American Studies Commons^™

The Underlying Consequences Of Social Media, Hannah Baz

Pop Culture Intersections

Since childhood, we, as human beings, are taught to look to others for signals and indications about how to live our lives. It is an innate human desire to evaluate, assess, and improve our skills based on what everyone else leads us to perceive is right or ideal. Such comparison is a necessary facet to social order- we compare political leaders, stocks, investments, property, ect. in order to determine what choice will lead to the best outcome. However, leaping into the abyss of comparison is not always one worth taking. With the recent exponential growth of technology, social comparison is …

A Seemingly Fatal Attraction Between Sad Souls, Taylor Kay Gustafson

Pop Culture Intersections

“Even the darkness has arms,” sings the band Barr Brothers.^[1] Depression is a mental disorder defined as persistent feelings of sadness that result in decreased energy and lack of interest in activities. Depression affects about 6.7% of people in the U.S.^[2] One of the most difficult aspects of depression is figuring out how to cope with it. Therapy is one step, but what can a depressed person do when they are alone to feel better? Depression necessitates a healthy outlet that allows the individual to purge intrusive feelings. Listening to sad music can help ease the intensity of …

Twitter And Identity: Living Up To The Social Comparison, Mark Ramelb

Pop Culture Intersections

Throughout this millennial age, technology continues to develop. Every day new technology such as computers and laptops have new applications that affect our society. Humans live in the era known as the digital revolution. The digital revolution is where people are constantly using the internet, more specifically, social media applications on their computer or mobile devices. Nick Lalone, author of "Fluctuations, Technologies And Media: Social Change And Sociology Change” states “that the technological makeup sits at the foundation of computer-mediated communication has had tremendous impact on society itself the technological makeup” (Lalone 559). In other words, humans interacting …

It’S A Match: How Society’S Dependence On Efficient Technology Effects The Ways We Date, Marissa Ceraolo

Pop Culture Intersections

I want to make an established connection between our society’s growing reliance on technology use and the ways in which online dating have shaped dating culture. In a society where we all are so obsessed with instant gratifications, finding matches instantly can definitely be problematic. While many people have found matches on dating websites, I will argue that although online dating definitely does have its various benefits, that it overlooks important parts of the dating experience that can be essential for the growth of a healthy relationship. Dating profiles are made to make the single applicant appear as the best …

Identity Of Pokemon Go Players: How Social Gaming Affects Behavior, Jasmine Quinn

Pop Culture Intersections

In July of 2016 Americans have received a fun new app that produces behaviors unlike any before. It causes people to gather at places, such as parks, in large groups, or causes them to wander around neighborhoods. Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game created by the company Niantic, and is available for free on mobile phones. An article From USA Today features the parks and recreation director of Kimberly Point Park, Michael Kading who says “I have never seen anything like this” as he has trouble getting people out of the park at closing time. The app has caused …

Human Computer Interaction And Data Visualization, Olivia Hsieh

Pop Culture Intersections

In 2013, SINTEF cited that 90% of the world’s data had been created over the past two years.1 With the onset of Big Data, the ability to analyze data at a rate directly proportional to its collection becomes quite near impossible, albeit nonetheless important. In “Play With Data – An Exploration of Play Analytics and Its Effect on Player Experiences,” Ben Medler explains its pertinence: “Data can be given a different context through relating it to other data. A relation informs someone of how data can be correlated or combined with other data.”

Heavy South: Identity, Performance, And Heavy Music In The Southern Metal Scene, Michael A. Mcdowell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Southern Metal scene depends heavily on the performance of a Southern Identity. While considerable research has been done on other musical genres and scenes from the American South (country music, blues, gospel music), less attention has been given to the extreme metal scene of Southern Metal. Using scholarship of Nadine Hubbs, Philip Auslander, Jefferey C. Alexander, and Keith Kahn Harris, among others, I analyze two films, Slow Southern Steel (2010) and NOLA: Life, Death, and Heavy Blues from the Bayou (2014), and one song, Down’s “Eyes of the South” as cultural productions of this Southern Metal scene. In …

Archiving The '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture, Margaret A. Galvan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual …

Media Representation Of Asian Americans And Asian Native New Yorkers’ Hybrid Persona, Min Huh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Asian Americans, having been degraded in the realm of popular media and neglected in the consumer market, have been unable to obtain a voice or leave a trace in American pop culture. The meager representation that Asian Americans rarely have is highly controlled through a distorted lens, inclined to paint them in a grotesquely exaggerated light for comic relief. The absence of Asian Americans in the media has compelled the Asian American youth to adapt the personas of different cultures in their desires for social and cultural mobility. These factors have given birth to a hybrid persona among Asian Native …

Introduction To New Work In The Empirical Study Of Literature And Culture, Aldo Nemesio

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Toward An Aesthetics Of Adaptation In Empirical Research, Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, Pascal Nicklas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research" Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas discuss the requirements and potential of empirical research into the reception of adaptations: adaptation is one key strategy in the creation of literature and art in general. The creative process and product of adaptation has its counter-part on the side of reception. Empirical research into the aesthetics of adaptation aims at the experimental elucidation of the physiological background and the establishment of a model describing the perceptual underpinnings of the act of seeing an adaptation as adaptation. This implies evolutionary biological reasoning …

