The first two decades of the new millennium have witnessed an abundance of change in the areas of textual production, digital communication, and our collective engagement with the Internet. This study explores these changes, which have yielded both positive and negative cultural and developmental outcomes, as products of digital dissonance. Dissonance is characterized by the disruptive consequences inherent in technology's incursion into the print publication cultures of the twentieth century, the explosion in social-media interaction that is changing the complexion of human contact, and our expanding reliance on the World Wide Web for negotiating commerce, culture, and communication. This study explores digital dissonance through the prism of an emerging literary subgenre called technohorror. Artists working in the area of technohorror are creating works that leverage the qualities of plausibility, mundanity, and surprise to tell important stories about how technology is altering the human experience in the twenty-first century. This study explores such subjects as paradigmatic changes in textual production methods, dynamic authorial hybridity, digital materiality in folklore studies, posthumanism, transhumanism, cognitive diminution, and physical degeneration as explored in works of technohorror. The work's rhetorical architecture includes elements of both theoretical and qualitative research. This project expands on City University of New York philosophy professor Noel Carroll's definition of art-horror in developing a formal explanation of technohorror and then exploring that literary subgenre through the analysis of a series of contemporary texts and industry-related trends. The study also contains original interviews with active scholars, artists, editors, and librarians in the horror field to gain a variety of perspectives on these complicated subjects.

This dissertation is a textual experiment in noise poetics. It is an experiment in that it results from indeterminate means, alternative grammar, and experimental thinking. The outcome was not predetermined. Noise poetics is the use of noise to explain, elucidate, and evoke (akin to other poetic forms) within the textual milieu in a manner that seeks to be less determinate and more improvisational than conventional writing. This text argues that noise poetics is a necessary form for addressing political inequality, coexistence with the (nonhuman) other, the ecological crisis, and sustainability because it approaches these issues as system of interconnected fragments and excesses and thus has the potential to reach or envision solutions in novel ways. The experiment draws quotations and fragments from a diverse collection of noise theory texts, arranged and assembled via indeterminate cut-up methods based on the work of several prominent artists and theorists (John Cage and William Burroughs among them). The experimental text (contained in full in Appendix B) was then edited and added to in order to craft the textual project into an argument for noise poetics that followed the juxtaposed lines of thought towards possible conclusions and practical applications. This project coincided with and was supplemented by bruit jouissance, a multimedia audiovisual noise project (contained and explicated in Appendix A). The two projects together are two applications of thoryvology (an articulation of noise theory created and presented within the text) and as complementary methods of viewing and understanding each other.

Power to the People: Responsible Facilitation in Co-Creative Story-Making describes and applies a tool for recording and analyzing the co-productive creation process of digital storytelling (DST) workshops to be used by project facilitators for the purposes of reflection and for developing an ethics of responsibly in story-making practices. It provides a method for analyzing digital storytelling practices that focuses on the rhetorical, dialogic, co-productive, creative story-making space rather than the finished stories or the technologies. Looking through a new media lens, this dissertation aligns the DST genre and practice in relation to alternative media broadly, and tactical media specifically, to understand DST as a resource for storytellers. This dissertation situates DST as a co-creative media process created among participants, individual storytellers, facilitators, institutions, and the audience, and discusses the inter-relationships within the workshop setting as well as in those found in the dissemination of the final digital stories. The author discusses the relationships among the storytellers and the facilitators, the other workshop participants, and the viewing audience, examining this final relationship in terms of face-to-face and digital interactions. This dissertation provides a reflexive look at the responsibility of the facilitator in co-creative digital storytelling endeavors and makes use of diverse international case studies in addition to an analysis of the author's own facilitated project, "Exploring Our Information Diets," as examples. The author argues that co-creative storymaking facilitators should interpret their roles within the collaborative creation process to ensure that responsible facilitation practices based in "witnessing" guide the storytelling process, and create an environment that treats participants as subjects with the ability to respond to the world.

