Television Commons^™

The Catastrophic Horizon: Contemporary Israeli Cinema's Critique Of Neo-Liberal Israel, Yael Munk

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, Munk analyzes the gradual decline in social solidarity of the once-socialist Israeli society has become discernible in arts and society alike. This process has been voiced in films that described the dangers of a segregated society in a graphic manner, pointing an accusing finger at what Israeli society has become. In these films, the prolonged Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories considered by some as the source of all evil, has been removed from the intellectual foreground in order to provide by a deeper look into the catastrophic outcomes of the social dead end Zionism has reached. …

Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case, Tamar Berger

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Suburban Realities: The Israeli Case" Tamar Berger discusses the nature of the new building in Israel in the last 3-4 decades. Israel, she claims, has been going through a process of massive suburbanization, which is drastically changing the face of the country. Some of the features of the new space are similar to those of other places, globally, but it has its particularity, the result of both the local spatial history and the nature of Israeli society. Suburbs in general are hard to define. Still, a set of typical features of the Israeli suburbs can be noted: …

Irony, Revenge, And The Naqba In Yehuda Amichai’S Early Work, Hannan Hever

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article offers a materialist reading of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the most well-known Israeli poet outside Israel. The article explores the political role of irony in Amichai’s early work, situating him as a prominent member of the “State Generation” poetry. Challenging accepted readings, the essay argues that Amichai’s poems that deal with the 1948 war, should be read as a post-traumatic response, which uses irony and rich and bold metaphorical devices to distance itself from the horrors of the war, and therefore also form the political and ethical meanings of the Naqba. That Amichai’s poetry translates the language …

Introduction: Israeli Critical Reflection After Post-Zionism, Or The Opening As Interpretive Horizon, Oded Nir, Ari Ofengenden

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay attempts to situate this special issue as an intervention, from a materialist perspective, in the field of Israeli cultural studies. We interrogate the common periodizations of Israeli culture, and its contemporary characterization as “post-post-Zionist.” We try to show that the latter betrays an unacknowledged failure of historical narration, present throughout Israeli cultural production. We then argue that rather than being satisfied with this failure, the goal of Israeli cultural critique today should be to search for new ways to narrate “big” history, to reassert the indispensability of relating personal experience of the present, in all its details, to …

"The Chinese Animation Industry: From The Mao Era To The Digital Age", Stephanie Jones

Master's Projects and Capstones

Since the 1950’s the Chinese Animation industry has been trying to create a unique national style for China. The national style of the 1950’s and early 1960’s was one of freedom, fantasy, and creativity. With the success of “Heroic Little Sisters of the Grassland”/草原英雄小姐妹(1965), the government administration, namely Jiang Qing of the “Gang of Four”, demanded that all animation should follow specific guidelines based on Social Realism guidelines. This in turn, ushered in a new national style of animation during the Cultural Revolution(1966-1976). During this ten-year period government policies imposed strict restrictions on animators and cause a drain of creative …

Slotus, Alison F. Huntley, Michael F.X. Daley

Honors Thesis

When a paranoid, image-obsessed woman becomes Second Lady of the United States, she will protect herself and her family from the (often non-existent) eyes of the press no matter what - despite her three step-children’s protests.

Recollection And Social Status, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

Television sets appeared in homes across the world during the 1950s and 1960s. Early audiences were researched in terms of ratings and so on, but the perceptions and experiences of early television viewers went unrecorded. There are no ready-made, bottom–up companion pieces to top–down institutional histories. In the absence of such work, life- story research offers one of our best means of attempting to capture the experiences of early viewers. This chapter offers an argument about the nature of memory. It argues that personal recollection, in memory interviews and other contexts, is practical; that people announce their pasts in a …

İbne, Gey, Lubunya: A Queer Critique Of Lgbti+ Discourses In The New Cinema Of Turkey, Azmi Mert Erdem