Methodological Reflections On Investigating The Reception Of Fiction In Public Spaces, Katarina Eriksson Barajas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Methodological Reflections on Investigating the Reception of Fiction in Public Spaces" Katarina Eriksson Barajas discusses how to find and approach research participants in public spaces. Eriksson Barajas's study is based on tenets of the empirical study of literature. Reader response and reception theories and discursive psychology are both employed in the analysis. This approach, called discursive reception studies, enables researchers to analyze the role of social interaction in the co-construction of the experience of, in this case, a film or a play. Eriksson Barajas discusses the following methodological issues: 1) how to gain access to "naturally" occurring …

Young Adults In Sweden On Reading Literary Fiction In Print And Electronic Media, Skans Kersti Nilsson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Young Adults in Sweden on Reading Literary Fiction in Print and Electronic Media" Skans Kersti Nilsson analyses 16-25 year old young adults' reflections on the reading of fiction in printed books versus electronic media. In Nilsson's study focus group interviews were conducted to gauge how conversations on the importance of reading literary fiction develop inside and outside the learning environment of school. The results suggest that young adults derive benefit from reading fiction and that they think this activity yields more benefits than reading fiction on electronic media or viewing filmed literature. Results also suggest that participants …

Toward An Empirically-Generated Typology Of Weblog Genres, Maciej Maryl, Krzysztof Niewiadomski, Maciej Kidawa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Toward an Empirically-generated Typology of Weblog Genres" Maciej Maryl, Krzysztof Niewiadomski, and Maciej Kidawa propose a typology of weblog genres based on empirical data, namely on the analysis of metadata and the study of blogs' content. In Study 1 they explore 287 categories used by Polish bloggers to classify their blogs. The analysis shows that most categories are topical, but some could be useful for genre analyses. In Study 2 they analyse "syntagma" combinations of 2-3 categories assigned to 88 252 blogs on one of the Polish blog platforms. Through quantitative analysis and clustering 3 main groups …

Bibliography Of Contextual (Systemic And Empirical) Approaches In The Study Of Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Fictionality And The Empirical Study Of Literature, Torsten Pettersson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Fictionality and the Empirical Study of Literature" Torsten Pettersson surveys three types of studies and argues for research which disentangles fictionality from other aspects of literariness. Pettersson conceptualizes the basic paradoxical phenomenon that made-up stories can influence readers' perceptions of the real world and presents an empirical study of the impact of fictionality based on a five-page narrative presented to two groups of young Swedish readers as an extract from an autobiography and a novel, respectively. A questionnaire elicited reactions to the narrative, as well as attitudes to fictionality and to literary reading in general. Results include …

Both Into And Out Of The Cage: New Media, Transgression, And The Remaking Of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999, Casey Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation addresses an absent history of late twentieth-century postmodern literature. Namely, I trace the shifts between 1980s postmodernism, described by Fredric Jameson as encapsulating a “wan[ed]”“affect,” and the emergence of 1990s post-postmodernism, marked by an exaggeration of affect. My dissertation posits that this reinvention of feeling was due to shifts in communication technologies and new media art during the 1970s and 1980s competing with, and eventually rendering obsolete, avant-garde literary techniques for “connection.” These latter strategies were encapsulated in the postmodern “encyclopedic” novel, a form miming the logic of new media, yet incapable of fully addressing new programmatic shifts, …

Windows On The World: The Aesthetics Of Difference In Neoliberal New York, Nicholas Gamso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to refine critical methods for interpreting global cities and their cultures, charting an aesthetic history of neoliberal New York — from the 1929 regional plan to the present. Surveying a range of literature, art criticism, and planning discourse, I argue that the global has served as the dominant motif of spatial production and political power during this watershed era. I trace this argument through analyses of midcentury planning’s global spatial imaginings, gentrification and imperial metaphor, transnational encounter in World literature, and the city’s contemporary waste and recourse imaginaries. While I follow the Marxist account of the New …

The One Exhibition The Roots Of The Lgbt Equality Movement One Magazine & The First Gay Supreme Court Case In U.S. History 1943-1958, Joshua R. Edmundson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The ONE Exhibition explores an era in American history marked by intense government sponsored anti-gay persecution and the genesis of the LGBT equality movement. The study begins during World War II, continues through the McCarthy era and the founding of the nation’s first gay magazine, and ends in 1958 with the first gay Supreme Court case in U.S. history.

