American Popular Culture Commons^™

Be Our Guest Or Welcome Foolish Mortals? Disney’S Invitation To Play And The Delusion/Illusion Of Hyperreal, Immersive Documents, L.P. Coladangelo

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper playfully appropriates the metaphor of delusional states to frame a discussion of hyperreal documents present in Disney theme parks and resorts. A brief overview of the literature on delusion in individuals transitions into the collective formation of positive illusions to introduce the concept of play. The conceptual framework of play culture, or ludics, is presented to understand cultural production and meaning, which is further described in relation to theme park design and the negotiation of theme park experiences. This discussion is situated in document theory to explicate the intentionality of theme park designers and the indexicality of park …

Co-Writing Nashville Style: A Recital Of Selected Country Songwriters, Joseph H. Wandass Iv

Recital Papers

Country music and songwriting have been hallmark features of the Nashville music scene for well over a century. Due to the development of the concept of "the Nashville Dream," the idea that one can "make it" in music by moving to Nashville and writing songs, migratory patterns to Nashville from across the United States have changed the ways in which Nashville-based music is created and disseminated. In the thesis and accompanying recital, these trends are analyzed through the lens of ten selected active Nashville songwriters who have seen these trends. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree …

Comic Literature And Graphic Novel Uses In History, Literature, Math, And Science, James O. Barbre Iii, Justin Carroll, Joshua Tolbert

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Graphic novels and comics have a rich history and have long served as a medium for both education and entertainment. Although we live in an increasingly technology-rich era which offers abundant visual stimulation to compete with comics, graphic literature is arguably a more immediate and robust resource than ever before. The following paper highlights specific applications of graphic literature to pedagogical purposes, including implications for the use of comics in teaching history, world languages, English as a new language, science, and mathematics. Across these areas, a wide degree of application exists for teachers, in both K-12 and post-secondary settings. In …

Cowboy Cooper Goes West: Mystery Babylon And The Western Hero Archetype, Matthew Bancroft-Smithe

Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) at UNI

William Milton Cooper was a radio show host, author, and conspiracy theorist. Among other things, Cooper claimed insider knowledge of a plot, guided by an ancient Luciferian religious order, to consolidate nations into a socialist New World Order. Although currently unexamined in academia, Cooper’s conspiratorial influence can be found everywhere from the Oklahoma City Bombing to contemporary false flag accusations to QAnon mythology. While this influence includes shared content, Cooper’s approach to evidence, persona, and narrative framing demand attention in a world of increasingly visible conspiracy discourse. Through application of Hocker-Rushing’s western hero archetype, my research indicates that Cooper’s Mystery …

We4: Leisure Quotes, Lance Gibbs Phd

We Exist Series 4: Quotes

Welcome to the fourth exhibit in the series of “We Exist”. In this section we have selected quotes that represent and explain how Maine’s Black residents’ create the processes behind their engagement in particular leisure activities. The quotes also highlight the particular types of leisure activities that Maine’s Black residents suggest that they are involved in. The quotes are taken from transcripts of the oral history project "'Home Is Where I Make It': African American Community and Activism in Greater Portland, Maine”. The interview subjects are all native to Maine or are longtime residents of Maine. The original intent of …

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History Of The World’S Greatest Hero By Roy Schwartz, Gabriel C. Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In Is Superman Circumcised?, Russell Schwartz provides a historical overview of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's creation of the comic book character Superman, arguing that Siegel and Shuster's backgrounds in Jewish immigrants gives a particularly Jewish subtext to their character. Schwartz builds on this argument with a larger historical overview of American comic book publishing, showing how Judaism and Jewish-American immigrant experiences have informed that industry from its earliest days.

Questions Of Canon In Gilbert Hernandez's "Palomar" Comics, Martin Dolan

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

While questions of misrepresentation are starting to be addressed in academia — acknowledging racial, cultural, gender, and artistic diversity — there is still much work to be done to close the gap between the literary canon and what contemporary literature actually looks like. These efforts have been a step in the right direction, but representation of unconventional literatures is often spotty, boiling down entire literary scenes into one book. This is especially true for those that offer formal or structural challenges – including multilingual and graphic narratives that don’t easily fit into a canonical “box.”

Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar comics, serialized …

The Dropout: Created By Elizabeth Merriwether And Based On The Podcast The Dropout Hosted By Rebecca Jarvis And Produced By Abc News, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

The Textual Gutter: How Gene Luen Yang Redefines The Gutter In Boxers & Saints To Tell A Transnational Tale, David Lucas Jr

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This paper attempts to provide a new understanding of the gutter and how it is used to significant effect in Gene Luen Yang's, Boxers & Saints. This research draws upon the work of Scott McCloud to establish a framework for the theoretical applications of the gutter. Most prior research focuses on the gutter within the page. This article demonstrates how Yang pushes the concept of the gutter further by creating a new type of gutter that moves beyond the pages and across texts. Then the research attempts to demonstrate how the idea of the textual gutter heightens the transnational elements …

Birth Control And The Sixties: The Dialogue Surrounding The First Oral Contraceptive, Eden E. Baize

The Cardinal Edge

No abstract provided.

Finding Your Inner Drag: How Drag Culture Helped Form Freedom Of Expression For The Lgbtq Community, Sylvia Zobel De Ayala

Pop Culture Intersections

This research paper discusses the history of the LGBTQ community, the effects of the drag community and the comparison to the behaviors and attitudes from the past to the present. This article goes in depth to different scholarly articles that help understand the history of the LGBTQ community. This article will also discuss personal stories and experiences that describe the emotional aspect of the moments of history mentioned. The three main topics discussed in this paper are the Stonewall Riot, the AIDS epidemic and the uprising of the transgender community. After understanding the history and the present attitudes, they will …

Popular Culture’S Grip On The Lgbtq Community, Connor Grogan

Pop Culture Intersections

The purpose of this research is to identify the causes and consequences of forming groups within this cultural sphere, specifically focusing on the LGBTQ community. I would contend that the inclusion and exclusion of this marginalized group which exists within a larger community can be promoted or amplified by hegemonic forces through the use of popular culture and mass media. Firstly, with regards to this paper, I will identify what hegemonic power dynamics are within the context of the thesis, as well as what it means to be a marginalized group without much force within a power dynamic. Secondly, I …

A Discourse, Delivered At Plymouth, December 22, 1820. In Commemoration Of The First Settlement Of New-England (1821), Daniel Webster, Paul Royster , Ed.

Zea E-Books in American Studies

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ Landing at Plymouth Rock, Daniel Webster (1782–1852), former congressman and future senator and secretary of state, delivered this long discourse to the assembled members of the Pilgrim Society. Always the consummate New Englander, Webster sketched 200 years of American history, surveyed the present era, and projected grand future prospects for a nation barely 40 years old, but with deep roots in Reformed Protestant values and English constitutionalism. Underlying all was his belief that “The character of their political institutions was determined by the fundamental laws respecting property.” Webster’s stories highlight the …

Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Following the 2016 American Presidential election, celebrity endorsements proved to be a more narrow gauge of public opinion than ever. The symbolic alignment with popular musicians, which had long abetted the Democratic Party’s standing with youth and particular identity groups, seemed only to reaffirm the party’s establishment status, drawing disavowal in a wave of anti-establishment sentiment on both the left and right. ‘Retromania,’ a term first coined by Simon Reynolds in 2010, can be tracked conceptually from the nostalgic inclinations of twenty-first century popular culture to the ideological sphere, where nostalgic, essentialized constructions of community, identity, and progress have coalesced …

Myth, Fiction And Politics In The Age Of Antiheroes: A Case Study Of Donald Trump, Igor Prusa, Matthew Brummer

Heroism Science

In this article, we demonstrate that the antihero archetype informs our understanding of Trump in important ways, including his rise to and fall from power. We introduce an analytical framework for analyzing Trump’s antiheroic traits based on his social positioning, individual motivation, and personal charisma. We argue that Trump is fascinating because he is powerful, amoral, and charismatic, and suggest that the American public was primed for Trumpism through a zeitgeist hospitable to antihero worship. That is, Trump’s dogged popularity with nearly half of the American public was foretold by decades of pop-cultural obsession with, and adulation for, the antihero.