I am proposing a critical inquiry into the structural function of the character of Skyler White in AMC’s Breaking Bad as well as a further investigation of show’s relationship to the Western genre and the construction of masculinity.

大量的史實證明，香港五、六○年代銳意介紹西方現代主義的文藝雜誌與 副刊跨越了不同的藝術媒介，為香港現代文學奠下了重要的基礎；而這個基礎 有兩個重要的特質：一它是一個連續的累積過程，二它具有跨越媒介的特色。 由《文藝新潮》（1956－1959）以降，到《新思潮》(1959)、《好望角》(1963) 等提倡現代文藝的雜誌，它們所累積的現代主義文化根基及對不同藝術媒介的 包容吸收，到了六○年代的《中國學生周報》仍然秉承這份精神。本文把西方傳入的現代主義思潮看成是一個在香港連續發展的整體。 現代主義雖然是西方思潮，但在香港的特殊背景之中，反而把其消化成香港獨特的文學風格，令香港文學更加本土化；而對於六○年代在香港成長的作者，歐洲電影更是一個吸收現代主義思潮的重要途徑。本文以現代主義及歐洲電影兩條線索在香港交匯的事實構成一個視角，一方面考察香港本土意識的形成，另一方面探討電影與文學在美學及文化上的互動關係。 在這個視角下，六○年代《中國學生周報‧電影版》所討論的歐洲電影成為本文重要的文獻，而本文會抽取當中較有代表性的電影作品，並以之為章節， 看其對香港文學的影響。討論的作品以長篇作品《剪紙》（1977）及《我城》 （1979）為主，旁及《養龍人師門》（2002）、《象是笨蛋》（1969）以至也斯及西西的影評，以及他們回應某些歐洲電影的文學作品。與過往的評論不同， 本文把這兩部作品放在歐洲電影與現代主義文學交錯的脈絡中，重新發掘其背後的影響來源，討論的電影包括阿倫‧雷奈（Alain Resnais，1922－）的《去 年在馬倫巴》(Last Year at Marienbad， 1961)、路易士‧布紐爾（Luis Buñuel， 1900－1983）的《模糊的情慾對象》(That Obscure Object of Desire，1977)、 安東尼奧尼（Michelangelo Antonioni）的《春光乍洩》（Blow-Up，1966)、路 易‧馬盧（Louis Malle，1932－1995）的《莎西遊巴黎》（Zazie dans le m�tro， 1960）等，並旁及這些導演其他電影作品及當時歐洲的電影文化，以至它們背後的文學原著，包括法國情色文學作家皮亞‧盧維（Pierre Louÿs，1870－1925） 的《女人與玩偶》（The Woman and The Puppet，1898）、 南美魔幻寫實作家科塔薩爾（Julio Cotazar，1914－1984）的短編作品、法國新小說作家的電影劇本等，並以也斯和西西早期作品為參照，察看當中受電影文化影響的轉變過程。

本论文主要考察中国大陆九十年代出现的独立电影的特性，首先从一批年轻的独立电影导演及其作品出发，将它们放在当代大陆城市青年文化的历史脉络中，着重考察独立电影的特殊生产机制以及对“青年”的再现，与“青年”在社会建构中出现的变化之间的关系。然后通过使用民族誌的研究方法，重点考察大陆本土年轻观众对独立电影的接受情况，试图解释为何“边缘”成为当下论述大陆独立电影文化特性的重要话语。本文的主要立论是，“边缘”是由独立电影与城市青年文化在不同层面上互构而成的。 这种互构关系的建立，表现在几个方面：首先，大陆进入商品经济时代，具有整合性的建构青年身份的国家意识形态话语失效，导致了年轻人的迷茫和失落，他们断裂和破碎的身份，通过独立电影在国家制片体系之外的生产和制作模式中被再现出来，被称为“边缘”的特殊个体。其次，大陆独立电影被部分青年影迷用来对抗互联网上出现的话语资源垄断和话语权威，从而确立“业余爱好 者”、“草根”等被称为“边缘”的身份。最后一个方面，即是作为影迷的城市青年对不同观影场所和对独立电影不同消费方式的选择，建立了在电影院线、个人在家庭观看影碟等主流渠道以外的，被称为“边缘”的观影方式，但这种方式又不可避免的会引起影迷的身份焦虑。

