I analyze comedian Stephen Colbert's performances as the bloviating "fake" pundit, "Stephen Colbert." Colbert's work reflects the progression of personality-driven media and performance-driven society. His frequent shifts and blending of characters – from actor and entertainer to pundit and politician – call attention to the similarly character-driven nature of "real" figures in politics and media. Using Kenneth Burke's theory of tragic and comic frames of acceptance, I analyze three sets of Colbert's performances – hosting The Colbert Report, speaking at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, and running for president – as well as the conventional situations and discourses he complicates. I argue that Colbert's comic critique provides perspective by incongruity about the processes of production, mediation, and persuasion in the business of news punditry – and the literal staging of politics performed as entertainment.

The comedies of John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, and Aphra Behn were equally well-received by Restoration audiences, yet each dramatist professes divergent dramatic theories and poetic goals. In prefatory material to their plays, Shadwell insists a dramatist’s duty is to depict virtue rewarded and vice punished, Behn rejects the idea that comic drama might influence morals or manners, and Dryden maintains that his only goal is to please the audience, despite his dull conversation and lack of wit. A comparison between the playwrights’ dramatic theory and their most popular comedies of the 1668-77 decade indicates that none of them represent with any accuracy their own (or others’) work. Shadwell abandons his didactic goals in pursuit of approbation and income, while Behn unswervingly attacks social issues prevalent in a patriarchal society. Dryden’s comedies—witty and fast-paced despite his protestations—also address weaknesses in the patriarchal system and condemn the commodification of marriage.

Les théories de la culture de masse sont durant vingt ans un enjeu essentiel pour les intellectuels américains, qui cherchent à construire un modèle rendant compte des dangers esthétiques mais aussi sociaux des contenus culturels diffusés par les médias de masse. Influencés par les théories de l'Ecole de Francfort mais développant une pensée indépendante, les intellectuels américains et en particulier le groupe des New York intellectuals se livrent par revues interposées à un long dialogue, qui prend fin brusquement au début des années soixante. Cette recherche reconstitue l'histoire de cette pensée aux Etats-Unis, depuis sa formulation condensée par le journaliste Dwight Macdonald dés 1944, dans un article retentissant ("A Theory of Popular Culture"), jusqu'à sa disparition deux décennies plus tard, consacrée par la publication simultanée du Understanding Media de Marshall McLuhan et des "Notes on Camp" de Susan Sontag. Il s'agit également de tester le domaine de validité de ces théories en les confrontant à un objet culture supposé de masse, les comic books. Deux ambitions sous-tendent cette recherche : reconstituer le débat dans sa complexité en interrogeant les textes clés, mais aussi identifier les facteurs endogènes et exogènes ayant mené à la désaffection rapide pour cette idée. Une attention particulière est accordée à deux passerelles entre l'activité intellectuelle et le grand public, d'une part l'influent recueil Mass Culture, the Popular Arts in America, publié en 1957, et de l'autre son pendant Culture for the Millions?, publié quatre ans plus tard.

Hero characters and their narratives serve as important sites for negotiating a culture’s values. Informed by sexism in Western cultures, female heroes often construct and perpetuate women’s statuses as second-class citizens. However, female heroes also can and sometimes do work against such representations. This thesis argues for a third wave feminist interpretation of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men comic books as a text that brings multiple feminist perspectives into conversation with each other and that opposes certain patriarchal systems. Through narrative and formal analysis, I explore female X-Men Emma Frost and Kitty Pryde as characters who reject gender essentialism and misogynist value systems and whose relationship addresses concepts of difference in third wave feminism. Using similar methods, I also explore an interpretation of villain Danger as a failure to integrate radical feminist ideologies into third wave feminism. I believe that Astonishing X-Men provides an example of how norms of the mainstream superhero comic book medium, which scholars have criticized as sexist, can be reworked for a new generation of feminists. / text

The depictions of women in film noir and neo-noir have long been objects of interest for feminist scholars. In this report, I extend this scholarship to examine Frank Miller's Sin city graphic novel series as a version of neo-noir that is both intimately connected to noir tradition and innovative in its approach, specifically in terms of his representation of women. Miller depicts his female characters in a variety of ways that reflect both the positive and negative imagery of women in classic noir and neo-noir; in doing so, he creates a new and complex vision of women in noir. This report uses three different characterizations of women in film noir--the spider woman, the femme moderne, and the angel--to explore the ways in which Miller's female characters can be understood to simultaneously uphold and challenge these conventions. / text

This is a case study of Carlstad Comic Con 2011 and 2012.The purpose is to study the event in relation to a project management and a local culture policy perspective. This in order to analyze the organization of a popular culture event and see how such a local event may benefit Karlstad as a city. Besides studying the organization of Carlstad Comic Con and its outcomes I am sketching a short cultural history of popular culture media and its context within recent year’s globalization.The study shows that the events have had a great beneficial impact on the local industry; lacking any negative sides, and have put Karlstad in an international context which goes directly in line with the standard guidelines for project management of region culture policy. Concerning how to organize the event the organizers have not followed a strict project structure. The organization of Carlstad Comic Con is based on a great enthusiasm for popular culture which eventually has led to an appreciated event both by visitors and artists alike.

