Thesis (M.A.)--Tennessee Technological University, 2009. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Feb. 25, 2010). Bibliography: leaves 87-90.

This paper explores the way Hong Kong independent comics encapsulate the essence of the city. Independent comics are distinguished from mainstream comics by their specific mode of production. More significantly they demonstrate an emphasis on subjective personal creativity and craftsmanship, which stands out sharply in the pervasive objective culture in modern society. Adopting an anthropological approach in representing local ways of living, these comics attempt to map an identity of Hong Kong in a way that is free from confusing influences of her postcolonial history, her political subordination to China and the global capitalist forces. The artists of independent comics embrace the essence of local culture by focusing on space and cultural memory and thereby rediscovering the truth and characteristics of life in Hong Kong. As a form of popular cultural text, Hong Kong independent comics package the local identity and history into fashionable goods for cultural consumption. Together with this, the articulation of a shared past creates forces of cohesion that binds the community together and offers a way for the people to negotiate their identity. / published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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D. Tech. Language Practice / The graphic novel has become the means through which a generation of contemporary writers has chosen to communicate the myths of our time to the world, yet unlike their counterparts in classic mythology, they have not yet enjoyed the same depths of investigation. As a medium with the ability to conjure up powerful, emotive reactions, the graphic novel is now in need of a means of substantiating the responses and reactions to the medium. This study has set out to prove that through the utilisation of a three-pronged analytic model that incorporates analytical approaches from the schools of Myth- and Archetypal Criticism, visual analysis, and particularly Linguistic Criticism an authoritative literary critique can be produced on a graphic novel that would reveal and comment on the three primary constituents of the medium, namely: language; story; and graphic illustration. In addition, this study has aimed to provide contextualisation for the nature and development of the graphic novel against the backdrop of postmodernism for the purposes of explaining the sociological, cultural and temporal influences that prompted and promoted the development of the comic book into what we now know as the graphic novel. A secondary aim of this study has been to provide further legitimacy to the concept of contemporary mythology through the exploration of this controversial concept and, by virtue thereof, set the scene for the incorporation of Myth-criticism into a multi-pronged analytic model.

LaRossa, Jaret, Gadgil, and Wynn (2000, 2001) conducted a content analysis of 495 comic strips published on Father’s Day and Mother’s Day in the United States from 1945 to 1999 in order to determine whether the culture of fatherhood and gender disparities in the media had changed over the past half-century. Drawing on their research, I conducted a similar kind of analysis of 246 comic strips published on Father’s Day and Mother’s Day in Japan from 1950 to 2004. By comparing and contrasting the results in the two studies, I show how comic portrayals of families have changed in Japan and in the United States, and demonstrate the value of analyzing comic strips in cross-national research.

This report is a chronicle of my research and design practice at The University of Texas at Austin in pursuit of the MFA in Design. It traces my interest in visual narrative, specifically in the component relationships evident in a close study of comics as they relate to questions of dimensionality and form. Key elements in this trajectory include the application of humor, sequential illustration, paper engineering and the adaptation of texts to works of visual and dimensional narrative. Along with a documentation of my working methods and experience, an appropriately distilled version of my extensive study of literature, comics, diorama, and pop-up books can be found in the following pages. / text

Προσέγγιση της γενικότερης φύσης της έννοιας του κωμικού μέσα από θεωρίες για το γέλιο. Το κωμικό στοιχείο στον Αριστοφάνη και η κοινωνική διάστασή του. Η σοβαρότητα μέσα από την κωμικότητα χάρη στις δυναμικές της κωμικής πειθούς και της καθάρσεως. Οι διαφορετικές μορφές του αριστοφανικού γέλιου - Διαχωρισμός αστείων μεταξύ τριών επιπέδων (οπτικό, προφορικό, δραματουργικό). Στοιχεία κωμικότητας στον λογοτεχνικό αγώνα των δύο τραγικών ποιητών. Το σοβαρό θέμα της γενικότερης παρακμής των ηθών μέσα από την κωμικότητα του αγώνα των δύο ποιητών των "Βατράχων". / Generally, the nature of comedy and the theories about laughter. The comic element in the plays of Aristophanes and its social context. The serious dimension through the comic side. Different forms for the laughable aspect of Aristophanes - Separation of the jokes into three levels (optical, verbal, dramaturgical. Comic types in the literary agon of the two tragic poets. The general moral decadence through the comic side of this agon.

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Joe Sacco and Chester Brown are two artists who emerged out of a vibrant tradition of autobiographical comics in the eighties and nineties. This paper argues that Sacco's Palestine and Brown's Louis Riel announce a new way of writing the self rejuvenating the autobiographical genre in comic books which has been lamented for having become overused and excessively solipsistic. Sacco's flamboyant expressionism opposes Brown's aesthetic of silence. Brown's silence is configured so that it is not an absence of speech, but a suppression of it in which attention is continually being drawn to the unspoken. A close analysis of Sacco and Brown's comics reveals the different ways in which their complementary aesthetics construct different subject positions for the reader. Sacco simulates a sense of being there and uses his subjectivity as a vehicle for drawing a reader in, while Brown's Louis Riel collapses these distinctions between absence and presence such that there is no point of entry into the work with which a reader can sustain illusory bonds of identification.

This dissertation investigates the development of mass communication research in the United States in the years between 1940 and 1972. Central to that investigation is the career of Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist whose interventions into debates about the effects of mass communication in the 1950s have remained largely overlooked in received histories of the discipline. By focussing on Wertham's contribution to the development of communications research a number of submerged tendencies are illuminated. A context for the development of the media effects research paradigm is suggested in the first three chapters, each of which highlights a different element which structured postwar communication research. The importance of elitist critiques of mass culture which dominated aesthetic discussions throughout the first half of the twentieth-century are assessed as a foundational factor in the development of communication research paradigms. Postwar concerns about the role of group-mindedness and collectivization are seen to contribute to a conservative political climate which shaped the development of the discipline. Differences between psychoanalysis and behavioral psychology are examined in order to demonstrate the ways in which communication research was consolidated around quantitative and scientistic methodologies. The remaining chapters present two specific case studies of media effects research. Wertham's 1954 anti-comics book, Seduction of the Innocent, is examined in detail in order to illustrate an approach to the study of the mass media that was not pursued by communications researchers. The development of a conservative and individualistic media effects paradigm stemming from research on the impact of television on children is presented as the culmination of postwar tendencies in communication studies. This dissertation argues that because the study of mass communication has been largely defined in the United States through reference to research into me