Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Gilded Age Visual Media As The Impetus For Social Change: Jacob Riis's Reform Photography And The Antecedents Of Documentary Film, Denitsa Yotova

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis examines the birth and evolution of the social documentary genre in visual media. It proposes that a mixture of ideology, technology, and social awareness are necessary for a successful social reform. Its review and study of related primary and secondary sources determines that despite the limitations of technology during the nineteenth century, social documentaries were produced long before they were part of the genres of photography and film. By focusing on the work of Danish photographer Jacob Riis and tracing the emergence of the film medium through time, this thesis demonstrates a strong connection between documentary film and …

Ecocriticism And Persian And Greek Myths About The Origin Of Fire, Massih Zekavat

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ecocriticism and Persian and Greek Myths about the Origin of Fire" Massih Zekavat argues that some contemporary ecological biases are rooted in ancient thought. Further, Zekavat argues that the study of mythology is relevant to the understanding of culture and ecology thus assisting ecocriticism. The investigation of man/woman, culture/nature, and human/nature binary oppositions conveys that Greek and Persian myths are mostly anthropocentric and androcentric. Zekavat postulates that one way to revise contemporary ecological conceptions is to study myths to shed light on the mind and context of their creators and believers, their representation of natural phenomena, and …

Introduction To New Work In Ecocriticism, Simon C. Estok, Murali Sivaramakrishnan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Rediscovering Local Environmentalism In Taiwan, Peter I-Min Huang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Rediscovering Local Environmentalism in Taiwan" Peter I-min Huang challenges the domination of "the global" and the marginalization of "the local." Huang argues that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century globalism seemed to have toppled localism in ecocriticism debates. Ecocritics embraced enthusiastically such concepts as Ursula K. Heise's "eco-cosmopolitanism" and the arguments associated with it that spoke for global forms of environmental thinking and practice. Yet, arguments for "the local" persist in part because of Heise's constructive criticisms of it. Focusing on local environmental movements in Taiwan, Huang identifies and discusses scholarly work …

Japanese Poetry And Nature In Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida, Shoshannah Ganz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Japanese Poetry and Nature in Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida" Shoshannah Ganz shows how the limited focus of research on Roo Borson oversimplifies the poetry and ignores the tradition that Borson is aligning her work with both in form and content: classical Chinese and Japanese poetry and their perspectives on nature. Further, Ganz explores the ways in which Borson's poetry overcomes intuitively the binaries of East/West, human/non-human, and the further binaries within the human/non-human created through representational language. Ganz contextualizes Borson's work within the master/disciple lineage of Chinese and Japanese tradition and explores how Borson …

The Systemic Approach, Biosemiotic Theory, And Ecocide In Australia, Iris Ralph

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Systemic Approach, Biosemiotic Theory, and Ecocide in Australia" Iris Ralph summarizes an argument in defense of disciplinarity ("openness from closure") that Cary Wolfe makes in What is Posthumanism? She also comments on an implicit argument that Wendy Wheeler makes in The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. As Ralph argues, Wheeler's implicit claim is that biosemiotic language, which humans share with other biological beings, connects human animals and nonhuman animals on moral and affective grounds. Ralph summarizes Wolfe's defense of disciplinarity that literary and cultural studies scholars who engage with the "question …

Transmedial Documentation For Non-Visual Image Access, Melody J. Mccotter

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In my doctoral studies on information accessibility for the individual who is blind or visually impaired, I’ve been exploring the ways we can make image documents more accessible. This requires using an alternative sensory modality, and translating the document into a different format. The questions that arise when we consider this process are many, but among them are:

• Is it the same document once we’ve converted it to an audio narrative about the work, or a 3D topographic map of an artwork, or a musical interpretation?
• If it is not the same document, how truthful can the “trans-medial” translation be …

It's Not Unusual: Glee And The Mainstream Acceptance Of Spontaneous Public Performance, Elizabeth M. Downey