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my thesis, I examine the intersections between liberalism, neoliberal globalism, and LGBTI+ visibility and identity politics, through films that present “openly” non-normative sexualities through cis/transgender male, female, or non-binary characters in the new cinema of Turkey. First, I survey existing scholarship on how liberal capitalism impacts the formation of LGBTI+ subjectivities and identity politics. Furthermore, I trace how non-normative sexualities, practices, and discourses evolved along with socioeconomic and political shifts in the Turkish Republic following the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, I review Turkey’s adoption of neoliberal ideologies in the 1980s and how these ideologies engage with its local, heterogenous gender …

From Vatican Radio To Inter Mirifica And Beyond - 20th Century Popes On [Im]Media.Pdf, Jon Radwan, Dennis Mahon

CHDCM Publications

[Im]mediacy, a meaningful encounter or contact where there is no space between participants, is a central concept in understanding how 20th century Popes have learned to communicate. The 20th century was characterized by extensive growth of mass media technologies. Modern papal approaches to communication developed from an instrumental to an [im]mediate contact orientation. Where media were originally seen as important tools for sending messages, John Paul II made interpersonal contact the focal point of papal communication via his nearly continuous world tour. The tour itself is mass mediated for the world to see, and each pastoral event is an immediate …

Hispanic Stereotypes In Contemporary Film, Emily M. Pressler

Honors College Theses

Stereotypes are present even in the most popular films. Groups of people are often misrepresented in a way that is entertaining, but not necessarily truthful, causing viewers to have a narrow, often incorrect, view of a particular culture or people. This research serves as an analysis of selected contemporary American films that feature a Hispanic character or cultural element. My aim is twofold: first, to shed light on the stereotypes surrounding Hispanics and the excessive appearance of these stereotypical representations in popular U.S. films, and second, to promote open-mindedness by educating others on the cultural diversity of Spanish speakers, especially …

Homebound: Sts-M1301 A Study On Television Writing In The Science Fiction Genre, Matthew Crouch

Senior Honors Theses

This project is a scene-by-scene outline of an original television pilot script in the science fiction genre. The outline is based on research conducted in both the television and science fiction fields, providing the project with a firm foundation in television screenwriting structure as well as insights into the characteristics of the science fiction genre. Additional research was carried out on the topic of developing realistic, engaging characters for the screen. This project serves to broaden the writer’s portfolio upon graduation while giving him a chance to study the world of television, which contains numerous differences from the field of …

A Commentary On Narrative Platforms, Cinematic Universes, And Consumers Formerly Known As The Audience, Andreas Treske, Aras Ozgun

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

No abstract provided.

Motherhood, Vulnerability And Resistance In The Elysium Testament By Mary O’Donnell, María Elena Jaime De Pablos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Mary O’Donnell’s novel The Elysium Testament (1999) narrates the story of Nina, an accomplished grotto restorer, but a neglectful wife and mother according to the Irish patriarchal symbolic order –the “register of regulatory ideality” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 18). Estranged from her husband, Neil, she sends him a series of letters, her “testament,” where some of the most significant aspects of her life are exposed. Readers discover that Nina’s and Neil’s marriage begins to crumble after the birth of their second child, Roland, to whom Nina attributes a frightening dual nature, which she tries to control through physical and psychological …

Chase Riboud’S Hottentot Venus (2003) And The Neo-Victorian: The Problematization Of South-Africa And The Vulnerability And Resistance Of The Black Other, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article touches upon issues of captivity, suppression, misrepresentations and exclusion of black people from a historical and cultural point of view through the analysis of Chase-Riboud’s neo-Victorian novel Hottentot Venus (2003). It also focuses on the implications and consequences for contemporary South Africa of situations of slavery and exploitation of African descended peoples. Notions of identity and moral and legal inclusion of black women into past and contemporary societies and communities will be also discussed from the point of view of postcolonial and gender and sexuality studies. The complexities of blackness and the violation of human rights as a …

The Commodified Body And Post/In Human Subjectivities In Frears’S Dirty Pretty Things And Romanek’S Never Let Me Go, Rocio Carrasco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Following new materialist analysis, this article takes the body as the central locus of analysis, and relates it to broader questions such as ethics, ideology, power and/or technologies. Specifically, it revolves around the idea of embodied subjectivity as articulated by scholars Rosi Braidotti, Sherryl Vint or Cary Wolfe, whereby body and subjectivity are indissolubly and interestingly connected. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) exploit the idea of the commodified body, understood here as a vulnerable body, a disposable commodity at the service of powerful and/or wealthy people. Victims of the cruelties inflicted …

Introduction, Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, Manuela Coppola

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This special issue addresses contemporary representations of “vulnerable” bodies in transit in Anglophone literature and culture and explores their strategies of resistance. The use of the expression “bodies in transit” in this issue has to be understood both as a reference to the materiality of diasporic, exiled, migrating, trafficked bodies, and as an allusion to the metaphorical transition of these marginalized subjects from alienation to regeneration in multiple contexts. The interdisciplinary contributions in this special issue tackle vulnerability as a marginal(ized) and potentially enabling condition entailing the crossing of bodily, sexual, mental, ethical, cultural, and national borders. Ranging from literature …

The Justice System Is Criminal, Raven Delfina Otero-Symphony

2020 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

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

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student 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 Examination Of News Media Representation Of Indigenous Murder Victims In Canada: A Case Study Of Colten Boushie’S Death, Latasha Vanevery

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The power of media outlets such as newspaper and televised news coverage could shape public perception and influence our policies on issues addressed in the news. More specifically, the media representations of Indigenous people in Canada often include racism, stereotypical assumptions, power struggles, and inaccurate accounts of the event being captured (Johnson, 2011). As a result, the western dominant perspective of Indigenous people would not be challenged resulting in the public perceiving Indigenous people as a group to be overlooked upon. To date, existing research on the media representations of Indigenous murder victims in Canada has focused solely on missing …

Resistance To Neocolonialism In Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory, Zeng Jun

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Resistance to Neocolonialism in Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory" Jun ZENG claims that the introduction of Western Literary Theory in the past forty years of China's reform and opening up was carried out under the background of neo-colonialism. "Western imagination" in the discourse of contemporary Chinese literary theory was an important aspect of the strategy of cultural resistance under the overwhelming influence of Western neocolonialism. Contemporary Chinese literary theory no longer simply regards Western literary theory in the twentieth century as a bourgeois literary ideology; instead, it adopts a "de-ideological" attitude to return to the issues of literature, …

Mo Yan’S Reception In China And A Reflection On The Postcolonial Discourse, Binghui Song

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Mo Yan's Reception in China and a Reflection on the Postcolonial Discourse" Binghui Song argue that the controversial style and themes of Mo Yan's works are necessitated by the interconnected yet different contexts of China and the rest of the world, only by means of which Mo Yan can let his voice be heard. As one of the most excellent and unique contemporary Chinese writers, Mo Yan has exerted extensive influence on Chinese readers, and his works have also caused various controversies over the past 30 years. His winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature, rather than …

The End Of The Nobel Era And The Reconstruction Of The World Republic Of Letters, Guohua Zhu, Yonghua Tang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "The End of the Nobel Era and the Reconstruction of the World Republic of Letters" Guohua Zhu and Yonghua Tang critically examine mechanisms of cultural hegemony associated with the Nobel Prize in Literature from a neocolonial lens. Borrowing from Casanova's idea of the "World Republic of Letters" and its attentiveness to geopolitics, the essay proceeds to reconstruct the dialectical relations between the nation and the world. It does so, in the first place, by documenting and analyzing the process of negotiation and bargaining entailed in the construction of global cultural hegemony and thereby examine the functions and …

Restaging World Literature In The Age Of Neoliberalism/Neocolonialism, Shaobo Xie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Restaging World Literature in the Age of Neoliberal­ism/Neocolonia­­lism" Shaobo Xie argues that Goethe's notion of world literature spells a genuine universalism that contributes to resistance to neoliberal imperialism. In the age of neocolonial­ism/ne­oliberalism all conduct, and all spheres of human life are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics and neoliberalism both as a govern­ing rationality and as an economic policy is penetrating into every part of the world. The politics that is really heter­ogeneous or external to the rule of neoliberal capitalism in the neocolonial global present consists in thinking towards new possibilities of organizing …