Panic At The Picture Show: Southern Movie Theatre Culture And The Struggle To Desegregate, Susannah L. Broun

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

This paper explores the complex desegregation process of movie theatres in the southern United States. Building off of historiography that investigates regulations of postwar teenage sexuality and recent scholarly work that acknowledges the link between sexuality and civil rights, I argue that movie theatres had a uniquely delayed desegregation process due to perceived sexual intrigue of the dark, private theatre space. Through analysis of drive-in and hardtop theatres, censorship of on-screen content, and youth involvement in desegregation, I contend that anxieties of interracial intimacy and unsupervised teenage sexuality produced this especially prolonged integration process.

A New Politics Of Black Regality: Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker’S Monarchical Method, William Martin

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Literary critics conducting a comparative study of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple diligently tend to the relationship between the two women, particularly at an intertextual level. This paper sheds light on an important third member of this relationship: Black women readers. An articulation of Black regality, which involves the incorporation of monarchical symbols and titles in characterizations of Black people, provides these readers with political tools poised to liberate Black women from hegemonic male authority and control. Examining the significance of adornment for the self exclusively to combat invisibility, the power …

How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary films and their paratextual elements are rooted in his intersectional identities as a Black and gay man. His activist goal of Black gay liberation was based on what he saw as deeply engrained internal and external racist and homophobic societal structures that subjugated Black queers. In this thesis, I place research from Black cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies in conversation with one another to show how Riggs’s filmography is an example of queer form. In doing so, I attempt to redefine the focus of the scholarship on Riggs from an avant-garde filmmaker …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Billie Holiday was a singer, songwriter, vocalist, bandleader and composer in the fields of music, black culture and more specifically the genre of jazz. The primary focus of this study is Billie Holiday’s discography, music, and compositions as treated in relation to the black culture of production. This study will explore a secondary content analysis of Billie Holiday’s music, musicianship, musicality and compositional skills within the American jazz mainstream, broader jazz audience and world at large. This project will take an analytical look at the structure and form of the compositions of Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday is credited with composing …

'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

For this project, I am interested in the study of nuanced self-representations of Black rage that appear within African American literary traditions, specifically the blues aesthetic, wherein artists narrativize a wide spectrum of intelligent and specific emotion--not just melancholy. Blues narratives in which Black people self-represent are in direct opposition to flattened narratives of certain affective modes such as anger as a useless, backwards, pathologized, and flat feeling that appear within dominant U.S. and global iconographies. What I see in the blues aesthetic is the capacity for a multichromatic approach to studying rage and Black authorship in America. By using …

Because Potato, Candice Evers

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This thesis project explores the phenomenological qualities of the internet; asking, since the internet is difficult to grasp, what other modes of investigation might we have available? Using an investigative framework set forth by Jack Halberstam, this thesis declines to come to knowledge solely through understanding the formal, the structural, the highly visible and mainstream. The literature that I have gathered provides a range of modes for interrogating the simultaneously central and inconsequential subject of my thesis itself: the potato. Juxtaposing the physical, political and material conditions of the potato the internet’s least academic mode of knowing: the meme. Analyzing …

Isocrates's Place In Postmodern Advertising, Christopher Barkley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study in communication and rhetoric seeks to ascertain constructive applications for distinct advertising practices by examining Isocrates’s work and place in postmodern advertising. The focus uses 5 principles known to Isocrates which are: 1) commonwealths of households, 2) integration of reputation, elegance, substance and style, 3) education and public discourse, 4) phronesis and praxis, and 5) truth and verisimilitude. These 5 principles can form a constructive and practical advertising approach. This study is important. It examines Isocrates through the lens of advertising and extends the research done about him by leading Isocrates scholars who have looked primarily at his …

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Examining The Power And Privilege Of Escapism In Young Adult Literature And Its Culture, Stacey Watson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will explore the systematic biases embedded within this genre, highlighting the ongoing battle between tokenism and inclusive storytelling. Thesis will also emphasize the importance of this genre, its tight grasp on popular culture, and showcase positive representations introduced by new creators over the years.