Central to the story is ONE The Homosexual Magazine, and its founders, as they embarked on a quest for LGBT equality by establishing the first ongoing nationwide forum for gay people in the U.S., and challenged the government’s right to engage …

Teaching Literature Through Online Discussion In Theory And Practice, Monica Manzolillo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Teaching Literature through Online Discussion in Theory and Practice" Monica Manzolillo focuses on the teaching of literature at the university through on-line discussion. Integrating discussion-based techniques with the predominant lecture mode is necessary because we need to modify students' merely receptive attitude, and help them develop the fundamental skills of reading, interpreting, and criticizing literary texts. Compared to live discussions, electronic communication has the advantage of providing a more relaxed atmosphere where social conventions are less important and this encourages positive interaction among students. Manzolillo illustrates the experimental use of the website Learning Literature http://www.learningliterature.it/ as support …

Paratexts In Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, And Medial Format Usage, Stefano Calzati

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Paratexts in Travel Blogs, Travel Books' Hypertextuality, and Medial Format Usage" Stefano Calzati compares a number of contemporary travel books and travel blogs. Calzati's objective is to promote a bridging approach between the digital and the analogue that goes beyond their differences. He posits a critique socio-linguistics where online multimodal texts are analyzed by identifying layers of analysis. Against these compositional models, Calzati suggests a double move: on the one hand, he applies Gérard Genette's notion of "paratext" to travel blogs and on the other he extends the concept of "hypertextuality" to travel books. From his analyzis …

Found In Translation: An Analysis Of Popular American Film In Spain, Emily Dushek

Honors Projects

This research examines American popular film in Spain with the aim of understanding if and how removing a popular text (such as a film) from its original language and socio-cultural context and translating it for consumption in a different language and culture affects the interpretation of the film. The study delves into the very successful 2012 films The Avengers (Joss Whedon) and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) and uses textual analyses and comparisons of the original English and the translated Castellano Spanish versions of the films, specifically focusing on the translations, as well as analyses of film reviews and critiques written …

Transforming The Mundane: Juxtaposing Maria Friedman’S "High Society" With George Cukor’S "The Philadelphia Story" As An Emphasis On The Importance Of Theatre, Dana T. Speight Ms.

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The subjects of film and theatre belong to an extensive hierarchical debate that has remained prominent within the realm of performing arts since the introduction of cinema in the late nineteenth century. A plethora of scholars choose to argue in favor of the former, suggesting that film surpasses theatre as superior in both aesthetics and overall execution of naturalism; however, the argument is purely subjective and cannot be applied to all films and their corresponding plays. As a counterclaim, theatre continues to thrive as a prominent source of artistic entertainment globally, not only offering a contemporary twist to preexisting texts, …

Gi Jane Versus Sergeant Jane Doe: How Women’S Images In War Movies Contribute To Conflicting Expectations Of Women In Combat, Sawyer Marie L. Alberi

All Theses And Dissertations

Research on women’s portrayal in media generally suggests that women continue to be sexualized and objectified as war trophies in the classic Hollywood warrior culture film. The age old question of whether life imitates art or vice versa is important to consider when examining the question of how this popular culture medium contributes to the conflicting expectations of today’s women in combat roles. What is the reality of women’s roles in the US Military compared to the roles portrayed by warrior film media? History tells us that women have been on the battlefield in one way or another since there …

An Unchained Analysis Of Racial Tension In America, Moriah Angott

Honors Projects

Modern race issues stem not only from the past but also from a lack of understanding and empathy for each other. How we talk about race will not only inform how we are able to move forward as a society, but it will also say a great deal about how we are evolving as human beings. It is important, and has been recognized as such, that black Americans have the freedom to grapple with that past, to understand it, and to feel connected to those ancestors who suffered in order for the foundation of this country to be built. Is …

The Art Of Death: Murder According To Poe, Hitchcock, And De Quincey, Jeanine Bee

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper examines the works of both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock in light of Thomas De Quincey’s series of essays entitled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” In his essays, De Quincey presents murder as an art form that can be criticized and appreciated just as any other fine art. While De Quincey’s essays faced some negative reaction when they were originally published, both Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock seem to have found something worthwhile in De Quincey’s ideas about the art of murder; Poe and Hitchcock both present murder as an art form …

To Utopianize The Mundane: Sound And Image In Country Musicals, Siyuan Ma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many consider music, songs, and dance performance as utopian signifiers for cinema, but few has entered the utopian discourse of country musicals, a small genre of cinema usually known as country music films. By closely scrutinizing Pure Country (1992), this thesis aims to reveal how country music—as music numbers and as background cues— integrate and connect the fragmented on-screen world for the country musicals so as to offer audiences a fullness of utopian experience, and how this utopian effect are culturally significant for American audiences due to country music’s unique mechanism of constructing utopia and nostalgia in its past-orientations, sentimentalities, …

Digital Humanities And Publishing A Learned Journal, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Digital Humanities and Publishing a Learned Journal" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses digital humanities and the publishing scholarship online in the context of the politics of publishing scholarship specifically as it pertains to humanities. Funding for the publishing of humanities scholarship remains constricted worldwide whether in print or digital and the standard remains to publish journals by subscription fees. Based on his argumentation against the "colonialism of knowledge," Tötösy de Zepetnek argues for the publishing of humanities scholarship against subscription-based or author-pay models. Further, he presents suggestions as to the how-s of the founding of a digital …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article Of Literature For Our Times & Reading Transcultural Cities, Alejandra Moreno Álvarez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …