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In contemporary cult film scholarship, the experiences of cult fans are too often subject to scholarly speculation rather than empirical observation, and tend to be limited to certain kinds of audience responses - deviant, rebellious, subversive. Even in instances where actual cult fans have been considered at all, scholars have largely produced synchronic snapshots rather than insights derived from sustained programmes of audience research. This study focuses on a faction of the increasingly visible cult following which has emerged in recent years around the British film The Wicker Man. Drawing on the personal testimonies of eight enduring fans of the film, I explicate and explore the range of experiences and complex processes involved in becoming and remaining a fan of The Wicker Man. I develop an approach to cult film fandom which aims to provide an account of the origins and evolution of a specific cult film formation. Combining textual analysis with a rich body of ethnographic research I collected over eight years, I tease out the complexities of the film's initial import for these fans and proceed to examine how their relationships with the film develop over time. In the meantime, I engage with a number of under-explored and uncharted concepts of cult which include issues relating to personal resonance, aesthetic experiences, affects, as well as the quasireligious dimension. The main argument of the study is that the cult film experience can be perceived as a form of personal mythopoesis -a process which engages the individual in modes of personal and collective mythmaking, and within which the integrity and coherence of the self is at stake. Drawing on theories in cognitive psychology and concepts originating from within personal mythology, I develop an original model of cult fan subjectivity which foregrounds the self's preconscious and experiential dimensions. Demonstrating the significance of generational factors and cultural location, I propose to show how the respondents in my study share a preconscious disposition to The Wicker Man. My study explicates and explores the relationship between cult film fandom and the mythmaking process by focusing on three specific trajectories through which the fan-text relationships analysed here develop. The first explores the formative experiences of these fans, emphasising early cultural investments which share aesthetic and thematic links with The Wicker Man and which predispose them to the film in a number of complex and fascinating ways. The second trajectory centres on the fans' initial encounters with the film, paying close attention to the aesthetic experiences they undergo and proceeding to observe the trace manifestations of these experiences in subsequent fan practices beyond the viewing context. The final trajectory examines the ways in which the fans continue to interact with the film over time, and discusses elements of their identities and experiences which uniquely position them in relation to The Wicker Man's dialectical treatment of myth. The conclusion draws together the main findings of the study and considers the relationship between personal mythopoesis, cult fandom and the processes of individuation to argue for ways of understanding cult mythopocsis in terms of a religious process.

Without consciousness we become victim instead of actors- even if it is only a question of acting victims. And in the make belief of our lives, the audience is self (Fugard in Frank 2004: 53). The primary concern of this study is the comparison of video interpretations of Athol Fugard with their adaptations as visual texts. It has been argued that 'the playwright's creative labour ends with the completion of the script' (Kidnie 2009: 15).Therefore, amongst other issues this dissertation will explore the politics of production at play during adaptation from printed version to screenplays. My assumption is that a comparison between the printed texts and video versions will add to the understanding of the effectiveness of Fugard's dramatic techniques and comprehension of literary texts; images are easy to decipher by inexperienced interpreters if guided. For the purpose of my presentation I adapt the reader response theoretical position of Stanley Fish based on a comparison that will be explored in terms of my own response to both the written text and visual texts, and in line with other responsed to the play. / English Studies / M.A.

Without consciousness we become victim instead of actors- even if it is only a question of acting victims. And in the make belief of our lives, the audience is self (Fugard in Frank 2004: 53). The primary concern of this study is the comparison of video interpretations of Athol Fugard with their adaptations as visual texts. It has been argued that 'the playwright's creative labour ends with the completion of the script' (Kidnie 2009: 15).Therefore, amongst other issues this dissertation will explore the politics of production at play during adaptation from printed version to screenplays. My assumption is that a comparison between the printed texts and video versions will add to the understanding of the effectiveness of Fugard's dramatic techniques and comprehension of literary texts; images are easy to decipher by inexperienced interpreters if guided. For the purpose of my presentation I adapt the reader response theoretical position of Stanley Fish based on a comparison that will be explored in terms of my own response to both the written text and visual texts, and in line with other responsed to the play. / English Studies / M.A.

