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Blundered by the Borrower attempts to illustrate the potential loneliness and anxiety that is experienced by the individual, amidst the contemporary and panicked social climate, domestically and globally--using the mediated jetsam of everyday life, violent entertainment and the disarming characteristics of cartoons to better understand and possibly illuminate a chronic lack of empathy in American society and popular culture.

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The center of this thesis proposal is a translation of the first book of AUGUST Software’s Eustia of the Tarnished Wings 穢翌のユースティア, a 2011 dark fantasy visual novel. As visual novels are practically unknown in English or Japanese academic writing, this thesis will provide an introduction to the medium’s history, as well as common display and organizational formats of the medium; a literary overview of Eustia of the Tarnished Wings and its characters and themes of choice and sacrifice; and a discussion of translation methodology and goals pursued in the accompanying excerpts. The translation presented consists of selected excerpts from the Prologue of Eustia of the Tarnished Wings, introducing the main characters, the floating city-state of Novus Aether, and the uneasy social climate of the city. Presented scenes are selected on the basis of plot or thematic relevance or translational interest, as well as scenes that are necessary to contextualize plot or character developments discussed in the critical introduction. This thesis will serve as an introduction to a developing medium that has been overlooked by most academics in the field of Japanese popular culture, as well as a look at the utilization of choice mechanics and branching story structure to In addition, it will present a personal methodology of and approach to translation as related to Eustia’s many and varied characters, social strata and situations, and maintaining individual and consistent voices for different characters and a first-person narrator in fiction.

In his essay collection Another Future, Alan Gilbert argues that culture, at it’s best, “interrogates the gap between the ideal and the real.” Ad copy, public text, Hallmark cards, narrative film, etc flood ‘the masses’ with the ideal: the dream of love, the dream of the new, happiness, happiness, happiness, while it purports to be ‘real.’ Conversely, a fair portion of art positions itself staunchly against the marketplace, it too claiming ‘realness,’ a superiority to ‘representation,’ a championing of ‘authenticity’ and ‘the individual experience.’ Art and poetry can be a venue to complicate this dichotomy, demystify all cultural products, and question the usage of massive words such as ‘real,’ ‘dream,’ ‘new,’ love.’ Maybe the most effective way to interrogate the gap between ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ is to read “the social poetically and poetry socially.” While post-modernism concentrated on experimentation with form and bridging a ‘high’ and ‘low’ divide, Gilbert argues that what comes next is an emphasis on the “social ramifications of cultural products.” As Kenneth Goldsmith says, “Context is the new content.” But I’m not interested in simplistic Conceptualist copy and paste. The function of art shifts to an aggregation and recontextualization of information: how ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ are represented, implemented, and manipulated across various social contexts. Artist John Baldessari asks: “Where does art reside? Is it physically there in that painting? Is it in my head? Could it be a trace memory? Could it be a photo? What is necessary for it? Can you just talk about it?” For me, there’s little difference between creating a cultural product, writing ‘about’ someone else’s cultural product, or interviewing artists about cultural products they made. Warhol thought of his body of work as equally visual and vocal: Andy is not Andy without his interviews. Conversation as poem. The conversation in the media around a poem as poem. Example: a poem by Kristen Stewart, a Hollywood actress, cannot be divorced from the reactions and retaliations it spawned. The content of Stewart’s poem, her word choice or where she broke the line fades to the background as voices across the Internet use the poem as an opportunity to judge and humiliate her. I’m concerned with how capital P Poetry is represented in the mainstream, how people experience poetry outside the context of the small press world, and reclaiming such experiences as Poetry. Can a commercial that features Whitman be labelled as a poem? Can my writing about how Whitman is represented in an iPad commercial be a poem? Or, how does listening to a poem while observing one’s surroundings influence one’s experience of the poem? In the ‘I listen’ series, I try to acknowledge that poems do not create a world, but exist within one. And I think of this book as lyric poetry, but my ‘lyric I’ must account for itself and its contexts. It must interview and interrogate itself. Even knowing what the lyric I is requires a privileged position. This must be acknowledged, and leads to a reckoning with former selves, former heroes. The ‘multitudes’ I contain are not my fellow citizens, but all the cultural products I’ve consumed in thirty years and how those products and individuals have changed me. I’m approaching cultural products and their contexts from a subjective, lyric, populist lens, trying to articulate each subject’s intention, because for me it’s in the absurdity of intention where the humor, or the poetry, or the ‘real,’ or ‘profound experience of art’ resides.

K-pop is the latest in a long line of example of ways East Asian cultures have been constructed in the West. Over time this has created generalizations about K-pop as a phenomenon and as a music industry. Furthermore, it has also contributed to a specific narrative about K-pop fans and how their experiences are justified. The discourse around K-pop fans is founded in stereotypes around gender, age, race and culture and social norms around how female fandoms and subcultures are seen as pathological. In this study, racism is seen as an analytical framework that is positioned within the research fields of postcolonial feminism and critical whiteness studies. This study aims to examine how K-pop fans use social media as a tool for negotiating space and to take back power regarding shaping the public image of themselves and their idols. One of the main goals of this project has also been to complicate the perceived notion of fangirls. This study draws data and empirical material from fan forums on the platform Reddit. By studying the interaction that takes place in these forums, this study shows how discourses about orientalism, authenticity and gender create a hegemonic discourse of K-pop in the West. Also, how fans create counter-negotiations against these discourses by questioning how Asian cultures are portrayed in the West.

On October 11, 1963, artists Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg held the event “Leben mit Pop: Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus” (Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism) at the Berges furniture store in Düsseldorf, Germany. Many scholars have treated this event as an image, useful only in outlining the trajectories of the later successful careers of Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, and Sigmar Polke. Few have attempted to contextualize this event in its social, historical, and political settings or to consider its effects on and relationship to the audience at the event. In this thesis, I resituate “Living with Pop” in terms of its experiential effects and its socio-historical context and extend my investigation of “Living with Pop” to the contemporaneous paintings and drawings of Richter, Lueg, and Polke. I argue that their artworks, which parody and question domestic tropes of the postwar era, reveal the complexities and ambiguities underlying the notion of West Germany’ s Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle.” I examine how Polke, Richter, and Lueg explored artistic and national identities, a postwar culture of consumerism, contemporary modes of communication, and theories of culture and aesthetics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. To investigate the relationships between artistic creation, artistic identity, and contemporary daily life, I use domestic design exhibitions, advertisements, the journal Magnum, and a few select texts on contemporary society and culture by Jürgen Habermas and Theodor W. Adorno as relevant sources. / text