English Language and Literature Commons^™

Infancias Imaginadas: Creciendo En España En El Siglo Xx Con Elena Fortún Y Miguel Delibes, Maria Del Carmen Toro Gonzalez-Green

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From the 1920s to the 1990s, a large number of works featuring children as main characters were produced and published in Spain. Children live in constant confrontation between what they are and what is expected of them: because of this, in a new literary paradigm, childhood became a symbol for the confrontations, tensions, and contradictions that characterize 20th century Spain. Also, the preponderant temporal dimension for these children characters is the present, which is a significant choice in a historical period in constant tension between letting go of the past and clinging to it. This project explores how different imagined …

Hitchcock Studies The Working Class In Literature, Cinema, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“While in college I took a class on literary criticism. That persuaded me that I was actually quite good at reading literature, and that I had more to say about it than anything else. Although I had been interested in literature for some time before I went to college, it was really the college itself that influenced me to study it more deeply.”

That’s how Dr. Peter Hitchcock explains why he chose his academic field. A native of the East End of London, he received his bachelor’s in the arts and humanities from the University of Greenwich in London, a …

On Variety: The Avant-Garde Between Pornography And Narrative, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

This article analyzes Bette Gordon’s first feature film Variety (1983), reassessing how experimental novelist Kathy Acker’s contributions to the screenplay awkwardly positioned the film within contemporary cultural debates over pornography and the future of avant-garde filmmaking. While centered on an erotic thriller narrative concerning a woman’s entrée into the scuzzy world of New York City porno theaters, Gordon and Acker also take up in the film a series of three related representational problems for the 1980s: feminist approaches to pornography, narrative in an avant-garde tradition, and the role of speech and writing in film.

Biopolitical Education: The Edukators And The Politics Of The Immanent Outside, Roland Vegso, Marco Abel

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The article examines the relationship of biopower and cinema through the analysis of a specific film, Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators (2004). It argues that in the age of biopower, resistance to power cannot be conceived of in terms of a radical outside to power. Rather, biopolitical resistance must take place on the terrain of this power itself, that is, within the field of life. Therefore, what we call the “viral” politics of The Edukators must be interpreted precisely in this context. The film argues that the exhaustion of political paradigms inherited from the past century forces us to take the …

Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey

Theses and Dissertations--English

Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …

Ecologies Of The Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature By Adrian J Ivakhiv, Edie Steiner

The Goose

Review of Adrian J. Ivankhiv's Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature.

‘There’S A Lot More To Ogres Than People Think’: Shrek As Ethical Fairy Tale, Eugene O'Brien

Journal of Franco-Irish Studies

No abstract provided.

Panting In The Dark: The Ambivalence Of Air In Cinema, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Turning Back Time: Duration, Simultaneity, And The Timeless In Fitzgerald And Fincher's Benjamin Button, Nathan Wagner

English Theses

This MA thesis seeks to apply Henri Bergson’s theory of time to a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and David Fincher’s film adaptation of the text, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. By applying Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity, timeless moments will be seen to emerge in the text and the film. I place Fitzgerald’s text in context with other seminal modernist works in order to provide a study of the importance of the story within its time period. Through Deleuze’s application of Bergson to cinema, I analyze the evolution of the time-image …

The Cinema Of Control: On Diabetic Excess And Illness In Film, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

While not rare, films that do represent diabetes must work around the disease’s banal invisibility,and images of diabetics in film are thus especially susceptible to metaphor and exaggeration.This essay is the first to outline a diabetic filmography, discussing medical and cinematic strategies for visualizing the disease as well as how the illness informs family plots and heroic characters in horror films. Doing so, it participates in a larger discussion of the manner in which film images of ill or disabled groups sustain notions of “normalcy” by both representing and denying otherness.

Translating Huck: Difficulties In Adapting "The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn" To Film, Bryce Moore Cundick

Theses and Dissertations

Filmmakers have had four main difficulties adapting The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to film: point of view, structure, audience and the novel's ending. By studying the different approaches of various directors to each obstacle, certain facts emerge about both the films and the novel. While literary scholars have studied Huck from practically every angle, none have sufficiently viewed the book through the lens of adaptation, despite the fact that it has been adapted to film and television over twenty times. The few critics who have studied the adaptations have done so using dated methodologies that boil down to little more …

Violence And The Scapegoat In American Film: 1967-1999, Paul E. Graham Iii

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study addresses the proliferation of cinematic violence since the demise of the MPAA’s Production Code in 1966. Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch were films that projected violence to comment on the civil fervent caused by the Vietnam War. Yet the floodgates these films opened allowed for virtually unlimited and graphic displays of bloodshed to redden big screens for the next three decades. Using the theories of René Girard, namely the scapegoating motif, this study proposes readings of film that, through cinematic ambiguity, contain humanitarian statements against violence by examining the consequences of using force to cause pain. …