This thesis examines the ongoing trends in depictions of Native American Indians in popular mainstream media from the last two decades. Stereotypes in general and in relation to Native American Indians are discussed, and a pattern of stereotype reactions to colonists’ perceived strains is identified. An analysis of popular television shows, movies, and books with contemporary Native characters will demonstrate new trends which we might consider transformed or emerging stereotypes of Native people in non-Native media. These trends will not only be shown to have emerged from more general national and regional stereotypes of Native identity, but will also demonstrate a continuation of the historical willingness of colonists to rely on more virulent Native stereotypes in cases where they perceive some Native threat. Particular attention will be paid to the denial of Indian identity in the southeast and northeast through comedy and mockery and, on the other hand, the exaggeration of Indian identity in the western United States through shape-shifting, paranormal encounters, mystery, and more conventional Native interests. At the end of the thesis, some possible methods for grappling with these problematic portrayals will be discussed.

No other population has contributed more to American society and received so little in return."1 Until recently the Mexican-Americans had remained quietly in the background, apparently accepting their station in life with little or no desire to improve it--a "sleeping giant," as some politicians have called this politically potential group. Statistics show that relatively few Mexican-Americans have become acculturated and assimilated into Anglo-American society (See page 9). The great majority have retained their Spanish language and their family traditions, and have remained more or less static in their economic position and isolated from the mainstream of life in the United States. While most ethnically differentiated groups in United States have used the educational system as a "major vehicle for social mobility," Mexican-Americana either have not taken full advantage of the opportunity, or it has been inaccessible to them.

Readers of Harriette Simpson Arnow’s most well-loved novel The Dollmaker had to wait sixteen years for her next work, The Weedkiller’s Daughter (1970). Clearly, the book was no quick cash-in. By the time Arnow was in her fourth decade of writing, the literary landscape had changed radically. The reviews for The Weedkiller’s Daughter reflect this shift. While many reviews of this contemporary account of a daydreaming teenage girl’s life in suburban Michigan praised Arnow’s sensitivity in portraying adolescents, a vocal minority took Arnow to task for the book’s anachronisms in post-Woodstock America. One review attacked the main character for being a “dull little frump.” Another snidely recommended the novel to “a few middle-aged virgins in Nebraska.” It would be grossly misstating the facts to claim that the mixed reception of The Weedkiller’s Daughter alone drove Arnow to write history and historical fiction subsequently. But one cannot ignore the fact that Arnow shunned the writing of contemporary fiction after 1970. Arguably, her choice to compartmentalize her rural Kentucky past from her suburban Michigan present cost her readers. This paper presentation is based on my own work with the Arnow Collection at the University of Kentucky’s Special Collections, both as an assistant archivist and as a researcher-scholar. I conclude from studying manuscripts and reviews of the novel that Arnow was unfairly pigeonholed as a regionalist writer, charged with writing barely fictionalized social commentary, when The Weedkiller’s Daughter was created as a reimagining, rather than a recapitulation, of themes found in The Dollmaker.

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Book Summary: Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies expands the geographical scope of scholarship about southern swamps. Although the physical environments that form its central subjects are scattered throughout the southeastern United States―the Atchafalaya, the Okefenokee, the Mississippi River delta, the Everglades, and the Great Dismal Swamp―this evocative collection challenges fixed notions of place and foregrounds the ways in which ecosystems shape cultures and creations on both local and global scales. Across seventeen scholarly essays, along with a critical introduction and afterword, Swamp Souths introduces new frameworks for thinking about swamps in the South and beyond, with an emphasis on subjects including Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, intersectional feminism, and the tropical sublime. The volume analyzes canonical writers such as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, but it also investigates contemporary literary works by Randall Kenan and Karen Russell, the films Beasts of the Southern Wild and My Louisiana Love, and music ranging from swamp rock and zydeco to Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade. Navigating a complex assemblage of places and ecosystems, the contributors argue with passion and critical rigor for considering anew the literary and cultural work that swamps do. This dynamic collection of scholarship proves that swampy approaches to southern spaces possess increased relevance in an era of climate change and political crisis.

