Critical and Cultural Studies Commons^™

Film And Television After 9/11 [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

One of the necessary compromises a book such as Film and TV After 9/11 must make is the amount and variety of examples it can provide. In order to be the first book to cover the subject, the book sacrifices the types of materials covered and the variety of themes they depict. Although the editor, Wheeler Winston Dixon, does not do so, the book’s twelve essays slot into four basic categories: analogies, productions altered to suit the "post-9/11" mindset, post-9/11 productions with metaphorical rather than literal linkages to the event and pre-9/11 productions whose viewing must now take that day …

Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Recognizing the growing importance (at least for consumers) of video games as a popular form of narrative fiction, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska situate their collection, ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/interfaces as a text which is corrective, informative and explorative. In the first case, the editors sought essays which would move the critical discourse on video games away from the more familiar but reductive debates surrounding the "effects" of video games (especially on children) and their modes of representation (especially of the female form and violence). Indeed, these have become the sine qua non of video game criticism and one feeds the other …

You Need Love And Friendship For This Mission!: The Final Fantasy Series As Social Education For Japanese Youth, Ben Hourigan

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

From the mid to late 1990s, popular and academic discourse on video games, particularly in the United States, has focused on their supposed capacity to engender violent and otherwise anti-social behavior in youth. Much like ludologists' recent claims that video games are not a narrative medium, at least one reason for this is that commentators have too narrow an understanding of the diverse range of games that exist. In addition to this, game demonizers have demonstrated an inadequate understanding of the ways games are related to real life. In order to combat these misunderstandings, this chapter analyzes the role of …

Little Gods And Little Heroes: Hyperreal Ethics In God Games And Online Gaming, G. Christopher Williams

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Media critics, notably Jean Baudrillard, have suggested that the environment of simulations are to be defined as something more real than the real, or, in his terms, hyperreal. If hyperrealities are indeed the way that we can define the environment of multimedia technologies like video games, what sorts of ethical considerations should exist in a place that gamers conceive as more real than the real? This essay considers what ethical considerations are worth contemplating as gamers begin to take on the roles of gods and heroes in multiplayer video games. The little gods and heroes whose identities gamers have begun …

The Everyday Life Of Playing Cards, Ruralism, And The Case Of Russian Peasantry, Anna N. Kushkova

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This chapter addresses the issue of card playing in the Russian village of the second half of the nineteenth century. The author challenges a widely spread stereotype that Russian peasants did not play in any other way that merely for fun or for entertainment, but rather shows that this view is inconsistent with historical reality, which places card play at the center of daily social life. Social changes of village life after peasants' emancipation (1861) brought about systematic contacts of rural and urban population in many provinces of the country. As a result, a number of city habits and practices …

More Than Girlfriends, Geekettes, And Gladiatixes: Women, Feminism, And Fantasy Role-Playing Games, Rebecca Borah, Inez Schaechterle

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The only function women have in D&D is to serve cookies. Gary Gygax, the most well known of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, claims he did not make this remark (Gel214th). That he did or not is perhaps, some thirty years after the introduction of the first fantasy role-playing game, of concern only to him. The problematic position of women players is a secure feature of the RPG zeitgeist. While few male gamers may openly challenge the assumption that women can or should play fantasy role games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the function of …

The Horror Is Alive: Immersion, Spectatorship, And The Cinematics Of Fear In The Survival Horror Genre, Jay Mcroy

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The video game genre known as survival horror resembles contemporary horror cinema in that both increasingly popular forms of entertainment allow audiences to experience fear resulting from the development of suspense coupled with the dread and shock of encountering monstrosity. One need only note the remarkable success of next generation video game franchises like Resident Evil (1996) and Silent Hill (1999) to realize that, more than ever before, game players in their late teens and beyond long to immerse themselves within interactive nightmares that offer the kind of thrills and chills once available exclusively through horror literature and films. However, …

The Game's Afoot: Images Of Infinite Games In Samuel Delany's Trouble On Triton, Marc R. Zaldivar