UL Publications

When Glee debuted in 2009, the genre of the television musical series had a shaky history. Traditional episodic programs had previously aired musical episodes but these were seen as rare absurdities; the genre was an oddity to exploit on occasion, not something that could sustain an entire series (a belief proven when previous attempts had failed). The flash mob culture that emerged in the mid-2000s alongside the groundswell of social media changed this environment. The absurdity of people “bursting into song” in a public place was no longer a completely unrealistic scenario, and this reopened the door for the musical …

Corre Muchacha, Corre: Estructura De Clases Y Trabajo Doméstico En La Nana (2009), De Sebastián Silva, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

En los casi treinta años transcurridos desde el restablecimiento de la democracia, los países del Cono Sur han transitado por profundas transformaciones socioculturales, económicas y políticas. Algunos elementos en común han sido la aplicación y el fracaso de políticas de corte neoliberal, la reconfiguración del escenario político, la revisión del pasado dictatorial y los reajustes ideológico-culturales en el campo literario e intelectual. Esto último atañe especialmente a países como Argentina y Brasil, donde los estallidos sociales desatados por décadas de medidas económicas restrictivas condujeron a la priorización de lo social en las agendas políticas. Por el contrario, la democracia chilena …

Choices In The Editing Room: How The Intentional Editing Of Dialogue Scenes Through Shot Choice Can Enhance Story And Character Development Within Motion Pictures, Jonathan Pfenninger

Masters Theses

This study examines the content of six feature length films, which showed in theaters in 2010 and 2011, from a communication perspective. Five of the scrutinized films are Academy Award winning and nominated films for Best Editing. The sixth film was the top grossing Christian feature film to be widely released within the two years. Utilizing Foss's rhetorical schema for the evaluation of visual imagery, this study examines and evaluates the composition of dialogue scenes within each film, identifying the functions of shot composition and movement choices within each film, individually. Through identification of a function, assessment and support found …

Case Study Two: Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Gottlieb presents an early case study of his mobile augmented reality game Jewish Time Jump: New York design on the ARIS platform for the iPhone and iPad (iOS). The game is set on-location in Washington Square Park in New York city. Players in 5th-7th grade take on the role of time-traveling reporters, landing on site on the eve of the Uprising of 20,000, the largest women-led strike in U.S. History. Based on their GPS location they receive media from over 100 years in the past, interactive with digital characters as they work to gather a story for the fictional Jewish …

Doctor Who And The Creation Of A Non-Gendered Hero Archetype, Alessandra J. Pelusi

Theses and Dissertations

This project investigates the ways in which the television program Doctor Who creates a new, non-gendered hero archetype.

"If You Can Hold On...": Counter-Apocalyptic Play In Richard Kelly’S Southland Tales, Marcus O'Donnell

Journal of Religion & Film

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) presents a dystopic, post-apocalyptic, near-future through an aesthetic, which fuses contemporary postmodern screens with the phantasmagorical of traditional apocalyptic visions. This article argues that Southland Tales is an example of what feminist theologian Catherine Keller calls the “counter-apocalyptic” (Keller 1996:19-20). Through strategies of ironic parody Kelly both describes and questions the apocalyptic and its easy polarities. In situating the film as counter-apocalyptic the paper argues that the film both resists the apocalyptic impulse however it is also located within it. In this sense it produces a unique take on the genre of the post-apocalyptic film …

Iran: Beyond The Headlines, Musselman Library

Other Exhibits & Events

Poster with Fall 2014 events for Iran: Beyond the Headlines series.

Iran: Beyond the Headlines is a learning series that includes book discussions, film screenings, and lecture designed to help us move past today's headlines and explore the history, art, culture, and everyday life of Iranians. Series events are scheduled for September 2014 - April 2015. All events are free and open to the public.

