American Studies Commons^™

See Me Show Me: Black Women Representation In Television Sitcoms, Lauryn Jennings

Master's Theses

Television is a commonplace item within the households of America. It brings the family together as well teaching people about other people. With this Black women have been shown in one-dimensional images that are harmful. Although these stereotypes are old they are still present within modern television sitcoms.

Bozo The Clown: An Icon As American As An Apple Pie In The Face, Gregory Kent Oswald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is no single path toward the creation of an American icon, a person or item with resonance to all in the country as well as having an ability to serve as a symbol of America itself for those outside the borders. This thesis considers certain elements that propelled the journey of the entertainment for children, Bozo the Clown, into a representational figure in the minds of young and old. Like all things American, his roots include many elements from outside the country: the name derives from foreign tongues mostly in derisory terms, but in at least one instance as …

The Reflective Age: Nostalgia At The End Of History, Zachary Griffith

Theses and Dissertations--English

This project investigates the ways in which nostalgic American media of the last decade reflects the sociopolitical conditions of the end of history. It begins with the assertion that the end of history represents a confounded, contradictory moment in which large-scale political change is relatively scarce, and belief in a progressive future has largely been abandoned, while cultural change has also accelerated at a pace never before seen––spurred on, in particular, by the constant return of dead styles and dormant IP. In other words, it seems as if nothing is changing and everything is changing simultaneously. The recent boom in …

Jewish Identity On American Television And Viewer Attitudes In An Era Of Rising Anti-Semitism, Jacqueline Winters-Allen

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Research in media and cultural studies have shown that viewers form opinions regarding Jewish identity based on how Jewish characters are presented on screen. American entertainment has struggled with accurate portrayals of Jewish culture and characters; negative Jewish stereotypes frequently appear and perpetuate these perceptions. Due to the current rise of anti-Semitism in the United States, it is important to consider how writers are defining Jewish identity by examining depictions of contemporary Jewish characters and assessing viewer attitudes toward those characters. Two long-running, popular American broadcast television shows that contain Jewish characters as part of the main cast – The …

Terrorists, Zombies, And Robots: The Political Unconscious, Thematics, And Affectual Structures Of The Post-9/11 American Fear Narrative, Nathanael J. Cloyd

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines the post-9/11 American fear narrative across media and genre. First, it proposes the concepts of the fear narrative, the primary fear theme, and the secondary fear theme. Second, it proposes that the fear narrative has a long tradition in American culture, in which its themes have adapted and evolved in historically sedimented layers of development. Third, it proposes that American fear themes change depending on its historical context of production, its cultural regime, its genre, and the form of media in which it is expressed. To help uncover the political unconsciousness of the American fear narrative, it …

The Cultivation Theory And Reality Television: An Old Theory With A Modern Twist, Jeffrey Weiss

Capstone Showcase

George Gerbner, a Hungarian-born professor of communication, founded the cultivation theory, one of the most popular and regarded theories in the communications world. Developed in the mid 20th century, the theory focus on the long-term effects of television on people. Longer exposure to signs, images and people on television cultivates their perception of reality in the real world. The television became a household staple during this time. Families often spent time together watching programming together, however, it played out different effects for each person. Television's constant visual and auditory stimulation on a person made it easier to cultivate certain messages, …

How A Psychopathic Serial Killer Becomes An American Favorite: An Analysis Of Dexter Morgan, Joanna Dunn

Augsburg Honors Review

In a society where the selling of serial killers' personal items is a profitable business and killers are the focus of many facets of entertainment such as biopics, crime novels, films, and the television network TruTV it is not surprising that a series about a killer debuting in 2006 would be the highest rated premiere of its home network Showtime, or that its viewership would increase by 84% between the pilot and season one finale. The series Dexter does, after all, follow the everyday routine of a serial killer, even giving the audience a glimpse into his innermost thoughts. However, …

Brrap Brrap Pew Pew: Representations Of Abortion In Adult Animated Television Comedy, Erika A. Byrnison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis documents and analyzes representation of abortion in American adult animated comedy, charging that it is under-examined and significant because representation on television in other genres has traditionally been absent or misleading. It covers theories on how pop culture communicates social norms, and posits that greater truthful representation of abortion in popular culture may be effective in reducing prevalent abortion stigma in the U.S. amongst the young by normalizing and more accurately representing the procedure. It reviews why our culture should be concerned about reducing abortion stigma in the U.S. It also identifies the “taboo ratings paradox,” wherein television …

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided …

Derek C. Maus And James J. Donahue. Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights. Jackson: Up Of Mississippi, 2014., Jacinta Yanders

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue. Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014.

Jeffrey A. Brown. The Modern Superhero In Film And Television: Popular Genre And American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2016., Danielle A. Orozco

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jeffrey A. Brown. The Modern Superhero in Film and Television: Popular Genre and American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2016.

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.

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 …

"If You Want To Be The Man, You've Got To Beat The Man": Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990'S, Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE’s on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …

"Everyone Has Thought About Killing Someone - One Way Or Another": Cannibalism And The Question Of Morality In Bryan Fuller's Hannibal, Kristi Michelle Pierse

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Popular criticism insists that violence in the media perpetuates violence in the real world. This is an especially relevant argument today as we witness on a daily basis the violence that is occurring in the United States through mass shootings, police brutality, and countless other forms of aggressive actions. While studies do show a correlation between violent media and real-world violence, there is no absolute conclusion that proves such. My thesis addresses the moral lessons that can be learned through violence on television, particularly through the creative adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series as reimagined by Bryan Fuller in …

A Critical Study Of The African-American Comedic Tradition, Allison Longo

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the changes in African-American comedy during the 1980s. In exploring the changes during this decade, specific attention is paid to Eddie Murphy, who achieved incredible success beginning with his 1980 entrance on Saturday Night Live. In a relatively short period of time, Murphy was able to ascend to a level of cultural significance that far dwarfed that reached by any of the African American comedians who had preceded him. Through a comprehensive presentation of the historical development of African American humor, the following thesis challenges the consensus critical assumption that Murphy both consciously forewent opportunities to be …

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

ETSU Faculty Works

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.

