American Studies Commons^™

The Action Of Grace In Territory Held By The Devil: Flannery O’Connor And Cormac Mccarthy, Scott A. Singleton

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

This paper compares the lives and work of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. The two authors share similarities in their backgrounds, careers, and work. The paper begins with an examination of biographical information of both authors to contextualize their work and note commonalities in their lives and careers. The central idea is that Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy both create grotesque characters to reveal the depraved condition of humanity in order to highlight the need for redemption and the possibility of divine grace. To prove this, examples are discussed from multiple pieces of work by O’Connor and McCarthy including The …

Movie And Television Fathers: A Positive Reflection Of Positive Changes, George J. Mcgowan

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Certain films and television programs depicting fathers have both enduring popularity and have reflected the advances in the institution of fatherhood. This has happened because of a symbiosis that has delivered positive results: popular films and television shows that earn money for producers and advertisers have depicted fathers who have changed to reflect the popular example. These depictions have contributed in their way to mending the family dynamic, specifically related to the father’s essential role in the family. Such family-oriented films and television shows have effectively showed fathers (and men that would become fathers) that they could be much more …

'People Want To See What Happened': Treme, Televisual Tourism, And The Racial Remapping Of Post-Katrina New Orleans, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

Occupying the space between cultural reproduction and theatrical production, the HBO series Treme offers an important vantage point from which to analyze the intersection of race, class, culture, and media representation animating New Orleans’s post-Katrina tourist identity. Treme illustrates the tension between the welcome recognition and celebration of New Orleans black expressive culture and its spectacularization and commodification. The resuscitation of tourist tropes and an emphasis on jazz and heritage music in the series often render the city’s history of racial conflict and injustice invisible or subordinate to new narratives of cross-racial unity among Katrina survivors and paternalistic actions by …

Happily Ever After Take Two: Rewriting Femininity In Hybridization Fairy Tale Films, Megan Estelle Troutman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The tradition of fairy tales has evolved drastically over the past five hundred years. At the beginning of the 20th century, fairy tale cartoons became widely popular as an independent medium, as well as introductions to larger films. In 1937, Walt Disney started the tradition of fairy tale cinema with the release of Snow White. Since that time, Disney has released and re-released eleven princess fairy tale films. Critics and parents alike ridicule Disney for its depictions of women as submissive and subservient. Recent films have used fairy tale tropes, without referring to a specific classic tale, in order to …

Monsters In Our Midst: An Examination Of Human Monstrosity In Fiction And Film Of The United States, Michelle Kay Hansen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The chapters within this dissertation concentrate on textual analysis of literature and film in which monsters appear in various forms, and particularly how those monsters still coincide with Noel Carroll's definition of "art-horror" in his book Philosophy of Horror, while proving that Carroll's definition of monster - and any others who may attempt to limit the definition of monstrosity - is incomplete and much too restrictive. I will be concentrating on monstrosity as it appears in gothic and horror fiction, film, and other elements of popular culture in order to explore the concept of "the monstrous" on multiple levels.

The …

From The Caped Crusader To The Dark Knight: An Application Of Robert Ray's Official And Outlaw Hero Framework To Batman, Daniel Cetina '12

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Civil Rights, Labor, And Sexual Politics On Screen In Nothing But A Man (1964), Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

The independently made 1964 film Nothing But a Man is one of a handful of films whose production coincided with the civil rights insurgency and benefited from input from activists. Commonly listed in 1970s surveys of black film, the film lacks sustained critical attention in film studies or in-depth historical analysis given its significance as a landmark text of the 1960s. Documentary-like, but not a documentary, it offers a complex representation of black life, but it was scripted, directed, and filmed by two white men, Michael Roemer and Robert Young.

This essay argues that the film’s unusual attention to labor …

Shaping Identity: Male And Female Interactions In Cinema, Jonette Lauren Lagamba

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Since the inception of cinema, women have been portrayed with the typical identities of emotionally and physically weak characters; this portrayal led to their subsequent dependence on men. Men were usually the protagonists and/or the heroes, following their archetypal journey. Thus, women's position in early cinema was to exemplify what men were not, placing the former in the diminutive position of the Other. One may conclude that men were often defined by what women lacked, and the women were defined by their relationships with these heroic men. As time progressed in the history of cinema, women's images retained part …

When Bad Things Happen To Good Mothers: Rethinking Motherhood Through The Single Mother Image In American Films From The 1930s To The 1970s, Tanna Alice Mancini

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The single-mother figure shows up in myriad American film genres, and my thesis explores three of these genres, maternal melodrama, film noir, and horror. I argue there is a melodramatic mode that carries over from maternal melodrama to film noir and horror. This mode emphasizes emotional excess. In maternal melodrama, the emotional excess is pity. For film noir, the emotion is anxiety, and in horror, it is repulsion. Even though each genre has its own emotional excess, maternal melodrama still speaks to these other genres through its maternal sacrifice, non-heteronormative families and misreading of proper gender performances. For this …