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Games are frequently used in speculative literature as a metaphor for real-world activities. In Trouble on Triton, Samuel Delany uses several sorts of games in order to explore complex systems of modeling and interrelationships between fiction and reality, extending a tradition in science fiction of placing games at the very center of social reality. Zaldivar's essay seeks to define some of the concepts of game theory that can be used to understand this complex novel and its representation of human social life. In particular, Zaldivar explores finite and infinite games and their uses within a deconstructive theoretical framework. A …

Role Playing Games As Interactive Fiction, John Miller

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This chapter compares the experience of gaming and the experience of reading, and explores what that comparison might tell us about each. More specifically, it applies methods of literary analysis to the study of two narrative activities situated near the border of reading and gaming: Electronic hyperfictions and role-playing games. Miller first reviews literary theories of reader response and interactivity and notes how these have informed recent critical discussions of literary hyperfiction. He then critiques these discussions and the claims made for hyperfiction's liberating or empowering effect on readers: Contrary to the claims of some critics, such narratives generally fail …

Digital Extensions And Performed Players: A Theoretical Model For The Video/Computer Game, Ben Fisler

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Despite over twenty years of studies, scholars have yet to identify a productive theoretical model for the video game that does not depend on a fragmentary understanding of its form. Following Pierre Bourdieu's contention that the purpose of criticism is to understand cultural products as distinct scientific objects, and Marshall McLuhan's theory that the message and formative power of media are the media themselves, this study attempts to generate a foundational critical understanding of the video game. Building on the most lucrative intrinsic (such as David Myer's 1991 Computer Game Semiotics) and extrinsic (such as Jeffrey Goldstein's 1998 Immortal …

Allegorical Reductions And Social Reconstructions: An Introduction To Games, Gamers, And Gaming Cultures, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Games have become a central metaphor in representations of society, and most people are familiar enough with Lewis Carroll's Alice to know that when she passes through the looking glass she finds herself embroiled in a game a Chess which is also much more (Carroll 1992 [1897]). This strange game of Chess is simultaneously a simulation and an enactment of social life in Wonderland, and Carroll plots out Alice 's narrative path as a series of tactical Chess moves, which can be understood as both an attempt to win the game and to navigate through Wonderland and her …

Cold War Games And Postwar Art, Claudia Mesch

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

During the Cold War both “superpowers” used games, particularly chess, in order to construct an ideology of complete conflict and irreconcilable division between East and West. This essay focuses on the broad cultural challenge to divisive Cold War zero-sum mentality issued by a number of artists—André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Öyvind Fahlström, and Fluxus artists George Maciunas, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Takako Saito and Yoko Ono. These artists, in a second wave of game-focused art, returned to the concerns of surrealist art practice and to earlier cultural game theory. Even conceptual art production was impacted by the predetermined structure of …

When A Killer Body Isn’T Enough: Cross-Gender Identification In Action-Adventure Video Games, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

While sports games try to recreate the atmosphere of a stadium or of television broadcasts of games, role-playing and action-adventure games attempt to duplicate cinematography through animation. For Tomb Raider, the virtual reality created by the cinematic animation of the game produces an environment for male-to-female cross-gender identification, a topic that has received little critical attention. The sense of identification intended in this chapter comes from psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, who describe identification as a psychological process in which a subject assimilates an aspect, a property, a characteristic of another and transforms himself [or herself] totally or partially …

Imre Kertész's Nobel Prize, Public Discourse, And The Media, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, in his paper, "Imre Kertész's Nobel Prize, Public Discourse, and the Media," discusses aspects of media coverage in German-, Hungarian-, and English-language newspapers and magazines of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Imre Kertész. The perspective of Tötösy's analysis is to gauge the importance and impact of media coverage comparatively in the three cultural and media landscapes. Based on selected examples from newspapers and magazines with an international scope, Tötösy argues that the reception of Kertész's Nobel Prize suggests the convergence of the media (as the message) and the contents of the message within …

New Books In German Media And Communication Studies, Martin Grimm

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Websites Of Bi-National Heterosexual Couples, Sadashivam Rao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "An Analysis of Websites of Bi-national Heterosexual Couples," Sadashivam Rao discusses the design of world wide web homepages of bi-national couples. Rao shows how such websites become locations of the re-invention of notions of culture, generating a particular practice of representation, namely that of "hyphenating." Rao contends that the subjects of personal homepages enter the domain of the internet as entities already embedded in many other domains of discourse such as those of nationalism, culture, and media. Further, Rao proposes that this specific genre of websites reflects traces of these discourses. Of course, in the process of …

Media Icons Of War And The Instrumentalisation Of Images In Us-American Media Today, Reinhold Viehoff

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Media Icons of War and the Instrumenalisation of Images in US-American Media Today," Reinhold Viehoff argues that the destruction of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad in April 2004 by the US army represents an attempt to instrumentalise the logic of mass media as a strategy of public diplomacy. Viehoff explains the logic of mass media and public diplomacy of the US government and US media today in the context of the history of the destruction of monuments as played out on the landscape of media during and following the demise of the Soviet empire. Viehoff proposes that …

Mental Models Of Communication And Television Advertising, Detlev Nothnagel, Gilda Vera Aguirre

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their paper, "Mental Models of Communication and Television Advertising," Detlev Nothnagel and Gilda Vera Aguirre discuss the question whether and if so, how and to what extent television advertisement spots differ cross-culturally. In contrast to the majority of studies on this topic, Nothnagel and Aguirre concentrate on a protocol-based formal analysis that is statistically oriented. In a more general perspective, the relation between face-to-face communication and communication mediated by technology is scrutinized. Provided that there are important differences, one hypothesis would be that they originate in habits of communication older than those found in technically-mediated communication. That would, at …

Introduction To Media And Communication Studies At The University Of Halle-Wittenberg, Reinhold Viehoff

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

A New Look At Robert J. Flaherty's Documentary Art, Gerhard Lampe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "A New Look at Robert J. Flaherty's Documentary Art," Gerhard Lampe challenges the general view of documentary film director Robert J. Flaherty's work. In film studies, it is generally assumed that Flaherty ignored cinematographic developments and kept repeating himself by telling his stories of mythical battles of the individual against the powers of nature in always the same old-fashioned way. He is said to have improved his "photographic eye" with the help of improved lenses and more detailed shots; nevertheless, he did not show any interest in editing problems and sound recording. By comparing Flaherty's Nanook of …

Towards A Theory Of Emotional Communication, Anne Bartsch, Susanne Hübner

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their paper, "Towards a Theory of Emotional Communication," Anne Bartsch and Susanne Hübner outline a model of emotional communication where emotional communication is conceptualized as a process of mutual influence between the emotions of communication partners. To elaborate this general notion further, four working definitions of emotional communication are introduced, each of which is based on a different theory of emotions. In the second part of the paper, an integrative framework is proposed that reconciles the four working definitions and their underlying theories of emotion. According to this framework, emotional communication comprises three interrelated levels of complexity: 1) innate …

Selected Bibliography Of German-Language Books In Media, Communication, And Cultural Studies (2000-2005), Martin Grimm

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Television And Politics In The Former East Germany, Claudia Dittmar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Television and Politics in the Former East Germany," Claudia Dittmar analyzes how in the former East Germany (GDR) while television audience was restricted severly by government, at the same time West German broadcasts acquired a substantial audience and what the impact of these broadcasts had on the audience. West German television programs enjoyed a high level of popularity with the East German population, thereby posing the greatest competition to the GDR's own television stations. As a result, GDR television was forced to counteract the impact of West German television. Dittmar discusses how the West German media were …