Human Nature And Cop Art: A Biocultural History Of The Police Procedural, Jay Edward Baldwin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Prior to 1948 there was no “police procedural” genre of crime fiction. After 1948 and since, the genre, which prominently features police officers at work, has been among the more popular of all forms of literary, televisual, and cinematic fiction. The received history suggests that much of the credit for this is due to Jack Webb, creator of Dragnet.

This study complicates that received history and traces the historical emergence of this signifying practice to early 20th century ideologies of Social control and the conjuncture of Social forces that ultimately coalesced in the training practices of the Los Angeles Police …

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's...Cultural Anxiety? Using Detective Comics' Three Biggest Heroes To Identify And Explore Cultural Anxieties As Depicted Through Television, Jonathan Vander Lugt

Media and Communication Studies Honors Papers

This collection of essays uses the mythic nature of superheroes to examine and discuss specific cultural anxieties as they’re navigated and alleviated in superhero television texts. First, I examine the way that anxiety over feminism and the women’s rights movement manifested itself in Wonder Woman, the 70s television series starring Lynda Carter. Next, I use Smallville and its depictions of a teenaged Superman to explore its handling of anxieties over the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Finally, I performed a content analysis of six different series of Batman cartoons to examine the way they respond to national concerns over …

“The Hard Work Is Done In The Looking”: Analyzing Representations Of And Responses To Appalachia In Popular Culture, Elizabeth Rose Barnes Trollinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For many Americans, the concept of Appalachia as a singular place has been created through images in popular culture, often stereotypical. This thesis presents an evolution of Appalachian representations—or, more appropriately, a chronology of images in stasis, as they seem to have remained fairly unchanged over time. Responses to those images, however, have changed greatly. Most importantly, responses from within Appalachia have transformed, with regional people gaining power over the types of images of the region in popular culture. There is, however, a paradoxical dualism in the responses from within the region, as some Appalachians grow weary of being stereotyped …

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.

Transferential Poetics, From Poe To Warhol, Adam Frank

Literature

Transferential Poetics presents a method for bringing theories of affect to the study of poetics. Informed by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, it offers new interpretations of the poetics of four major American artists: Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Andy Warhol. The author emphasizes the close, reflexive attention each of these artists pays to the transfer of feeling between text and reader, or composition and audience— their transferential poetics. The book’s historical route from Poe to Warhol culminates in television, a technology and cultural form that makes affect distinctly available to perception. …

"Wires And Lights In A Box": Fahrenheit 451 As A Product Of Postwar Anxiety About Television, Christine V. Shell

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This project discusses the ways in which Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 functions as an indictment of media culture. While many analyses of the novel focus on the text’s sweeping themes of literary censorship, this study instead centers on Bradbury’s depiction of media—particularly television—culture and the ways in which Bradbury feared it could be harmful. Although Bradbury wrote about a future society a century beyond his own, his novel serves as a remarkable reflection of his contemporaneous culture’s media consumption and gendered divisions; this thesis discusses Bradbury’s novel alongside such forces, considering the effects such influences may have had on …

Got Lost Behind The Scenes: Underexposed Television Producers In Magazines, Jordan King

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Award-winning television shows are popularly depicted through digital media and magazine coverage. However, the strenuous efforts of TV producers are hidden behind the publicity of celebrities and plotlines of the show. Using Eugene Shaw's agenda-setting theory and Robert Entman's framing theory as a basis, the author created a case study analyzing how the producers of Lost and Game of Thrones are portrayed in magazines. The research shows that reporters tend to perpetuate the anonymity of these producers, which in effect, leads an audience to deem them as unimportant.

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 …

Who's Laughing Now? From Lovable Lucy To Top-Of-The-Rock Tina: How Women In Comedy Changed From 1950-2014, Caroline Hershey

Honors Theses

This thesis discusses the evolutionary progression of women in comedy from the 1950s to the present day. By looking at the stand-out female comedians and entertainers from each generation, the change from Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy to Carol Burnett as host of The Carol Burnett Show, to Tina Fey and the multitalented new group of women in comedy. By examining the cultural and political climate of the time and how it influenced the unique style of comedy associated with each individual, a clear progression emerges. I would like to present my chapter on Tina Fey to highlight how …

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

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

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 …

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

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

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

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 …

#Prettylittleliars: How Hashtags Drive The Social Tv Phenomenon, Melanie Brozek

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

Twitter is used by many TV shows to promote discussion and encourage viewer loyalty. Most successfully, ABC Family uses Twitter to promote the teen drama Pretty Little Liars through the use of hashtags and celebrity interactions. This study analyzes Pretty Little Liars use of hashtags created by the network and by actors from the show. It examines how the Pretty Little Liars official accounts engage fans about their opinions on the show and encourage further discussion. Fans use the network-generated hashtags within their tweets to react to particular scenes and to hopefully be noticed by managers of official show accounts. …