Infrastructure, Production, And Archive: American And Japanese Video Art Production Of 1960s And 1970s, Ann Atsuko Adachi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing a study on the infrastructure of artistic production and maintenance opens a space in which to examine the relationship between artistic inspiration and knowledge making, the occurrences and the writing of its history. In the case of the comparative study of the emergence of Japanese and American video art, common artistic technique employed may indicate motivations derived from the technical possibility of the video medium, while the study of infrastructure demonstrates how large-scale funding, formation of archives, the establishment of systems of distribution and channels of education affect the emergence and development of video art as a genre. This …

Utopias Misplaced: The Cost Of Outsourcing Dystopian Poetics To North Korea, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I'm sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the "uncanny body politic," the uncanny valley, "dystopian poetics," what it means to outsource dystopian poetics, the intersection of aesthetics and politics. Authors/artists mentioned include: Thomas Hobbes, Mary Shelley, David Mitchell, Marjane Satrapi, Song Byeok, Sun Mu, Masahiro Mori, Andy Warhol. The talk also discusses the James Bond film Die Another Day.

Civilization Of The Living Dead: Canonical Monstrosity, The Romero Zombie, And The Political Subject, Nicholas Walter Robbins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the canonical monsters of Western political theory, including Plato's wolf-man, Hobbes's Leviathan and Tocqueville's mechanical mass. It argues that monster theorists - including horror film director George A. Romero, creator of the zombie and its apocalyptic narrative - utilize the horror genre in order to reveal the hidden dysfunctions and unrealized potentials of self and society. The canon features several prison-like heuristics - including Plato's cave, Hobbes's sate of nature, Tocqueville's prison, and Romero's zombie apocalypse - that bring to light the mass enslavement, intellectual dysfunction, appetitive tyranny, and cannibalism of the political subject. Theorists consistently depict …

The Immersive Medium: Art, Flow, And Video Games, Christopher M. Yalen

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

In this article, the question of whether or not video games could be considered art is explored, as well as what this means for video games as cultural products. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I suggest that there are some games we can consider “art”, and that these games are not only different aesthetically speaking, but are also different from a media-effects standpoint. The article consists of three main sections, an aesthetic review, a content analysis, and a pilot study. In the aesthetic review, I employ different perspectives from aesthetic philosophy in order to come up with criteria for what an …

The Bad Boy: A Cultural Phenomenon, Writing Collective Ffc 100.12

e-Research: A Journal of Undergraduate Work

The bad boy is a cultural phenomenon that exists as an archetype in all sorts of artistic mediums, though most prevalently in literature and film, and even in the real world. The bad boy is defined through his actions and his philosophy of resistance - of challenging the world (ours or his own) on the normalcy of its convictions. This article explores the ways in which the bad boy manifests and the vast categories he may occupy - from hero to criminal, introvert to public performer, or sexual deviant to authoritarian dictator. The bad boy is many things: a liberator, …

Filipinos Depicted In American Culture, Eileen Regullano

e-Research: A Journal of Undergraduate Work

From the early 20th century, Filipinos have been depicted as treacherous savages or as innocent children in America, evidenced in political comics and comments from the time. In today's society, even though the depictions are not as blatantly racist as they were in the early 20th century, Filipinos are dehumanized, exoticized, or idealized and represented in a two-dimensional way. However, this construction of the Filipino identity may be starting to change with the advent of more ardent vocalization by Filipinos with regard to the production of their images.

The Paradox Of Commercial Photography: Power And Sexuality In Models, Christina Bell

e-Research: A Journal of Undergraduate Work

Commercial photography has a tendency to force upon us a standard template of what the ideal person is or looks like. Unfortunately, the artificial standard is horribly unachievable and detrimental to physical and mental health, which produces sentiments of insufficiency and abjection with the self, especially among young impressionable girls. In a sick - and very modern - twist of evolutionary progress we find ourselves idealizing the depictions of models appearing to be on the verge of starvation. This article examines the power and sexuality in models produced through commercial photography and its effects on society at-large.

Are Approval Ratings An Accurate Reflection Of Success? Effects Of Media Coverage On Public Opinion Of Colin Powell, Michaela Dalton

e-Research: A Journal of Undergraduate Work

No abstract provided.

