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Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Imaginative Acts, Environmental Futurity: Re-Envisioning The Heroic White Male Savior In Snowpiercer, Michelle Yates May 2024

Imaginative Acts, Environmental Futurity: Re-Envisioning The Heroic White Male Savior In Snowpiercer, Michelle Yates

Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts

In contrast to many Hollywood climate fiction films, Snowpiercer (2013) offers a more complex representation of the white male savior. In contrast to films like WALL-E (2008) and Interstellar (2014) that recuperate and invest in white masculine privilege, Snowpiercer highlights the more destructive aspects of a patriarchal capitalist system that privileges hegemonic white masculinity. While the ending of Snowpiercer may seem bleak, it also points to the possibility of a new system, an environmental futurity that centers indigenous knowledge and the experiences of women and people of color. Though Snowpiercer is not formally an American film, its casting of recognizable …


Narratives Of Miami In Dexter And Burn Notice, Myles Mcnutt Apr 2017

Narratives Of Miami In Dexter And Burn Notice, Myles Mcnutt

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

In popular discourse around television, a series’ relationship with place is often marked through the suggestion its setting is “like a character in the show”, but this article argues against adopting this as a framework for analyzing television’s relationship with space and place. It articulates the relationship between this discourse of “spatial capital” and hierarchies of cultural capital within the television industry, limiting the types of series that are deemed to warrant closer investigation regarding issues of space and place and lacking nuanced engagement with place’s relationship with television narrative in particular. After breaking down the logic under which these …


There Is No Word For Work In The Dragon Tongue, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly Jan 2013

There Is No Word For Work In The Dragon Tongue, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly

English Faculty Publications

The past decade or so has witnessed a relatively steady stream of scholarly interest in the mundane medieval—in labor, local economies, and their influence upon wider cultural production.1 Despite this interest (and perhaps as a reaction to it), popular medievalism has continued to emphasize versions of the medieval that are decidedly more heroic—productions that are simultaneously (and paradoxically) more “realistic” and more “fantastic.” Labor plays, at best, a supporting role in these fantasies: while not absent, it rarely, if ever, has the same productive presence as it does in recent scholarly treatments of medieval economies. Inasmuch as popular medievalism …


Commodifying Scarcity: Society, Struggle, And Spectacle In World Of Warcraft, Kevin Moberly Jan 2010

Commodifying Scarcity: Society, Struggle, And Spectacle In World Of Warcraft, Kevin Moberly

English Faculty Publications

Overrun by monsters and tyrants, and ravaged by fanaticism, excess, and greed, World of Warcraft offers players a chance to struggle metaphorically against that which oppresses them: the excesses of late capitalism as they are represented by the game’s spectacular antagonisms. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, however, players must employ the very thing through which their oppression is manifested. Interpellated into the game as fetishized images, players must construct themselves and function in accordance with the limitations imposed upon them by the race and class of their characters. Players, as such, are incorporated into World of Warcraft’s …


Contesting Identities: Sports In American Film [Book Review], Marc Ouellette Jan 2004

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 Jan 2004

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 …