In the field of research within film studies which consider how aspects such as gender or race affect the portrayal of a character, the aspect of characters' body sizes are not always taken into account. By analysing the fat characters in the popular children's and young adult film series about Harry Potter, I bring attention to the fact that the use of stereotypes is significant in these characterisations, and further contributes to the marginalisation of this particular group of people. I looked specifically at what the characters had in common with each other, and if they adhered to already established stereotypes concerning fat people, and found that the one thing they all share is a lack of academic or intellectual skill to varying degrees, which is in line with the common stereotypes of fat people as dumb. I further analysed the differences between the fat men and fat women in the series, and found that fat men were a far more common occurrence than fat women, and that fat girls did not even exist in these stories. This is not surprising, as the exclusion of fat women and girls is abundant in mainstream culture.

This thesis explores the potential of domestic space to act as the ground for new forms of community and sociability in Argentine and Chilean films from the early twenty-first century. It thus tracks a shift in the political treatment of the home in Southern Cone cinema, away from allegorical affirmations of the family, and towards a reflection on film’s ability to both delineate and disrupt lived spaces. In the works examined, the displacement of attention from human subjects to the material environment defamiliarises the domestic sphere and complicates its relation to the nation. The house thus does not act as ‘a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’ (Bachelard), but rather as a medium through which identities are challenged and reformed. This anxiety about domestic space demands, I argue, a renewal of the deconstructive frameworks often deployed in studies of Latin American culture (Moreiras, Williams). The thesis turns to new materialist theories, among others, as a supplement to deconstructive thinking, and argues that theorisations of cinema’s political agency must be informed by social, economic and urban histories. The prominence of suburban settings moreover encourages a nuancing of the ontological links often invoked between cinema, the house, and the city. The first section of the thesis rethinks two concepts closely linked to the home: memory and modernity. Analysing documentary and essay films, Chapter 1 suggests some political limitations to the figure of the fragment which dominates scholarly discussion of memory in Latin America. Chapter 2 studies films which explore the inclusions and exclusions created by modernist domestic architecture. The second section focuses on two human figures found on the threshold of the home: the domestic worker and the guest. Chapter 3 analyses unorthodox representations of domestic work, and explores how new materialist approaches can enhance readings of the political potential of ‘art cinema’. Finally, in Chapter 4 I examine films depicting household visitors that upset urban class divisions, and question the possibility of ‘domestic cosmopolitanism’ (Nava 2006) in contemporary Latin America. My comparative analysis of these films explores a rupture between physical dwelling and imagined home that points towards new political practices in a neoliberal, post-dictatorship context.

Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age examines a host of differing positions on media in order to explore how those positions can inform one another and build a basis for future engagements with media theory, research, and practice. Herbig, Herrmann, and Tyma have brought together a number of media scholars with differing paradigmatic backgrounds to debate the relative applicability of existing theories and in doing so develop a new approach: polymediation. Each contributor’s disciplinary background is diverse, spanning interpersonal communication, media studies, organizational communication, instructional design, rhetoric, mass communication, gender studies, popular culture studies, informatics, and persuasion. Although each of these scholars brings with them a unique perspective on media’s role in people’s lives, what binds them together is the belief that meaningful discourse about media must be an ongoing conversation that is open to critique and revision in a rapidly changing mediated culture. By studying media in a polymediated way, Beyond New Media addresses more completely our complex relationship to media(tion) in our everyday lives. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1132/thumbnail.jpg

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ABSTRACT My project for this Interdisciplinary Master’s Program, studying Film Theories and Media Production methods, details “A Production Process for Creating a Web Series, called SNAPtv”. This media production was designed to demonstrate my experience and knowledge I gained through this degree, by specific areas of developing and producing media, including script writing, filming and editing media content, to construct an original web series from Pre-Production to Post-Production. SNAPtv is a hybrid, sketch comedy, talk show produced as an online web series that mimics the characteristics of a semi-scripted Reality-Television series and combines the elements of a talk show with short comedy scenes used as segues for entertainment. This original web series SNAPtv, features the lives of four students who move into a co-ed dormitory at Cal State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB). As freshmen students, they embark on a new but similar journey to achieve their academic endeavors while experiencing diversity, social and racial inequalities and situations relevant to those of college students. These issues included, the cost of an education, pressures of studying, time management and adjusting to college life. This web series will launch from within the CSUSB’s own media channel to produce the first pilot webisode for SNAPtv, titled “MOVING IN”. This project will provide a sample production packet in the form of a manuscript for the development of this web series. This project will include a completed sample production packet containing the documents necessary to create SNAPtv’s pilot webisode, including essential procedures and functions of The Production Process for developing and producing media. SNAPtv will demonstrate my current knowledge and understanding of producing media for the Entertainment Industry while outlining my production process for creating SNAPtv

From the polluted canals of turn-of-the-century Birmingham, England, William Moxley is an ineffectual captain of industry burning for a Music Hall life. With his unlikely bride Elvina in tow, he journeys to the west coast of the United States, only to shipwreck against his lifelong dream--a vaudeville hall called "The Sunshine." In "Dear Clara," a depression-era love story, Warren Wilkerson has been a Sunshine fixture since the age of six; suddenly forced out by the theatre's back-stabbing, bootlegging "owner," Warren must resort to desperate measures in order to pay for his dying wife's insulin. Freewheeling philosopher Holly Jo is a Seattleite sausage cart owner with a bun in the oven. Having recently lost her parents, she forges a new family from the fringes of 1974 arthouse--it's "The Labor of Holly Jo Daffodil." In "Chapter Eleven," foul-mouthed Red--the Helios's manager--learns that his boss is selling out to evil Emerald Cinemas; the news triggers a long-overdue heart attack, which turns out to be the least of his worries. Beginning with the birth of the feature length and ending at the onset of the digital age, Cinerati is a comic salute to the celluloid era--a grand era spanning over a century. Featuring an eccentric ensemble where a bit player in one decade can take a lead role in the next, Cinerati celebrates the venues in which cinema was meant to be seen, and the strange families that pop up wherever the projectors flicker.

