael Hunter

J Michael Hunter

“Profiles of Selected Mormon Actors” provides brief profiles of over 80 Mormon actors and actresses, including some biographical information and career highlights. This chapter appears in the first volume of Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon (Praeger 2013), a comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture, providing an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic.


Where Have All The Good Men Gone? A Psychoanalytic Reading Of The Absent Fathers & Bad Dads On Abc's Lost, Melissa R. Ames Jun 2014

Where Have All The Good Men Gone? A Psychoanalytic Reading Of The Absent Fathers & Bad Dads On Abc's Lost, Melissa R. Ames

Melissa A. Ames

Fictional fathers in narratives are often allegorical in nature and contemporary television is not immune from this. ABC’s groundbreaking television drama, Lost, offers a multitude of father figures that suggests not only a crisis concerning the role of the father in the 21st century but also the crisis of national security experienced by Americans after the attacks. In particular, the program showcases three specific types of troubled father/child relationships: those in which the father is absent and/or dead, those where the father is portrayed as abusive and/or evil, and those where the father and child are estranged and/or their relationship …


Monkee Business: The Musical And Commercial Revolution Of The 1960s, Andrew T. Murphree Jan 2014

Monkee Business: The Musical And Commercial Revolution Of The 1960s, Andrew T. Murphree

Andrew T Murphree

Very few bands in the history of American popular music possess a more captivating story of rapid ascension to commercial acclaim than that of The Monkees, an American rock band that was brought together in 1966 by executives at Screen Gems, a division of Columbia Pictures. Originally conceived for the purpose of a television show that followed the everyday life of four young musicians aspiring to become the next Beatles, their artificial construction as a band represented their primary purpose as a commercial venture as opposed to a traditional artistic endeavor. While The Monkees rose to success as a merchandising …


Time In Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality In 21st Century Programming, Melissa R. Ames Jan 2012

Time In Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality In 21st Century Programming, Melissa R. Ames

Melissa A. Ames

This collection analyzes twenty-first-century American television programs that rely upon temporal and narrative experimentation. These shows play with time, slowing it down to unfold the narrative through time retardation and compression. They disrupt the chronological flow of time itself, using flashbacks and insisting that viewers be able to situate themselves in both the present and the past narrative threads. Although temporal play has existed on the small screen prior to the new millennium, never before has narrative time been so freely adapted in mainstream television. The essayists offer explanations for not only the frequency of time play in contemporary programming, …


When Predator Becomes Prey: The Gendered Jargon Of Popular Culture, Melissa R. Ames Jan 2011

When Predator Becomes Prey: The Gendered Jargon Of Popular Culture, Melissa R. Ames

Melissa A. Ames

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century the vernacular of popular culture has been bombarded by sexualized terminology. Although these terms are often formed with humorous intent, their staying power and use as cultural descriptive categories is both intriguing and disturbing. Also troubling is the fact that the majority of these new terms, such as puma (a thirty-something female “dating” a younger male), cougar (a forty-plus female “dating” a younger male), and MILF (“mother I’d like to fuck”), are restricted to the female gender alone. This article analyzes the etymology of these terms, their use in popular culture (ranging …


History Of Communication And Its Application In Multicultaral,Multilingual Social System In India Across Ages, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr Sep 2010

History Of Communication And Its Application In Multicultaral,Multilingual Social System In India Across Ages, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

The history of communication dates back to the earliest signs of cavemen.Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations and mass communication. Human communication was revolutionized with speech perhaps 200,000 years ago, Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago and writing about 7,000. On a much shorter scale, there have been major developments in the field of telecommunication in the past few centuries.