Bob Dylan And American Folk Music: The Pigeonhole Effect, Thomas J. Murray

Of Life and History

This article tracks Bob Dylan's early musical career and his relation to the American Folk music movement of the late 1950s into the early 1960s. The author grapples with the question of why Bob Dylan went electric and explores some of the stories around the seminal event in American Folk Music history. The author mainly uses Bob Dylan's personal interviews and songs to draw conclusions.

The Glass Coffin: Gothic Adaptations And The Formation Of Sexual Subjectivity., Colton T. Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is now an almost foregone conclusion that classic depictions of vampirism resonate with contemporary queer audiences. A sympathetic response to the monster’s persecution is often the key factor in these arguments, yet little attention is paid to the textual details that prompt such a process of identification. This study posits that the iconography used to establish a connection between monstrosity and non-normative sexuality has its origins in Victorian Gothic fiction, whose descriptions of vampirism were assimilated into the discourse of the fin-de-siècle medical field known as sexology. Theories that defined homosexuality as an illness with physical and psychological symptoms …

Paranormal Investigators: Exploring A Positive Social Construct Through Paranormal Belief And Investigations, Meagan E. Oltman

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This thesis is a case study providing a more detailed look into how a local paranormal investigation team forms a community that cultivates social benefits beyond proving the supernatural’s existence. Folklore provides a path to understanding supernatural beliefs and fears, furthering the understanding of paranormal communities and any advantages of being a part of or receiving help from paranormal investigators and investigations. The paranormal or the supernatural defies standard explanation. For example, ghosts and UFOs, at times, are not explained away with traditional scientific theories and hypotheses. Paranormal investigators, also called paranormal researchers, choose to study the paranormal phenomena considered …

The Imagined Histories And Futures Of The Past: Wwi And The Cultural Imagination, Kelly Aliano

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In this paper, I look at various modes of imagining the futures incarnated by the First World War, beginning with artists and writers, like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Maria Remarque, who experienced and depicted the war from a firsthand point of view. From here, I expand that framework to include J.R.R. Tolkien, whose masterpiece Lord of the Rings may owe no small debt to his wartime experiences. I consider the Doctor Who episodes, “Human Nature” and “Family of Blood,” as contemporary attempts to reinsert WWI into the cultural consciousness. Finally, I look at the two versions of War Horse …

Mourning The Marathon: Black Men Rappers, Homicide Survivorship Bereavement, And The Rap Tribute Of Nipsey Hussle, Melvin L. Williams, Justin K. Winley, Justin Causey

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

Eritrean-American rapper Ermias “Nipsey Hussle” Asghedom’s murder represented a cultural cataclysmic event that startled the hip-hop community and triggered previous memories of Black men’s homicidal deaths in rap and Black American urban communities. Nipsey Hussle’s death inspired touching rap tribute songs by Black men rappers, who sought to commemorate his cultural legacy and express their bereavement pains as homicide survivors. Rap tribute songs occupy a significant history, as rappers historically employed them to honor hip-hop’s fallen soldiers, communicate their homicide survivorship bereavement processes, and speak about social perils in the Black community. Framed by critical race (CRT) and gender role …

“A Meaningless Institution”: Allen Ginsberg And The Struggle To Resist Dehumanization, James Altman

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

This presentation details how in poems such as “A Meaningless Institution,” “Howl,” and “American Change” Allen Ginsberg depicts individuals striving as best they can to maintain their freedom, especially freedom of thought in the face of lockstep conformity. In doing so, they seek to hang onto and reassert their humanity. In virtually every line, Ginsberg’s ideas about free speech, democracy, patriotism, inclusiveness, the environment, and community collided with the dehumanizing ideals of mainstream Cold War America. Ginsberg’s reverence for the United States as celebrated by his artistic “father” Walt Whitman functions as the catalyst for him to protest what the …