Visual Studies Commons^™

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 …

The Role Of The Reader Is To Fallow: Responding To The Negative Reception Of Paul Verhoeven’S Film Adaptation Of Starship Troopers, Julian Meyerstrom

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Robert A. Keinlein’s science fiction novel Starship Troopers (1959), and its film adaption of the same title directed by Paul Verhoeven (1997), received mixed critical reactions. Both pieces came across as supporting fascistic ideals to most critics upon release, despite the two creators opposing political and moral beliefs. Using Louise Rosenblatt's reader response theory as a framework for analyzing both the novel and film adaptation, this paper postulates the film adaptation fails to deliver an accurate critique of the novel by placing the burden of moral knowledge on the audience. Keinlein’s novel guides the reader into his moral sensibilities, whereas …

Depicting Absence: Thematic And Stylistic Paradoxes Of Representation In Visual And Literary Imagery, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

The article draws up an inventory of, and compares strategies for, the theoretical and critical treatment of the absence–presence interplay at stake in the literary and visual representations of absence. This brings to our attention a multiplicity of heterogeneous and, to a greater or lesser degree, marginal signify-ing phenomena that have in common patterns of disrupting and deviating from the standard conventions of creating and conveying meaning through figures of absence. Lacking a name for these disparate yet similar instances where meaning is created from empty signifiers, we have chosen to call them figural voids. This attempt to produce a …

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

Are Postmodernism And #Metoo Incompatible?, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

Course Syllabus (W19 Online) Coli 331t--Television Culture: "Lens, Mirror, Screen: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

Or a conjuncture of three moments in the dialectic of television as technical apparatus and cultural practice. In this course, we will read George Orwell’s 1984, view Michael Radford’s filmic adaptation of the novel, and consider a number of critical texts in order to think the psychological and social implications of television as an instrument of control, manipulation, and knowledge production. What, we ask, are the implications, in both 1984 and concrete experience, of light-speed communication capabilities for sense perception, consciousness, language, and awareness? In its dissemination of images and information, how does television impede and/or facilitate politics …

The Fluid Gaze In Virtual Reality, Soudhamini

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

"In 2006, in the course of an Artists Residency in Munich I made a video triptych titled Meditations on the Tiger, in which a story unfolds over three adjacent screens... The story is as linear as it can get, but working with three screens I found I could move laterally as well... There were multiple tracks of time running together on that train - the real time of action and event, the hurtling projected time of anticipation and expectation, and the deep, reflective time of memory, thought and speech. 3 video timelines synchronized so we begin to approach image, just …

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

Course Syllabus (W17 Online) Coli 211m: "Superhero Film And Contemporary Culture", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

What might the current popularity and ubiquity of superhero film say about contemporary culture? This course will explore three possible implications of this question: (1) that the superhero genre reflects a moment in our species’ history of reconciling the human being-technology relation, which we shall view as a complex system constituted by our productive relations to material and ideological tools and their ensembles, the needs and aspirations that determine how we conceptualize and activate these relations, and the technically rationalized social reality that is their result, (2) that this ongoing process of reconciliation evinces, at once, the …

Play This Paper: Forms Of Time In The Open World, Branching Narrative, Roleplaying Game, Jimmy Evans

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper is an analysis of chronotopes in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that reveals how the procedurality of video games might suggest a refined heteroglossic form. Synthesizing contemporary american philosopher Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric with the materialist linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, this ultimately hypertextual and interactive article reflects on language as Bakhtin once did: as "agent and agency” (MPL 146). After detailing how the three major processes of the game coordinate spacetime, it is necessary to conclude that its kaleidoscopic nature provides new opportunities for the rendering of the geometry of thought in what is a …

Nietzsche’S Digital Alexandrians: Greek As Musical Code For Nietzsche And Kittler, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

Course Syllabus (Fa15) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Material Aesthetics", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

An examination of questions concerning aesthetic experience from the standpoint of the structural and functional logics of the capitalist mode of production

Course Syllabus (Sp15) Coli 214 Literature & Society: "Societies Of Discipline And Control", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course description:

Optics is central to the arts of producing human subjects and governing our spatiotemporal deployment of vital forces. Yet, in the transition of societies from industrial to post-industrial modes of production, there seems to have occurred a parallel shift in governmental focus from merely producing and disciplining subjects at the material level to controlling them at the ideological. In this discussion-driven course, we will turn to works of theory and fiction in order to examine the basic tenets of discipline and control and consider the extent to which these social practices diverge and converge in our present era.

Course Syllabus (Fa13) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Power, The Subject, And Technological Rationality", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description and Objectives:

In this course, we will examine mechanisms of power and the processes by which these produce categories of subjectivity. Theoretically speaking, we will begin by considering these processes at the level of society and then dwell on their human experience at the level of the psyche. Here, we will aim to discover processes by which the subject reproduces conditions of domination by power at the level of psychic experience. Power-practices assume their condition of possibility by positing, on the one hand, that the category of the subject is a priori existent and, on the other, that …

Manifesting Stories: The Progression Of Comics From Print To Web To Print, Hannah Fattor

Summer Research

Publishing comics via the Internet is a growing practice among creative individuals who desire artistic and personal autonomy, and also wish to share a diverse range of stories. These webcomics have expanded the creative boundaries of storytelling with the digital medium. Additionally, publishing on the Internet offers the possibility to engage with markets that print comic books have ignored (particularly stories about minorities, stories which contain explicit or crude content, and stories with character designs deemed 'unattractive' and therefore unmarketable). Despite these opportunities the Internet presents, webcomics have returned to print culture as webcomic creators seek to print their webcomics. …

Politics And Heidegger: Aristotle, Superman, And Žižek, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay discusses Heidegger's thinking on the political and technology in the context of metaphysics in an age that is increasingly directed to both technology and the imaginary or the virtual. The context of Aristotelian phronesis is traced back to Aristotle's youth in Macedonia and the circumstance of war and world conquest, to the allure of a comic book character (that would be the Action Comic's figure of Superman) and the cinematic seduction of a pair of eyeglasses to conclude with a review of Latour's network actants and Žižek on Marxism (and Occupy Wall Street).

Plato. Spider-Man And The Meaning Of Life, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

Some versions of mysticism have taught that the ordinary world around us is sacred and wonderful, that the meaning of life is to be found not through some extraordinary knowledge or awareness, but in appreciating what already surrounds us. I believe that both Spider-Man comics and Plato’s dialogues offer exactly this deep vision, and that they introduce us to it in some remarkably similar ways. I cannot do any kind of justice here to the richness of either set of works, or to the variations of style and meaning within each of them. Instead I shall focus only on four …