Other Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Engaging China: Beckett’S Debt To Pound, Giles, And Laloy, Lidan Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Engaging China: Beckett’s Debt to Pound, Giles, and Laloy," Lidan Lin examines Ezra Pound’s influence on Samuel Beckett. In their dealings with China, Pound and Beckett are both indebted to such sinologists and cultural transmitters as Ernest Fenollosa, H. A. Giles, Louis Laloy, and Laurence Binyon who introduced Chinese culture, literature, and arts to the Western world through translation and their writings about China. Lin situates the Pound-Beckett connection in the broad cultural context of the early 20^th century. She argues that while modernism’s turn to China as a cultural paradigm was collectively brought about by …

Translation As Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders In Contemporary China, Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Translation as Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders in Contemporary China,” Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang examines four groups of selected writings centered on one of Robert van Gulik’s more well-known Judge Dee novels, The Chinese Maze Murders (written first in English but not published until 1956). Different from most publications on van Gulik and his novels, Zhang examines the impact of censorship and self-censorship on the writing, rewriting, and (re)adapting, “literal” and “liberal/free” translation of the Judge Dee stories traveling between Chinese and English, between China and the West, for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences. Focus is given …

Exotic Construction Of An Ancient Oriental Sappho: On Rexroth’S Creative Translation Of Li Ch’Ing-Chao’S Ci-Poems And Its Influences, Yuqun Fu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Exotic Construction of an Ancient Oriental Sappho: On Rexroth’s Creative Translation of Li Ch’ing-Chao’s Ci-Poems and its Influences,” Yuqun Fu discusses Li Ch’ing-Chao’s Ci-poems and her identity as a woman intellect in the patriarchal and feudal Song Dynasty of China. Due to Kenneth Rexroth’s feminist perspective and Sappho complex as well as his own pursuit to excel in the hipster stylistics of the newly prospering Beat writers, Rexroth turns to the Eastern women poets to fuel his own cause, especially in his idiosyncratic way of interpreting and translating Li Ch’ing-Chao. His translation focuses on gender identity and …

Legend Trips And Vernacular Film Theory: Spooky Encounters In Tiktok Mediated Legend Trips, Drew Holley

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

In this thesis I looked at how legend tripping is mediated through the affordances of new social technologies and apps, specifically TikTok. Short video formats allowed for folk cinematography to spread legend narratives and at the same time create more visual online landscapes for people to interact with. I defined folk cinematography as the way in which people make videos based on a vernacular level. This has been based on people having more access to video making tools and learning from informal patterns such as trends on sites like TikTok. Because of this, I explored how audiences participate in a …

Past * An Introduction To The Problem, Zelimir Zilnik, Boris Buden, New Media Center Kuda.Org, Olivera Jokic

Publications and Research

Who can know what is in the past? Is it what historians can tell us? Should we also trust what we can remember? Past • An Introduction to the Problem proposes that the problem of the past now concerns everyone. Visions of a different, brighter future defeated in the Cold War and its heated afterlives, we are being offered the past as the only horizon of possibility. And what are we supposed to find in that past? Philosopher Boris Buden considers these questions in a series of essays and conversations with filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, one of the most prominent filmmakers …

Embodied Abstractions: Identity And Representation In The Digital Era, Srikar Hari

Masters Theses

The digital image is a copy in motion. As it accelerates, it deteriorates.

It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, squeezed through

digital connections, resized, uploaded, downloaded, reformatted

and re-edited.

- Adapted from “In defense of the Poor Image” by Hito Steryel

With today’s digital technology, the image is no longer a stable

representation of the world, but a programmable database that

is updated in real time. It is not only part of a program, but it

contains its own operating code: the image is a program in itself.

Consequently, the image’s rhetoric has taken on …

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

間, Lele Dai

Theses and Dissertations

LeLe Dai makes contingent participatory public interventions using sensory materials such as sound, flickering light, and water. This paper examines their works through the lens of Chinese character Jian (間), meaning “gap/slit/incision,” to investigate the concept of “in-betweenness.”