"The Politics Of Literature In Michel Foucault: Veridiction, Fiction And Desire", Azucena G. Blanco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article is based on two hypotheses. The first is that in the later Foucault we would find a reformulation of the status that literature had occupied in his work and the development of a politics of literature (already developed in “Sujetos irregulares: ficción y política en el Sade de Michel Foucault”). The second considers that fiction and desire are inseparably joined, which leads me to analyse the logic of Sade as logic of desire in the lectures that Foucault gave on the author at the University of Buffalo (1970). A reading of both aspects together needs to be …

Processes Of Subjectivation: The Biopolitics And Politics Of Literature In The Later Foucault, Azucena G. Blanco

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The last few years saw the publication of the lectures given by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France from 1970-71 until the year of his death, 1984. In May 2015, Éditions du Seuil published Théories et institutions pénales (1971-1972), which is the last volume of the series. Knowledge of these published lectures has led to a return to the French thinker’s work and to a transformation of the studies on subjectivity and politics both in literary theory and philosophy. The study of his work, in particular of his later theoretical production and of its reception, is therefore necessary and …

Bibliography: Life, Illness And Disabilities In Life Writing And Medical Narratives, I-Chun Wang, Jonathan Hart, Cindy Chopoidalo, David Porter, Shu-Hua Chung

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Landscapes Of Illness, Politics Of Segregation And Discourse Of Empathy In The 19th Century Leprosy Narratives Of Hawaii, I-Chun Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Leprosy is one of the oldest known human diseases, recognized throughout the world. Leprosy causes serious damage to the nervous system, often resulting in deformity in the absence of an effective treatment; sufferers were often left at the mercy of its natural process or were segregated from others due to the fear of contagion. The places ravaged by leprosy became lands of fear. Modern science has shown that leprosy bacilli have a high rate of infectivity but a rather low rate of pathogenicity, and above ninety percent of people are equipped with immunity to leprosy. Leper colonies as described in …

Disability, Victorian Biopolitics And Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Hiu Wai Wong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Disability, Victorian Biopolitics and Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray,” Hiu Wai Wong discusses The Picture of Dorian Gray as Oscar Wilde’s life writing of the androgynous beauty. Extending his praise of Lord Alfred Douglas in De Profundis, Wilde’s descriptions of Dorian as the androgyne can be read as the demonstration of Michel Foucault’s techniques of the self. She argues that the androgynous beauty can be a strategy of bodily practice that overthrows the Victorian biopolitics which enforces a rigid gender role. Moreover, she explores the notion of camp and Judith Butler’s theory of performance to explain the …

More Migrants With Nowhere To Go?, Mary E. Theis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "More Migrants with Nowhere to Go?” Mary Theis reframes the stories of the Tai Dam and discusses this group of people, who migrated from Vietnam and Laos to Thailand and then to Iowa in 1975 after the wars in Southeast Asia when they virtually had nowhere to go. It is based on interviews with some of the 1,200 Tai Dam who were invited by Governor Robert Ray to resettle in Des Moines, Iowa, and nearby cities. The stories are contextualized by research on U.S. policies on immigration and the current precarious fates of other migrants in the United States …

Albert Camus' Social, Cultural And Political Migrations, Benaouda Lebdai Pr

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Albert Camus’ social, cultural and political migrations,” Benaouda LEBDAI analyses Albert Camus’ posthumous autofiction The First man, a fascinating self-representation and self -telling. Found after his deadly car accident, the manuscript adds a tragic dimension to the disguised autobiography. This paper demonstrates Camus’ capacity to migrate from one world to another, looks into the reasons behind such attitudes and stresses the significance of an outstanding life account within the on-going debate between France and Algeria about his political stands during colonial Algeria. His vision of the indigenous people, the Algerians, and of the future of colonial Algeria, …