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Book Summary: Part I, 'Theoretical Openings,' of Volume 39 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction contains outstanding contributions by leading interactionists on welfare reform, history, biography and memory. The three chapters in Part II, 'Studies in Social Construction,' interrogate the complexities of social interaction, interpersonal and professional identity, and the cinematic representation of alcoholism. Part III takes up important interpretive interventions on the topics of imagination and intimate deception in everyday life.

Although Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous American film stars, and a monumental cultural figure, her film work has been studied far less than her biography. Applying C.S. Peirce’s semiotic categories of icon, index, and symbol, this research explains how Monroe acquired meaning as an actress: Monroe was a powerful, but simplified, public image (an icon); an indicator of a particular historical and social context (an index); and an embodiment of significant cultural debates (a symbol). Analyzing Monroe as an icon reveals how her personal life, which contradicted her official publicity story, generated public sympathy and led to a perceived intimacy between the star and her fans. Monroe’s persona developed through her roles in films about marriage. We’re Not Married (1952) and Niagara (1953) expose the pitfalls of marriage. In response to fan criticism of Monroe’s aggressive persona in these films, however, Darryl F. Zanuck, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), consciously distanced Monroe both from her aggressive persona and her implicit criticism of marriage. Monroe’s films, in particular, The Seven Year Itch (1955), Bus Stop (1956), and Some Like it Hot (1959), also revealed the tensions inherent in postwar understandings of female sexuality. Monroe’s role in her final completed film, The Misfits (1960), both acknowledges and resists her status as a symbol. This film unites Monroe’s screen persona and off-screen life in resistance to conventional values: her character embraces divorce, lives with a man who is not her husband, and openly criticizes men who betray trust. This film most extensively interweaves Monroe as an icon, an index, and a symbol. In so doing, it reveals how Monroe embodied the contradictions inherent in both postwar culture and Hollywood stardom.

This thesis seeks to explore the commonalities between religion and video games, ultimately making the argument that video games employ religion as a tool to make some deeper commentary on (in this case) American society and culture. This will be done through a detailed analysis of the game play, narrative, and religious elements at work in three different video games, as seen through the lenses of Queer Theory and Civil Religion. Furthermore, it will attempt to show that, just as gamers are struggling with their previously insular community opening up to the outside world, America has also not yet figured out what role video games can fulfill in society. This thesis seeks to provide one possible answer: the potential for video games to become tools of inquiry, sites of disruption, and, like film and books, provide commentary on our values as a society.

This dissertation examines professional wrestling in the U.S., in particular, live and television shows produced by the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Through the examination, it addresses complex issues of authenticity, audience, commodification, and discipline in contemporary popular culture and media. I use three approaches in this study. First, I apply the theory of culture industry, developed by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, to understand WWE wrestling. I examine how the WWE thoroughly stylizes its products to attract fans and condition them to repeat the same calculable reactions. However, contemporary fans often refuse to react as the WWE wants them to. By analyzing the complex interplay between the WWE and fans, I update and re-contextualize Adorno and Horkheimer's idea that the culture industry exerts total control over consumers. Second, I examine the recent rise of "nonfictional" narratives in professional wrestling, narratives that candidly acknowledge wrestling's scripted nature. I demonstrate how the WWE uses nonfictional narratives to present fans new ways of finding realness in wrestling and respecting wrestlers. I also point out that, by utilizing both fictional and nonfictional narratives, the WWE has developed clever ways of balancing between offering controversial products and transmitting conservative and respectable messages to enhance its populist appeal. Third, I look at the history of professional wrestling through theories of modernity and postmodernity. I grasp it as a dynamic process in which wrestling has expressed its challenge against and ambivalence towards dominant ideologies, values, and masculinities of modernity in multiple ways. I also examine the predominance of obsessed subjectivities in contemporary WWE wrestling as a unique form of postmodern expression. I argue that obsessively competitive and self-destructive performances of WWE wrestlers illuminate the contradiction of the construction of modern "disciplined" subjects described by Michel Foucault. They also reveal that in the culture where pain and destruction of human beings are among the most desired objects, the WWE has to endanger real live bodies of its wrestlers in order to survive and thrive. WWE is a rich, problematic, and compelling cultural phenomenon that illuminates issues and contradictions of itself, and the system it belongs to.