Scare If You Dare: A Look Into Scare Acting, Hana Goss

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Scare acting has always been the unsung villains of the entertainment industry. For three months of the year, for about five minutes of a haunted house, they get attention. However, the work scare actors do to is way more than just a five second “boo.” Scare actors have been at the beginning of theatre and continue to influence modern entertainment. Even though the patrons may be the ones feeling the danger, scare actors may be even more in danger than them. Each scare actor is unique from their looks to their moves. It might be take a lot of nerve …

Paradoks Determinisme Dalam Film Tenet (2020) Sebagai Refleksi Kesadaran Manusia Akan Waktu, Farobi Fatkhurridho, Suma Riella Rusdiarti

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Time is a complicated object of study because understanding time is closely related to periodization, history, and memory. Film is a medium for presenting manifestations of motion and time in visual products that can be captured by human senses. Tenet (2020) is a film that displays temporal dimensions in terms of both creative ideas and packaging through its cinematography and narrative structure. Tenet presents the idea of overlapping time consciousness of the past, present, and future. A revolving door machine in the film is used to signify the paradox of determinism or the condition of characters suffocated in a time …

Audio Dramas As Self-Expression For Marginalized Identities, Athena Towne

Honors Projects

Fiction podcasts, also knows as Audio Dramas, often afford a level of creative freedom to potential creators that is not seen in other popular media. This is seen explicitly through the marginalized representation that popular works in the medium allow. This work seeks to explore why the medium allows for such stories to flourish, as well as how these stories are received. Then, to test this theory, this paper documents the process of creating an audio drama, from conception to completion.

When Language Fails: A Critical Analysis Essay Of Kathryn Stockett’S The Help:, Evan Mccreary

Black Album Mixtape

A critical analysis essay of Kathryn Stockett's New York Times Bestselling book, The Help, and it's subsequent film adaptation, and how in recent years, particularly following the murder of George Floyd, the story has been used as a classroom tool for teaching students about racism and its effects. Written by a Black student in a primarily white school community, this essay was written as an antithesis to the ideology that the book and movie exceed their intended intentions of being a beneficial teaching tool to youth.

Us Manufacturing Readiness Assesment For Industry 4.0, Yogesh Bhutani

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Industry 4.0 is the next frontier in manufacturing evolution. Industry 4.0 is the term coined by the German government based on the research work of Henning Kaegermann. Multiple studies have been published worldwide, showing the slow or no adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies. Factors such as high costs, unproven technologies, integration, and others impacting the adoption are areas of concern. Readiness is an important factor that impacts adoption. Understanding the current readiness for Industry 4.0 to predict future adoption levels is important. It is vital to understand the readiness of manufacturing companies to adopt Industry 4.0 technologies, as this is …

On Gary Snyder’S Tradaptation Of Cold Mountain Poems And Its Spiritual Salvation And Literary Enlightenment In Postwar America, Hu Anjiang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs), which have been neglected in the history of Chinese literature for ages, captured the attention of most Americans immediately after its being translated into America by the American poet Gary Snyder in 1950s, however. It is Snyder that reconfigured and recreated a sagacious Chinese Chan Buddhist poet Han-shan (literally, Cold Mountain), the acknowledged author of Cold Mountain Poems, in his translation for the postwar Americans in the midst of varied social problems and cultural identity crisis after World War II. Snyder eventually found in his translation of Cold Mountain Poems a back-to-nature remedy of …

Topological Tropology Of V.S. Naipaul’S Islamic Travelogues And Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism, Md. Habibullah

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of …

T. Hanks For Nostalgia: The Power Of Tom Hanks And Film Branding, Jacob Higgs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In March 2020, Tom Hanks announced he had contracted COVID-19 while shooting the Elvis Presley Biopic in Australia. On Instagram, he encouraged fans to take the disease seriously and be aware of how severe of a disease it was. Character brands and nostalgia have been found to foster trust in products and encourage relationships with those brands. Using the lens of nostalgia and uses and gratification to examine Tom Hanks as a character brand, the researcher analyzed five blockbuster films with Tom Hanks as the lead character. The study used narrative thematic analysis to observe Hanks and the depictions of …

Remembering Complicity And Resistance: A Review Of Mihaela Mihai’S Political Memory And The Aesthetics Of Care: The Art Of Complicity And Resistance (2022), Sofía Forchieri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a review of Mihaela Mihai’s book Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance (2022). In it, Mihai courageously brings together insights from critical theory, political and legal science, philosophy, literary studies, and feminist theory to argue for the need of rearticulating how we remember complicity and resistance in the aftermath of political violence. Mihai develops her argument in three steps. First, she provides an account of how complicity and resistance are misremembered after systemic violence. Second, she tracks the political, epistemic and ethical consequences that this faulty work of memory-making holds …