This thesis is about measuring social acceptance of the American public on the increasing trend of intermarriage in the United States. It outlines U.S. Census data in the areas of population, educational attainment, regional data, and marriage data. It analyzes popular and influential media from 1960 to 2011 including: marriage of Guy Smith and Peggy Rusk, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Star Trek, Jungle Fever, The Joy Luck Club, and modern television shows such as Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, Modern Family, and New Girl.

This study will embrace certain features of postmodern experience so as to underline subjective embodiment as the condition, corollary, and appropriate focus of textual, rhetorical, and sociopolitical criticism. It will theorize somantics as a conceptual toolkit for mapping the structural correspondence of embodiment to the symbolic order, each thus emerging as the other’s non-foundational “efficient reason.” This study will argue that the flesh mediates the theoretic divisions of structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, although not in a priori or essentialist ways. It will draw from their vocabularies, combining them into a vocabulary of its own while retexturing their relation to one another. It thus aspires to reduce all rhetorics and metaphysics to the somantic, so as to sabotage conservative fundamentalisms and to establish the terms for an argument with enthusiasts of transhumanism. Moreover, this study will suggest that theoretic systems, cultural messages, and sociopolitical speech-acts inattentive to the condition of embodiment—whether that of their agents, interlocutors, or material mediums of expression— must then seem at once suspicious, maladaptive to the sense contingencies of the moment, and deserving of somantic reduction. In correcting these faults, it will also resist systematizing or universalizing sense-experience; it will function rather as a corpus of maps that rechart the volatile, moment-to-moment interimplication of the somatic and the symbolic. Thus this study takes axiomatically Frederic Jameson’s claim that intertextuality replaces history in the era of transnational capital, seeing in this argument the strategic advantage of taking a theoretic standpoint against diachronic modalities of time. Arguing for the reconstruction of certain narratives as distortions, if not outright falsifications, of the simultaneation of needs, impressions, and changes in a subject’s sense-experience, this study will redirect attention to the relation of certain discourses to the bodies of their interlocutors.

This dissertation examines transnational flows and identities in the work of four European filmmakers and writers that have done extensive work in Latin America around the mid-twentieth century. Not renouncing to the thematic and formal analysis of representation in the works themselves, it focuses more broadly in the modes of production and circulation of cinematic and literary creations. More specifically, it pays close attention to the location in which the work was produced, understood as a conglomerate of circumstances, places, people, as well as symbolic and cultural demands that exert pressure on the author. Understanding that a transnational piece establishes a multi-national dialogue, I emphasize the frequently unacknowledged dialogue that these authors establish with the Latin American tradition and culture. Not only were they conscious of the symbolic landscape in which they were working, but also their production represents a valuable contribution for such landscape, even when their primary audience might be European. The case studies include: an introduction on the globalization of “Tercer Cine”; Werner Herzog and his two Amazonian feature films in Peru; Luis Buñuel and his abundant Mexican production, with special attention to his American and French co-productions shot in Mexico; Max Aub and his Mexican stories and chronicles; and Witold Gombrowicz’ Trans-Atlantyk, as well as his translation of his novel Ferdydurke into the Spanish language. / Romance Languages and Literatures

My dissertation examines the experimental poetry of three periods, the historical avant-garde of the 1920s, the neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and the digital avant-garde (from the 1990s until the present), drawing on the works of poets from the Luso-Hispanic world including the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. Scholars such as Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger define the avant-garde as radically new and unrepeatable, an "advanced" guard that exhausted its aesthetic and political possibilities. I challenge this view by establishing a continuity of avant-gardes that emerge during periods of technological innovation and cultural exchange, introducing new artistic modalities, engaging with emerging media and re-purposing the strategies of past avant-gardes to their own historical conditions. Experimental poetic practices such as visual, kinetic, phonetic, concrete, video poetry, and poetic performance have unfolded over time and across national boundaries in response to global, social, and technological forces. My focus is on poetry broadly understood as works that "experiment" with the interplay between the visual, the sonorous and the verbal, questioning both genre and medium specificity, and contesting traditional discipline-bound tools of analysis. In order to critically approach poems that are often not printed on a page, and depend on more than verbal communication, I draw on disciplines such as literary analysis--including close-readings--media theory, and film analysis, and deploy theories of metaphor, embodiment and affect to interpret works that focus on the materiality of language through typographic experiments, script animation, and performance. The selection includes poems by authors from the 1920s such as Josep M. Junoy, Joan Salvat-Papasseit, José Juan Tablada, Guilherme de Almeida; neo-avant-garde visual and concrete poets from the 1960s such as Joan Brossa, Julio Campal, Edgardo Vigo, and Décio Pignatari; and their contemporary counterparts working with digital media such as Ana María Uribe, Olga Delgado, María Mencía, Arnaldo Antunes, and Eduardo Kac. Examining digital poetry in the light of older poetic practices, I compare and contrast how artists have queried the status of literature as a purely script-based art, considering how notions of experimental literature have changed through time (diachronically), but also isolate each period (synchronically). / Romance Languages and Literatures