Out Of Our Depth: Hyper-Extensionality And The Return Of Three-Dimensional Media, Justin Alan Brecese

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work theorizes the contemporary attraction to three-dimensional media. In doing so, it reframes ongoing debates surrounding digital three-dimensional media in order to critique the neoliberal social relations such media engender. I argue that the contemporary interest in dimensionality, especially regarding digital media, is symptomatic of a broad cultural shift, wherein millions of lives are now essentially being lived through two-dimensional, "flat" media, which have consequently generated a lack of spatial relationships and a craving or desire for "depth." This "desire for depth" has arisen in contemporary society because people are being "spread too thin" through a combination of the …

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

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

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, …

Murrow And Friendly’S Small World: Television Conversation At The Crossroads, Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

Small World

(1958–60), an Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly television production, brought together political and entertainment figures from around the world, boasting technological innovation and a high level of public affairs discourse. The author discusses critical reception, producers’ ideals, cultural and historical context, and relation-ships to evolving notions of public service broadcasting.

Study Guide For United In Anger: A History Of Act Up, Matt Brim

Open Educational Resources

The United in Anger Study Guide facilitates classroom and activist engagement with Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. The Study Guide contains discussion sections, projects and exercises, and resources for further research about the activism of the New York chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). The Study Guide is a free, interactive, multimedia resource for understanding the legacy of ACT UP, the film’s role in preserving that legacy, and its meaning for viewers' lives.

"Only A Girl Like This Can Know What's Happened To You" : Traumatic Subjects In Contemporary American Narratives, Allison Virginia Craig

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project is primarily concerned with the difficulty of representing traumatic experience and the problem of seeing violence and exploitation as natural and inevitable functions of social life. It argues that texts attempting to expose exploitive hierarchies and structural injustices often risk having their stories subsumed and commodified by the profuseness and proliferation of countervailing messages about individual choice and personal freedom. This struggle is highlighted through historicizing five contemporary American narratives--Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm, the films Boys Don't Cry and Monster, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms--with and against critical concerns and popular texts. Furthermore, by employing …

"We Should Have Brought The Tank": Hypermediated Interactivity In Red Vs. Blue, Marc A. Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Machinima, the practice of adapting recorded video game play into short films, highlights an often unacknowledged but significant shift in the consumption of video games and represents a key and underexplored intersection between the two leading theoretical camps. Considering the landmark series Red vs. Blue through the lens of Bolter and Grusin's propositions about "new" media's relationships with other forms offers an entry point for theorizing not only machinima but also the intersections between the ludology and narratology positions in games studies.

Apaches And Comanches On Screen, Kenneth Estes Hall

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: A generally accurate appraisal of Western films might claim that Indians as hostiles are grouped into one undifferentiated mass. Popular hostile groups include the Sioux (without much differentiation between tribes or bands, the Apaches, and the Comanches).

Monstrous Dialogues: The Host And South Korean Inverted Exile, James Lloyd Turner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bong Joon-ho‟s monster movie blockbuster, The Host (Gweomul, 2006), is the most commercially successful film in South Korean cinema history. The film‟s popularity and significance derive from its unearthing of the ambivalence concerning South Korea‟s rapid transformation from a rural dictatorship to an urban democracy with one of the strongest economies on the planet. This ambivalence is buried beneath a veneer of "progress" blanketing contemporary South Korea and constitutes a condition I call inverted exile. The Host explicitly engages life in inverted exile through my notion of aesthetic dialogue. Aesthetic dialogue, takes influence from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and …

A Model Of Human Scale Tested On Rural Landscape Scenes, Richard K. Sutton

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Landscapes such as the Great Plains have been described as lacking human scale. This study developed a quantitative model of human scale and compared it with viewers' perceptions of visual structure. Visual structure was selected from the physical features of Otoe County, NE, forming boundaries, found as ground textures, vegetative screens, and topographic breaks and was depicted in photographs of landscape scenes. The model used and tested nine classes of scale based on grain and extent of the photos rated by viewers against those from the model. Viewers identified boundaries representing grain and extent that were synthesized into a viewer-perceived …

Out Of True, Andrew David Bryan

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, I will detail the process that went into the making of my thesis film, Out of True. The areas I will cover include Writing, Directing, Production Design, Cinematography, Editing, Sound, as well as Technology and Workflow. Special emphasis will be given to Directing and the new directing style I experimented with in an effort to create not only believable but engaging performances. I will then assess the success of this experiment through the use of audience questionnaires.