East Asian cinema is receiving increasing global attention. This attention is not focused merely on the fiction and feature films produced in the region, but also on the documentaries produced there; films such as Petition (2009) by Chinese director Zhao Liang which premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 2009. This attention to East Asian documentary can be traced to the documentary film festivals organised in the region, particularly those that devote their programming to independent documentary productions from the region. These festivals open a window that enables such works to be exhibited for the rest of the world. But these festivals do not aim merely to exhibit and screen these works. They also pay attention to the filmmakers. The attendance of filmmakers at festivals has previously been assessed to be of low importance. By encouraging filmmakers to visit and participate the festivals examined here can be seen to represent shared concerns regarding the cultivation of documentary filmmaking in the Asian region. The four film festivals that serve to exemplify this are the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) in Yamagata, Japan; the Documentary Film Festival China (DOChina) in Beijing, China; the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) in Taichung, Taiwan; and the Hong Kong’s Chinese Documentary Festival (CDF). Each festival forms the basis of a case study in the hope that the context of documentary film festivals in the East Asia can be delineated. Particular aspects of the festivals are discussed in relation to a significant underlying dimension that is identified in each of the festivals in question: the emphasis on communication in YIDFF that enhances the sense of connectedness in the participating festival community; the independent and underground status of DOChina that is embedded in the festival as a form of resistance to the state government; the relocation of TIDF to a government-supported museum contextualises the festival and draws on the general functions and purposes of a museum: exhibition, education and collection. The fourth case study examines the multi-faceted nature of CDF through the previously examined concepts to demonstrate the generalisability of the concepts to, and the inherent complexity of film festivals. A common theme underlies all of these concepts: a sense of the local, of ‘local-ness’. The ‘local’ here is a relative term that depends largely on where it is that these events regard as home. So, it is not merely the immediate locale of the festival that can be regarded as ‘local’; the ‘local’ can be extended to encompass the nation or the entire region if that is where ‘home’ has been identified. Such an extensive and fluid understanding of ‘local-ness’ not only defines those areas to which the festivals pay specific attention, it also furthers understanding of the festivals’ shared ambitions; ambitions rooted in the cultivation of a ‘local’ documentary filmmaking milieu.

This paper aims to investigate how film neo-noir functions as an ideal medium to engage in a postmodernist critique of our society, focusing on its negotiation in the city of Los Angeles. Through incorporating postmodernism theorists Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon’s arguments of the themes of the Nostalgia Mode, Parody and Pastiche, and the Decentered, Destructured and Dehumanized, this paper will demonstrate how they manifest in neo-noir’s Los Angeles to totalize contradictions in society and evoke a critical awareness.

This is a collection of short stories and memories from the eight places that I have lived. Through these stories and memories, I reflect on themes of identity and community. I also consider the idea of home: what defines a home, how we make a place feel like a home, and what transforms a city or a town into a home. Each chapter also includes my own original designs and photographs. The stories about Sharon and Westwood, small towns in Massachusetts, focus on childhood and familial relationships. The narratives about St. Louis, Missouri and Toluca Lake, California, consider the transition from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the memories from Claremont, California, Silver Lake, California and Santa Monica, California all meditate on the idea of belonging. Lastly, the recollections from London, England, contemplate how a foreign city can become a home.

This paper will examine the production of the thesis film, Capshaw Ravens. I will analyze the production process from development to post-production, and determine if I achieved my goal of creating a short film with concept, character, and conflict.