Terada Torahiko, A Physicist And A Haikai Poet, Akira Komiya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Terada Torahiko is known as a scientific essayist in Japan, but hardly anyone knows he was a haikai poet as well as a physicist. According to him, haikai poetry and physics are two different ways of conceiving Nature, both valid and perhaps complementary to each other. Seeing his research in physics looking for regularities in apparently irregular phenomena in everyday life, we may say his haiku haikai spirit is manifest there and that he was pioneering a new science such as the one developed later by Ilya Prigogine. His association of haiku haikai poetry and Freudian interpretations of dreams leads …

Orature: The Political Interpretation Of Performance Framework In Anthills Of The Savannah And Half Of A Yellow Sun, Jing Duan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The focus of discussion in this paper lies in a perception that orature of African written literature is not innocent but a form of control. Operated through its performance framework, the concept of orature provides an angle to observe how African oral tradition penetrates written literature and cultivates an awareness of the political nature both of the material to be written and of the writing process itself. This paper explores the performance framework in two African novels — Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Through such key concepts as event, narrative and self-reflexivity …

Shakespeare On Zoom, Fandom, And The Uncanny Humor Of Imperfections And Plurality: A Comparative Study Of The Show Must Go Online And Zoom Shakespeare Productions, Hyemin Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis surveys the phenomena of Shakespeare performance on Zoom (‘Shakespeare on Zoom’) that have emerged during the current Covid pandemic in order to illuminate a complex intersection of lockdown culture, fandom, and new media’s techno-social archive, including its affective resonances. As case studies, this study pays attention to The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO) and Zoom Shakespeare Productions (ZSP) to examine countercultural fandom, vernacular creativity, and technologically imperfect aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) in ‘Shakespeare on Zoom’ performed by underfunded artists or amateur fans. In analyzing TSMGO’s and ZSP’s endeavors of production and dramaturgy, I bring in Sigmund Freud’s …

Community Despite Connection: Resisting The Digital Logics Of Optimization And Failure, Irina Kalinka

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together …

The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …

Lacan And The Algorithm, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in …

Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?, Matthew Flisfeder

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Elizabeth Robins Portrays Working Women In Suffragette Literature: A Reflection Through The Lens Of The 2015 Film, Suffragette, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

I place the 2015-released film Suffragette within a context of the efforts Elizabeth Robins made to document and, by witnessing, to advocate, the early phases of the British Women’s Suffrage Movement in England. Robins wrote and participated across margins. An expatriate American living in England, she had no personal advantage to gain with a franchise. In her late forties and in ill health, she took perhaps only "safe" opportunities to thrust herself into the fray. But as Jane Marcus points out, with her research on the play that became Votes for Women, she took efforts to experience how working-class …

Me, Myself, And My Muppets, Sara Jones

Emerging Writers

In this personal narrative, the author explores her relationship and upbringing in relation to Jim Henson’s Muppets. She illustrates her experience at puppet camps, on long Muppet-filled road trips, and the special connection her mother and her share with the Muppets. Find out how the Muppets have shaped the author’s life, morals, and aspirations, as well as how Jim Henson’s creations have influenced and brought joy to past generations and future generations to come.

Inhumanity Restored: Digital Play & Poetic Drama, Ali Emir Dağlar

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay addresses the relationship of digital games to absurdism through a comparison of the 2011 video game Dark Souls with Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot. Staked in this comparison is the rhetoric not only of Dark Souls but of the contemporary digital game as a medium; establishing an analogy that speaks to the broader genealogy of modern media, my argument implicates the underemphasized yet critically meaningful kinship of computer games and poetic theater. I argue that understanding the digital game vis-a-vis absurdism means explicating how the 20th century stage, particularly that of Beckett, prefigures contemporary digital worlds …

Girls From The Heights: From Mexican Spitfire To Maddy Perez, Gabi Martinez

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

The stereotype of the “Spicy Latina” is as prevalent today as it was in the early days of film, and tracing its origins leads to the discovery of a complicated root system of prejudice and stereotype. From the days of Lupe Velez and the film Mexican Spitfire, to the TV shows Modern Family and Jane the Virgin, Hollywood has never seemed to know how to portray Latinas in all of their complexity. This paper investigates how the white male gaze has shaped the perception of Latinas in the media, and how even the modern, more diverse media landscape contributes …

Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe In The Twenty-First Century (2020): Review Essay, Sourit Bhattacharya

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern …