<p> In the search for understanding a future for our selves with the potential merging of strong Artificial Intelligence and humanoid robotics, this dissertation uses the figure of the android in science fiction and science fact as an evocative object. Here, I propose android theory to consider the philosophical, social, and personal impacts humanoid robotics and AI will have on our understanding of the human subject. From the perspective of critical posthumanism and cyborg feminism, I consider popular culture understandings of AI and humanoid robotics as a way to explore the potential effect of androids by examining their embodiment and disembodiment. After an introduction to associated theories of humanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism, followed by a brief history of the figure of the android in fiction, I turn to popular culture examples. First, using two icons of contemporary AI, Deep Blue, a chess playing program and Watson, a linguistic artificially intelligent program, I explore how their public performances in games evoke rich discussion for understanding a philosophy of mind in a non-species specific way. Next, I turn to the <i>Terminator</i> film series (1984-2009) to discuss how the humanoid embodiment of artificial intelligence exists in an uncanny position for our emotional attachments to nonhuman entities. Lastly, I ask where these relationships will take us in our intimate lives; I explore personhood and human-nonhuman relationships in what I call the nonhuman dilemma. Using the human-Cylon relationships in the reimagined <i>Battlestar Galactica </i> television series (2003-2009), the posthuman family make-over in the film Fido (2006), as well as a real-life story of men with their life-sized doll companions, as seen in the TLC reality television series <i>My Strange Addiction</i> (2010), I explore the coming dilemma of life with nonhuman humanoids.</p>

This dissertation argues that the figure of the crowd in literature and visual culture constitutes a crucial component in the emergence and construction of the cultural, political, and historical values of modern China. From Lu Xun’s momentous recollection of the lantern slide that compelled him use literature as a means to heal the souls of the Chinese people to Zhang Yimou’s spectacular staging of the crowd at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the numerous ways the crowd has been written and pictured not only demonstrates its utility as a motif, but also asserts a mode of literary and visual imagination and even critical inquiry. Although the question of how a work of art or literature stands in relation to the masses has long been a preoccupation of writers, artists, critics, and policymakers in China, this dissertation sees crowd representation as a narrative or visual act that compels us to reconsider the conventional categories that would relegate the crowd as strictly synecdochic for the politically reified nation. To that end, I focus on how concepts such as crowd and mass are under constant revision, laying bare the negotiations and struggles entailed in the process of defining China collectively. Chapter One investigates the role of the crowd in the self-construction of the modern intellectual through two themes, the public warning (shizhong) in the case of Lu Xun, and the idea of superfluity (duoyu) in Qu Qiubai. Chapter Two considers the term “massification” (dazhonghua) as a narrative technique of writing the crowd into being, and in particular the volatile means of its manifestation through violence, death, and annihilation. Chapter Three inquires into the reciprocal relationship between crowd and image in two films (Big Road and Prairie Fire) as well as propaganda art from the 1930s and the Cultural Revolution, with a special focus of the technological means of exhibiting the crowd. Chapter Four positions filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s use of the crowd within the context of the “red legacy” of revolutionary history and technological visuality to argue that efforts to define the Chinese masses remain an ongoing concern. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This thesis provides a critical enquiry into the films of Theo Angelopoulos. Dividing his films into two periods—the one running through the seventies and the other starting with the advent of the eighties—I will examine the representation of history in the first period of Angelopoulos and the metaphor of the journey in his subsequent films. Furthermore, I will trace the development of an aesthetic based on long takes which evokes a particular sense of time in his films. This aesthetic, which is based on the internal rhythm of the shot, inscribes a temporality where past, present, and future coexist in a contemporaneous image. Being free from the requirements of an evolving plot, this image is an autonomous image which allows the passing of time to be felt. Autonomy, which I will define after philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis as an immanent movement towards change, can be also used to describe the process of changing oneself or a given society from within. In exploring the resonances autonomy has, I will make a connection between the social and the cinematic; an attempt which is informed by what Angelopoulos’ films do of their own accord. In this way, I will suggest that Angelopoulos is important not only for the history of film but also for one’s modus vivendi.

<p> The Brothers Grimm and the Walt Disney Company have produced popular fairy tales for large audiences. In this work, cluster criticism&mdash;a rhetorical criticism that involves identifying key terms and charting word clusters around those terms&mdash;is applied to four Grimm fairy tales and four Disney princess films. This study aims to reveal the worldview of the rhetors and explore how values present in Grimm tales manifest in contemporary Disney films. Disney princess films in this study have been categorized as &ldquo;White/European&rdquo; and &ldquo;Non-White/Cultural &lsquo;Other.&rsquo;&rdquo; Because film is a form of non-discursive rhetoric, an adaptation of cluster criticism designed for film was been applied to the selected animated features. This study reveals that many patriarchal values present in Grimm fairy tales appear in contemporary Disney films, and while Moana (2016) features far fewer displays of these values, intersectional feminism should be kept in mind, with more diversity in princesses needed.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation seeks to make sense of historicist media in America and the ideological work that they do. It examines a variety of discourses that inflect the texts examined. It focuses on representations of the Anglo-American past since this history, more than any other, is selling to American media consumers and has been for the last thirty years. Consequently, media about Anglo-American history provides vital clues as to what motivates the dominant culture&rsquo;s invocation of the past. </p><p> In order to gain the broadest perspective possible on how historicist media function in America, the texts this dissertation examines come from a variety of media, including television, film, a Renaissance festival, and an experiential history museum. For a similar reason, this dissertation explores three distinct historical locales that have been especially marketable in the United States: the English country house of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Renaissance England, and the American Revolution. </p><p> This dissertation argues that the media studied is structured by a contradictory desire for the sense of stability promised by notions of pastness and the sense of freedom, flexibility, and novelty promised by notions of modernity and mass production. As a result of these conflicting desires, historicist media in America can best be characterized as contemporary versions of what Elizabeth Outka described as the nineteenth-century aesthetic of the &ldquo;commodified authentic.&rdquo; Like the &ldquo;commodified authentic,&rdquo; contemporary historicist media offer to help consumers negotiate anxieties caused by rapid social, technological, and economic change by holding history and modernity in productive tension with one another. Whereas the anxieties addressed in the nineteenth century stemmed largely from the Industrial Revolution though, the anxieties negotiated in contemporary media about the past have to do with digitization, neoliberalization, and the global economic crisis of 2007&ndash;2008. However, nineteenth century and current examples of the &ldquo;commodified authentic&rdquo; are similar in that by turning to history as a source of stability, they tend to reinforce conservative values, even when they incorporate various forms of liberal social critique. As a result, this dissertation pays special attention to the discourses of class-, gender-, and racial privilege that inflect the media texts examined, particularly when considering what kind of communal American identity (a la Benedict Anderson) my sample texts imagine or imply.</p><p>