Text in English / This study offers a close look at Andrew Niccol’s (b 1964) satirical film S1mOne from a biocultural perspective emphasising the technological simulation of a Hollywood celebrity and the farce ensuing from her creation. The film is based on Niccol’s assumption that the hypertrophied culture into which he places his cultural object will be one in which human traits of sociality will be well advanced and the highly demanding genre of satire will be entertaining, persuasive, and on occasion punitive in its ridicule of Hollywood. The study makes a contribution to the idea that a cultural object/text operates as a rapid mechanism for propagating cognition — it shows how Niccol has adapted to less than optimal conditions in his world of Hollywood — in this case he parodies the role of the director of Hollywood films in the figure of Taransky. Cognition is understood as that series of mental processes which include attention, memory, learning (from mimicry as well as other forms), problem solving, ratiocination, and making decisions. Niccol relies on his audience's embodied capacities and skills of recognition, thinking, feeling, remembering, and accounting for his message to be understood. Niccol’s technical skill in editing his narrative to emphasise the satire of the narrative of Taransky and Simone is a critical part of the film’s success. Interpersonal and social propagation of cognition is achieved through reference to other cultural artefacts recalling a variety of similar ideas used in film and other visual creations. The cultural significance of the simulacrum, Simone, is that she is a vehicle for and a form of socially propagated cognition. The powerful imagistic impression of film helps to structure internalised cognitive artefacts in the viewers who are expected to reflect on their habits of viewing and thinking. When a film, artwork, poem or novel is analysed, then such a cultural object becomes a vehicle of and for propagating cognition. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Art History)

Text in English / This study offers a close look at Andrew Niccol’s (b 1964) satirical film S1mOne from a biocultural perspective emphasising the technological simulation of a Hollywood celebrity and the farce ensuing from her creation. The film is based on Niccol’s assumption that the hypertrophied culture into which he places his cultural object will be one in which human traits of sociality will be well advanced and the highly demanding genre of satire will be entertaining, persuasive, and on occasion punitive in its ridicule of Hollywood. The study makes a contribution to the idea that a cultural object/text operates as a rapid mechanism for propagating cognition — it shows how Niccol has adapted to less than optimal conditions in his world of Hollywood — in this case he parodies the role of the director of Hollywood films in the figure of Taransky. Cognition is understood as that series of mental processes which include attention, memory, learning (from mimicry as well as other forms), problem solving, ratiocination, and making decisions. Niccol relies on his audience's embodied capacities and skills of recognition, thinking, feeling, remembering, and accounting for his message to be understood. Niccol’s technical skill in editing his narrative to emphasise the satire of the narrative of Taransky and Simone is a critical part of the film’s success. Interpersonal and social propagation of cognition is achieved through reference to other cultural artefacts recalling a variety of similar ideas used in film and other visual creations. The cultural significance of the simulacrum, Simone, is that she is a vehicle for and a form of socially propagated cognition. The powerful imagistic impression of film helps to structure internalised cognitive artefacts in the viewers who are expected to reflect on their habits of viewing and thinking. When a film, artwork, poem or novel is analysed, then such a cultural object becomes a vehicle of and for propagating cognition. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Art History)

Text in English / This study offers a fine-grained analysis of James Cameron’s film, Avatar (2009), on several theoretical fronts to provide a view of the film from a cognitive cultural studies perspective. The insights gained from cognitive theory are used to situate the debate by indicating the value cognitive theories have in cultural criticism. The critical discourse analysis of Avatar that results is a vehicle for the central concern of this study, which is to understand the diverse, often contradictory, meaning-making exhibited by Avatar audiences. A focus on the construction of empathic responses to the film’s messages investigates the success of this polysemy. Ihe central propositions of the study are that meanings and interpretations of the experience of viewing Avatar are made discursively; they are situated in definable traditions, mores and values; and this meaning-making takes place in a cognitive framework which allows for the technical reproduction and reception of the experience while providing powerful, emerging and cognitively plausible narratives. In an attempt to situate the film’s commercial success and its plethora of awards, including an Oscar for best art direction, the analysis takes a critical view of Cameron’s use of cultural stereotypes and the framing of the exotic other, and considers the continuing development of these elements over the whole series and product line or, as Henry Jenkins (2007) defines it, “transmedia”. In drawing the theoretical boundaries of the methodologies used in this study and in arguing for their complementarities, the study contributes to a renewal of Raymond Williams’ (1961) mostly forgotten claim of the cross-disciplinary cognitive dimension of cultural studies and demonstrates an affirmation of this formulation as cognitive cultural studies. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (Art History)