Effect Of Convergence Culture On Spectatorship, Amanda Marcus

e-Research: A Journal of Undergraduate Work

Media convergence has changed how we receive and process information. No longer are we passive spectators, but we are part of the media we consume. Because of the explosion of technology since the turn of the century and a new definition of spectatorship, producers of media can no longer control how their messages are received; they have to engage their audience and listen to feedback in order to remain functioning. Fellow peers serve as informants or as a new source of media. This also affects our individual identities, which shapes our cultural identity. Social media enables us to present ourselves …

Dog Movie Stars And Dog Breed Popularity: A Case Study In Media Influence On Choice, Stefano Ghirlanda, Alberto Acerbi, Harold A. Herzog

Entertainment Collection

Fashions and fads are important phenomena that influence many individual choices. They are ubiquitous in human societies, and have recently been used as a source of data to test models of cultural dynamics. Although a few statistical regularities have been observed in fashion cycles, their empirical characterization is still incomplete. Here we consider the impact of mass media on popular culture, showing that the release of movies featuring dogs is often associated with an increase in the popularity of featured breeds, for up to 10 years after movie release. We also find that a movie’s impact on breed popularity correlates …

Conscience's De Leeuw Van Vlaanderen (The Lion Of Flanders) And Its Adaptation To Film By Claus, Gertjan Willems

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Conscience's De Leeuw van Vlaanderen (The Lion of Flanders) and Its Adaptation to Film by Claus" Gertjan Willems discusses Hugo Claus's 1984 filmic adaptation of Hendrik Conscience's 1838 historical novel, a landmark in the history of the Flemish Movement. Willems's analysis is executed by means of a textual film analysis and archival research. Willems pays special attention to the Flemish-Dutch coproduction's complex relations with the national question. Despite various difficulties concerning Flemish nationalist sensitivities of the project, the producers wanted the film to be as faithful as possible to Conscience's novel. This resulted in an …

Translation As Relation And Glissant's Work, Sandra Bermann

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Translation as Relation and Glissant's Work" Sandra Bermann proposes that in today's complex world of migration, war, and globalization, translation among languages and cultures is everywhere evident. Indeed, as citizens of the twenty-first century, we inevitably think in and through translation. Yet we have only begun to explore its contemporary modes of operation, its challenges, and its promise for study. Bermann suggests ways to think about translation — its difficulties, as well as its promise. Looking first to some traditional views of translation, Bermann then turns to particular ways in which it might be recast in terms …

New Work About Reading Poetry: A Book Review Article On Stafford's And Bohn's Work, Martyna Markowska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Love And Marriage In The Work Of Abdul-Baki, Abu-Jaber, And Al-Razzaz, Qusai A.R. Al-Debyan, Shadi S. Neimneh

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Love and Marriage in the Work of Abdul-Baki, Abu-Jaber, and al-Razzaz" Qusai A.R. Al-Debyan and Shadi S. Neimneh posit that love, marriage, and sexuality represent important aspects in Mu'nis al-Razzaz's 1997 novel Alive in the Dead Sea, Kathryn K. Abdul-Baki's 2000 novel Ghost Songs: A Palestinian Love Story, and Diana Abu-Jaber's 2003 short story "Madagascar." Issues of love, marriage, and sexuality in these texts suggest a rebellious attitude on the part of women protagonists against taboos of religion, politics, and sexuality and Abdul-Baki, Abu-Jaber, and al-Razzaz employ descriptions of sexual intimacy to reflect the social …

Trust-Based Learning And Its Importance In Intercultural Education, Clemens Seyfried

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Trust-Based Learning and Its Importance in Intercultural Education" Clemens Seyfried introduces the concept of "trust-based learning," an approach he developed for learning in an intercultural world and applied in primary and secondary education. The objective of the concept is the raising of opportunities students with (im)migrant background in education. Seyfried presents an overview of the educational situation of (im)migrants and ethnic minorities in the European Union with special focus on Austria, followed by a description of the said concept of trust-based learning including the results of a statistical survey conducted in Austria. The focus of the concept …

Postcolonial Studies In The Twenty-First Century: A Book Review Article About New Work By Ashcroft, Mendis, Mcgonegal, Mukerjee And Carrera Suárez, Durán Almarza, Menéndez Tarrazo, Alejandra Moreno

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.