Aesthetics And Audiovisual Metaphors In Media Perception, Kathrin Fahlenbrach

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Aesthetics and Audiovisual Metaphors in Media Perception," Kathrin Fahlenbrach presents a model of audiovisual analysis where focus is on audiovisual aesthetics perceived physically and affectively. Fahlenbrach starts out from the assumption that image and sound are inseparable in audiovisual media and must be treated as a unit, a "synchresis" (Chion). Fahlenbrach proposes that only this premise is able to cover the pre-consciously perceived elements sufficiently, namely the sensorial and affective structures of audiovisual aesthetics. Fahlenbrach articulates some aspects for an audiovisual aesthetics that concentrate on the interfaces between audiovisual perception and audiovisual design and employs to this …

The Canonization Of German-Language Digital Literature, Florian Hartling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "The Canonization of German-language Digital Literature," Florian Hartling discusses "Net Literature," a relatively young phenomenon, that has its roots in experimental visual and concrete poetry and hypertext. With the use of new media technology, this new genre of literature has acquired much interest and is now considered to be one of the most important influences in contemporary art. Not only does Net Literature connect sound, video, and animation with interactivity and allows new forms of artistic expression, it also impacts significantly on the traditional functions of the literary system. Hartling suggests that, in relation to Net Literature, …

Out Of The Blue: Re-Evaluating Electra-Glide In Blue, William Blick

Publications and Research

The 1970s was a time of moral ambiguity for the cinema. The cult- favorite, Electra Glide in Blue demonstrates the polarization of ideologies in America at the time. In this film, there are several conflicting views of the Vietnam War, "Hippies", drugs, conservatism, communes, and the mistrust of authority that made up a zeitgeist of the time. This short article defines the film as a examination of the ambiguity of the 1970s.

Oy Science Fiction: On Genre, Criticism, And Alien Love: An Interview With Marleen S. Barr, Marlene S. Barr, Ximena Gallardo C., C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Abstract]

Marleen S. Barr is a pioneer of feminist science fiction criticism and a leader in the fight against the ghettoizing influences of genre-labeling in literary criticism. While the noteworthy Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (University of Iowa Press, 1992) has been praised as Barr's seminal work in feminist science fiction criticism and theory, it is in Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies (U of Iowa P, 2000) where she takes on literary critics' discriminatory practices against genre fiction in general and fantasy and science fiction in particular.

Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting And The Condition Of Women, Ludmila Volná

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting and the Condition of Women" Ludmila Volná presents a critical culture-based reading of Desai's novel Fasting, Feasting, a work that deals with the condition of women (not only) in India. Volná analyzes both female and the male sensitivities in the novel where Desai makes use of a double symbolic of food expressed throughout the novel by (not only literal) hunger. In Volná's view, Desai's Hindu imagery of sun/fire as patriarchal power and water, which, as the counterpart of the sun and fire, represents recognition of women’s condition and a possible way to …

Cultural Studies, Composition, And Pedagogy, Mark Mullen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Cultural Studies, Composition, and Pedagogy," Mark Mullen argues that while much cultural studies work makes claims for the transformative powers of a radical educational agenda, such work is often, surprisingly, deeply resistant to a complex discussion of pedagogy. The response to Mary Louise Pratt's theory of the "contact zone" offers a useful case study in this regard, and indicates the way in feelgood narratives of student and teacher empowerment are only made possible by a refusal to analyze the classroom as a workplace. Reliance upon depictions of the classroom as essentially an empty space playing host to …

The Staged Self In Mary Carleton's Autobiographical Narratives, Geraldine Wagner

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "The Staged Self in Mary Carleton's Autobiographical Narratives," Geraldine Wagner examines Mary Carleton's use of romance and picaresque modes of self-representation to appropriate and redefine counterfeiting as a legitimate means to identity. The most notorious female criminal of the English Restoration, Mary Carleton, captured the public's imagination in 1662 when she stood trial for bigamy. Although acquitted on insufficient evidence, the allegation that she was a common shoemaker's wife counterfeiting the identity of a German noblewoman spawned a war of pamphlets of competing biographical accounts between Carleton and her detractors. Wagner argues that these attempts to confine …