In this thesis, the different aspects of trauma are discussed at length while looking at the French New Wave Film directed by Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Through this film, I discuss how language shapes testimonies of traumatic events and if this shaping of language can possibly be seen in the film itself. Furthermore, I discuss if there is merit to looking at a work of art as an accurate depiction of historical trauma.

Typified rhetorical situations are often a result of normalized ideologies within cultures; however, they also have the capability to produce new ideology. Within these discursive sites, identities are constructed among these normalized social acts. More importantly, these identities are constructed across many layers, not limited to one social act, but many that overlap and influence each other. In this paper, I focus on the identities that are constructed in marginalized spaces within sites of interacting discourse. Focusing on the rhetoric of abjection posited by Julia Kristeva, along with McKenzie Wark’s exploration of gamespace, a liminal theoretical space that encompasses the sites of analysis and ideology formation from the perspective of gamers, I analyze disruptions of normalized social practices in the gaming genre in order to implement the use of abjection as a method of understanding how sites of difference produce meaning for minoritarian subjects.

By using adaptation theory and Linda Hutcheon’s depiction of adapters in the process of adaptation as “first interpreters and then creators” (18), this article argues how the original Sherlock Holmes illustrations, penciled most notably by Sidney Paget, are both a canonical element of the Holmes legacy and themselves an adaptation. This creates a means of exploring why and how the television show Sherlock Holmes (1984-1994), developed by Granada Television, uses the original Holmes illustrations as a source of adaptation to create the appearance of fidelity to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Being faithful to the Holmes stories is not a common adaptation practice. Granada’s Holmes chooses to be faithful to the original illustrations and to the Victorian era, not so much to be unique among Holmes adaptations but to be similar to the 1980s heritage cinema trend of faithfully adapting English literature. Heritage cinema, as Andrew Higson states, is a “potent marketing of the past” (1), and through its propensity to adapt literature faithfully to a past time period, heritage cinema reflects a cultural desire for national nostalgia in 1980s Britain. In the case of Granada’s Holmes, this tactic turns Sherlock Holmes into both financial and cultural capital. By being seemingly faithful to the original illustrations, Granada’s Holmes is left vulnerable to the kinds of fidelity or comparative criticisms that adaptation scholars often denounce. Adaptation studies criticizes efforts to compare the source text to the adaptation, saying it will inevitably lead to privileging the source text. Through my investigation, however, I argue that there is a need to use forms of fidelity criticism in order to more fully explore the reasons why Granada’s Holmes hinges its success around fidelity to the original Holmes illustrations.

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.

(and i can’t stress this enough) in my mouth: Extradiegetic Affect as Material is a non-linear exploration into the structures of feeling that exist in relation to cinema in its role as a technology for generating subjectivity. In the development of this research, a proposal of cinema’s likeness to the ecological circulation of microplastics is drawn in order to illustrate cinema’s materiality and nearly invisible ubiquity. The notion of extradiegetic affect is outlined as a post-cinematic condition in which lived experience becomes secondary to cinematic representation and which, simultaneously, becomes directly shaped by engaging with these representations.

United Artists was an independent film distribution company that Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford jointly formed in 1919 to maintain creative autonomy over their work. Without the benefit of block booking practices through studio-owned theater houses, each founding artist established specific economic and aesthetic practices within their respective oeuvres in order to maintain company solvency. The resulting films produced during the company’s formative years (1919-1931) saw increased emphasis and innovation in regard to stardom, spectacle, show, and salability, features which ultimately innovated the model for the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. Attributing the formation of the blockbuster to United Artists not only complicates the notion of the Hollywood blockbuster as a post-World War II phenomenon, but also broadens our comprehension of blockbuster filmmaking by formulating a model in which one can refine blockbuster criteria. This reframes the blockbuster as the cornerstone of the Hollywood film industry for over a century and presents it as a more persistent phenomenon.

The goal of this thesis is to explore the way heterosexism and homophobia are present in the coding that has created an implied and monstrous queer identity for the Joker, present in many versions of the character over the past forty years. Through close readings of several of the Joker’s most iconic appearances, queer theory texts, and analytical essays on pop culture, this paper will analyze the use of queer signifiers present in the comics and the way that these portrayals of the Joker are rife with harmful and heterocentric perceptions of what comic creators have seen as necessary signifiers for queerness. Additionally, I will be using knowledge gleaned from my own preexisting work with fan and cultural studies in order to talk about the way that this portrayal of the Joker has been developed within fandom/fan communities and how it is continually replicated in superhero media.

This thesis examines two works from different mediums, the short story “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien and the video game Battlefield 1, to compare how each constructs empathy using virtual reality and mimetic communication between audience and the work. The thesis draws from both digital media studies and affect theory to construct a nuanced view of how empathy functions in the works. The body responds to empathy physically. As social creatures, humans feel the emotions of those around them, even if those around them are virtually constructed. In other words, the thesis will explore how video games have been used historically and what their effects are on gamers, especially gamers’ bodies and emotional responses to the constructed virtual reality. This work aims to show how the lines of fiction and reality become blurred to establish empathy within a narrative and virtual reality space.

This thesis problematizes early cyberfeminist claims that heralded the Internet as a liberating space for women. Cyberfeminism emerged in the early 1990s, at the dawn of the “Internet Age,” and is heavily influenced by Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway theorized a new way of looking at the nature of female identity, using the figure of the cyborg found in science fiction literature and films. Traditionally, women have been explained in terms of sexual difference and have been forced to uphold a gender binary that privileges men. By contrast, Haraway argues that the cyborg, a hybrid of human and machine, escapes binary logic, thereby resisting categories and hierarchies, and embraces a more fluid understanding of identity. This model contains powerful ramifications for women. Every day, we become more like Haraway’s cyborgs as our physical bodies become increasingly intertwined with modern technologies, specifically in our ever-growing relationship with the Internet. In online interactions, users are no longer confined to their physical bodies and are free to play with identity. Early cyberfeminists believe that this leads to a more fluid understanding of identity and, more importantly, allows for the deconstruction of gender. These claims, however, do not apply in practice as well as they do in theory. From the anonymous text-based spaces that early cyberfeminists describe to social networking sites like Facebook, Internet spaces tend to polarize the gender binary rather than blur it, and women are now colonized on a new front. This becomes increasingly dangerous as the boundaries between our virtual and real lives continue to blur.

This paper examines online fan fiction communities as spaces for identity formation, collaborative creativity, and fan empowerment. Drawing on case studies of a LiveJournal fan fiction community, fan-written essays, possible world theory, and postmodern theories of the hyperreal and simulacrum, this paper argues that writing fan fiction is a definitive, postmodern act that explores the mutable boundaries of reality and fiction. It concludes that fans are no longer passive consumers of popular media—rather, they are engaged, powerful participants in the creation of celebrity representation that can, ultimately, alter reality.