Perception Of Social Presence In Asynchronous And Synchronous Online Discussion From The Perspective Of Native And Non-Native Speaker, Abdullah A. Alruhaimi

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The technology innovation of telecommunication gave confidence to educational institutions to substitute some of their courses from traditional courses into virtual ones. This switch in education inspired globalization. The learners use either synchronous or asynchronous communication tools to interact with each other. Most previous studies in this field show that social presence is correlated with learner achievement satisfaction and interaction. So the researcher measured the level of social presence for both groups of learners, native and non-native speakers, across both types of online communication, synchronous and asynchronous communication. The researcher conducted a 2x2 split-plot ANOVA design with repeated measure for …

Assessment And Impact Of Gentrified Public Housing Neighborhoods In The United States: A Case Study Of Chicago, Todd W. Sink

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social-mix housing policies play a unique role in shaping the geography of gentrification in cities throughout the U.S. and Europe. The HOPE VI program in the U.S. is one popular example. Since its inception in 1992, HOPE VI has simultaneously displaced thousands of urban poor from their homes and neighborhoods, reduced their housing opportunities, and created and encouraged housing development for a more affluent population. Yet over the years, very few empirical studies have emerged that examine the place-based outcomes of HOPE VI within the context of gentrification. As such, important empirical questions remain unanswered. This study focuses on the …

From Here To InFinnerty: Tony Soprano And The American Way, Terri Carney

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

As fellow critics have pointed out in a myriad of published studies on the series, The Sopranos challenges the traditional gangster genre formula and brings the mob closer to all of us: Tony and his gang inhabit a recognizable world of Starbucks, suburbia, and SUVs. They discuss issues of the day, the same ones we discuss when we turn off the TV after the episode. In short, they inhabit a quotidian reality that is continuous with our own, and we are prevented from drawing the neat lines that allow us a comfortable remove from the horror of the “criminal world,” …

From Where I Am Standing: Indigenous Narrative And Photo Documentary, Nestor R. Veloz Passalacqua

Ethnic Studies

Latin American Indigenous Peoples (LAIP) are a marginalized segment in Latin America. They inhabit a sub-America and are forced to migrate due to socio-political struggle and cultural coercion. LAIP experience a transnational and transborder migration that reflects the quality of cultural hybridity and of regional, ethnic, and cultural crossings. The purpose of this study is to research LAIP ways of reclaiming and reproducing cultural practices that elicit Indigenous awareness, knowledge, and ethnic identification in a transnational setting. The study examines through interviews and photographs transborder experiences and the lives of the participants. As a result, the project reveals that LAIP …

Towards A Theory Of Comic Book Adaptation, Colin Beineke

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary adaptation studies/theories have tended to focus singularly on the movement from the novel/short story to film – largely ignoring mediums such as the theater, music, visual art, video games, and the comic book.  Such a limited view of adaptation has led to an underdeveloped and misplaced understanding of the adaptation process, which has in turn culminated in a convoluted perception of the products of artistic adaptation.  The necessity of combating the consequences of these limited outlooks – particularly in the field of comics studies – is as vital as the difficulties are manifold. In opposition to this current stream …

After The Fall: The Post-Apocalyptic Frontier In The Road And 28 Days Later, Jeffrey J. Lavigne

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Previous scholars have identified three scenes of the American frontier myth: the sea, the west, and space. This evolution of frontiers reflected key changes in the expression of America’s cultural identity. While Janice Hocker Rushing called space “the final frontier,” the prominent place in contemporary society held by zombies and other minions of the occult hint at the emergence of yet another scene of the American mythos: the post apocalypse. In contrast to previous frontiers, which are defined geographically, the post-apocalypse is much broader, for in the wake of a global cataclysm, everywhere is a potential frontier. This decentralization of …

Goodman, Julian, B. 1922 (Ct 1968), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Cassette Tape 1968. Recording of a speech delivered by Julian Goodman to the Kentucky Broadcasters Association on 23 October 1975. He outlines his life story and his rise to the presidency of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the history of broadcasting with particular emphasis on the de-regulation of the radio industry and lessons learned from it.

Metalepsis In Fan Vids And Fan Fiction, Tisha Turk

English Publications

No abstract provided.

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

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

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 …

From American Bandstand To Total Request Live: Teen Culture And Identity On Music Television, Kaylyn Toale

American Studies Senior Theses

Because television succeeds or fails based on its ability to attract an audience large enough to entice advertisers, this project will operate under the assumption that popular television conveys some important cultural attributes of both its creators and its audience. American Bandstand and Total Request Live (TRL) each presented the most popular music of the day in ways that drew massive audiences from America’s youth, between 1952-1989 (Bandstand) and 1998-2008 (TRL.) I will treat these and related shows as venues through which to view American youth culture. The music itself adds an exciting component to the project: as music changed, …

Download This: Artist Development And Interconnectivity In The Internet Age, Geoffrey Johnson

American Studies Senior Theses

The advent of internet media distribution has profoundly changed the way most people consume music and experience artists. Outlets such as Myspace, YouTube, Twitter, and peer-to-peer downloading networks have made music and artists more accessible than ever before. These changes have come largely at the expense of the traditional music industry model of distribution. My thesis proposes that these new media have radically redefined what it means to be a developing artist. Specifically, these media empower artists with the ability to circumvent music industry oversight while providing them with tools of self-promotion to autonomously construct a fan-base. My thesis will …