abstract / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This thesis examines an intermittent uncanniness that emerges in cultural responses to new image technologies, most recently in some impressions of the digital actor. The history of image technologies is punctuated by moments of fleeting strangeness: from Maxim Gorky's reading of the cinematographic image in terms of 'cursed grey shadows', to recent renderings of the computer-generated cast of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as silicon-skinned mannequins. It is not merely the image's unfamiliar and new aesthetics that render it uncanny. Rather, the image is received within a cultural framework where its perceived strangeness speaks allegorically of what it means to be human at that historical moment. In various ways Walter Benjamin, Anson Rabinbach and N. Katherine Hayles have claimed that the notion and the experience of 'being human' is continuously transformed through processes related to different stages of modernity including rational thought, industrialisation, urbanisation, media and technology. In elaborating this argument, each of the four chapters is organized around the elucidation of a particular motif: 'dummy', 'siren', 'doppelg??nger' and 'resurrection'. These motifs circulate through discourses on different categories of digital actor, from those conceived without physical referents to those that are created as digital likenesses of living or dead celebrities. These cultural responses suggest that even while writers on the digital actor are speculating about the future, they are engaging with ideas about life, death and identity that are very old and very ambivalent.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-113).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-260).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-61). Also available in print.

by Ku Ho Kwan Lisbeth. / Thesis submitted in: September 1997. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Filmography: leaves 117-119. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-116). / List of illustrations --- p.vii / Chapter I. --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1. 1 --- Articulating Hong Kong History / Identity --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Identity through Mass-Cultural Mediation --- p.10 / Chapter 1. 3 --- Using Popular Culture --- p.18 / Chapter II. --- The Locality of Culture: A Contextual Analysis of Cantonese Cinema in Hong Kong --- p.32 / Chapter 2.1 --- The Emergence of Local Consciousness through Three Decades of Cantonese Cinema (From the 30s to the 50s) --- p.32 / Chapter 2. 2 --- Youth Film and Its Historically Specific Audience --- p.38 / Chapter 2. 3 --- Reading Youth Film -- A Purple Stormy Night (紫色風雨夜) --- p.55 / Chapter III. --- Mass Mediated Images of Women --- p.64 / Chapter 3. 1 --- Connie Chan Po Chu and Josephine Siao Fong Fong as Desired Cultural Images --- p.66 / Chapter 3. 2 --- Identification and Commodification --- p.81 / Chapter IV. --- Conclusion --- p.92 / Chapter 4.1 --- The Ordinary and the Extraordinary-- Siao Fong Fong and the Self-Image of Hong Kong People in the 90s --- p.92 / Chapter 4.2 --- Mediating Cultural Identity with Cultural History of Hong Kong --- p.102 / Bibliography --- p.109 / 中文電影目錄 --- p.117 / Appendix --- p.120

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Not available / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 337-346).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.