<p> The purpose of this project report is to evaluate my role as producer, writer, and actor on the short film, <i>Intervention X</i>. The film was produced to fulfill the thesis requirements for the Master of Fine Arts in Television, Film and Theatre at California State University, Los Angeles. This report will emphasize each aspect of my work differently. The first portion of the report explains my process creating a lead male character who does not necessarily fit the regular cinematic stereotypes. My next goal was to create an antagonist who would challenge my protagonist&rsquo;s free will. After watching the film, I hope my audience will examine the notion of spiritual forces against their own free will. This paper explains how the genre of magical realism influenced the film. This project allows me to embrace my experience from when I was in my home land, Haiti, and my experience here in the United States. In addition, it allows me to address human struggle and ways of life utilizing a philosophical approach. When I did research for this project, I was on a quest to collect information from people I met or had a close relationship with. So even though the story of this film is fictional, it&rsquo;s closely related to people&rsquo;s real-life problems. I hope my readers and viewers will explore this project and find a source of light in it.</p><p>

<p> Utilizing a postphenomenological lens, in this study, I analyze Human Security Era (1990s&ndash;2010s), techno-futurist films as case studies to explore how humans and technology can and do co-shape a more harmonious world, resulting in TechnoHumanity. To build a techno-humane world, humans must find a way to spur technological innovation and advancement, embedding ethics in design to avoid a dystopian path to dehumanization. Films, and specifically the content or text of the films, provide case studies for a postphenomenological analysis to explore designed, in-design, and future technologies and their interrelationship with humanity.</p><p>

<p>Pre-nostalgia exists at the intersection of identity, memory, and temporality. The core difference between what is understood to be a nostalgic feeling versus a pre-nostalgic feeling comes from the individual?s motivation to act due to an instantaneous awareness of, or concern with, missing something at the exact moment of loss and prior to the creation of a recallable memory. The degree, scope, and nature of the motivation and the thing being missed are specific to the individual at that moment in time, and the catalyst for this awareness and its subsequent behavior is primarily due to an engagement with a cultural object. The types of cultural objects in question are almost infinite ? music, film, cars, art, or another individual, among many others. This immediate connection with the object triggers a response from the individual that causes what I have described as a conscious or subconscious temporal compression and a newfound awareness of the perceived distance and proportion between this experience/awareness and the individual?s past, present, and future, and their understanding of their sense of self. This thesis seeks to explore and demonstrate the existence of this virtually undocumented phenomenon via two analytical and interrelated processes. First, I draw on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and nostalgia theory as foundational disciplines to document an academic structure of pre-nostalgia. Second, using the medium of film as a cultural object, I apply my research to identified characters, scenes, and soundtracks from several films from the 1980s to objectively demonstrate the manifestation of this phenomenon. The purpose of this dual analytical approach is to provide both spectators and evaluators of this theory an environment in which to objectively observe and understand what I believe is an intrinsic phenomenon, and my overarching goal is to advance the academic and practical discussion of memory and nostalgia theories.

Scientists are widely regarded as high status individuals, who are smarter than the vast majority of the population. Science holds a very high status as a discipline, both within and outside of academe. This notwithstanding, popular stereotypes of scientists are often highly negative, with the image of the socially inept or even mad scientist being commonplace. This apparent contradiction is worth exploring. Additionally, we see the label scientific being used to justify pseudoscience and other results that are flatly contradicted by the bulk of scientific research (e.g., links between vaccines and autism). This is not due, as some argue, only or even primarily to a lack of understanding of science. Ultimately, there are two "sciences": science defined by the scientific methodology of the scientists, and the broader cultural use of science as a truth-teller without real use of scientific methodology. This dichotomy is wrapped up in both the nature of modernity and the idea of post-modernity. This research uses a content analysis of film to examine the nature of stereotypical portrayals of scientists, and a factor analysis of NSF survey data to investigate the complex attitudes towards science and scientists.

In an attempt to facilitate the task of charting a path toward a radically different future, a future without the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), this dissertation searches back in history by examining China's loss of socialism. The guiding question can be formulated thus: Why did the People's Republic of China give up its socialist mode of intellectual production only to embrace the bourgeois intellectual property regime (IPR), which had been subjected to devastating criticism by progressive scholars in the West since mid-1990s? Situating this rupture of China's approach to intellectual production within the ongoing process of postsocialist structuration in the wake of the waning Chinese socialism, this dissertation focuses on Chinese intellectuals as social mediators and locates the traces of the loss of socialism in various cultural productions during the postsocialist era.