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近年來，動漫(動畫、漫畫與線上遊戲)越來越受歡迎。全球資訊網也陸續出現收集大量包括故事情節、動漫角色、作者等動漫相關資訊的動漫網站。多數動漫網站都提供使用者文字檢索的功能，以搜尋動漫網站文字內容。但是動站網站若能提供根據文字與圖形風格來搜尋圖文內容，對於動漫使用者而言，將更為方便。圖文風格可能是漫畫人物的繪畫風格、動畫故事的敘事風格等等。 為了方便使用者以圖文風格進行搜尋相關資訊，本論文根據動漫關連探勘技術，研究並開發一個動漫網站的搜尋引擎：動漫魔鏡，以提供使用者根據圖文關連來搜尋動漫網站中風格相似的動漫資訊。本論文的搜索方法關聯了圖像特徵和文字特徵。首先，針對圖像特徵，由於動漫角色是動漫的靈魂，因此經過動漫臉部偵測後，我們以電腦視覺中的局部二值樣式(Local Binary Pattern, LBP)與灰階值分佈來抽取並表示動漫角色的臉部特徵。針對文字特徵，我們利用一般全文檢索技術來擷取文字特徵。接著，運用階層式分群技術將文字特徵與圖像特徵值轉換為文字與圖像關鍵詞。最後，以語意主題模型中的隱含狄利克雷分布(Latent Dirichlet Allocation, LDA)分析圖文關鍵詞的潛在語意，並據此計算動漫網頁之間的相似性。實驗結果顯示本論文所研發的風格搜尋，其效果優於其他三種基本作法。 / Animations, comics, and games (ACG) have become more and more popular in recent years. There exist many ACG web sites which contain lots of textual and visual information on stories, characters and authors of animations, comics and games. Most ACG web sites provide users text retrieval capability to search for textual contents. However, there is a need for users to search for textual and visual contents by styles. Examples of styles are drawing styles of comic characters, narrative styles of animation stories and so on. In order to help users to search for textual and visual contents by similar styles, this thesis investigates and develops a search engine, Comirror, for ACG web sites based on latent correlation between textual and visual contents. First, while facial styles of characters play important roles in ACG, after comic face detection, Local Binary Pattern (LBP) along with gray-value histogram is utilized to extract and represent the visual features. For the textual contents, traditional full-text indexing technique is employed to extract textual features. Then, hierarchical clustering is performed to quantize and transform the textual and visual features into textual and visual words. Finally, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is utilized to discover the latent semantic correlation between visual and textual words. Experiments show that the developed approach performs better than the other baseline approaches.

Le recueil de brèves théâtrales "Les Journées nationales" rassemble trois courtes pièces ("La Journée nationale du pardon", "La Journée nationale de la lutte contre l’embonpoint" et "La Journée nationale de la frivolité") qui reposent sur une prémisse commune, en apparence farfelue : l'obligation de célébrer un quelconque impératif social dicté par la majorité. À travers un humour parfois noir, "Les Journées nationales" se présentent comme de courtes satires sociales qui, en judiciarisant une conduite morale implicitement imposée, entreprennent de disséquer et de décomposer les normes sociales et les valeurs généralement admises afin d’en souligner les incohérences. "Quand les huissiers se saisissent de la scène : l’absurde bureaucratique dans le théâtre contemporain" est un essai qui vise à analyser les procédés et à identifier les enjeux à l’œuvre dans les pièces de théâtre de l’absurde bureaucratique. Cette expression désigne des œuvres dramatiques qui, à travers un comique de décalage, une utilisation ludique et créative du jargon bureaucratique et une importance accordée au référent social du lieu et des personnages, expriment la terreur ressentie par leurs auteurs à l’endroit de l’institutionnalisation des relations humaines. À l’aide de quatre pièces principales ("Le Professeur Taranne" d’Arthur Adamov, "Les Travaux et les Jours" de Michel Vinaver, "Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers" de Lydie Salvayre et "États financiers" de Normand Chaurette), d’études sur le théâtre de l’absurde (Esslin, Hubert) de même que d’ouvrages de sociocritique (Duchet) et de sociologie (Crozier et Friedberg, Le Breton), il sera démontré qu’en exprimant une tension constante entre l’intime et le professionnel, l’absurde bureaucratique laisse aussi entrevoir la persistance du pouvoir et de la responsabilité individuels au sein des organisations sociales. / "La Journée nationale du pardon", "La Journée nationale de la lutte contre l’embonpoint" and "La Journée nationale de la frivolité", the three short plays collected in "Les Journées nationales", all spring from the same, seemingly eccentric idea : the obligation to celebrate any social aspect as long as it is dictated by a majority. By "legalizing" an implicitly imposed moral conduct, "Les Journées nationales", short social satires laden with black humour, dissect and analyze social norms and generally acknowledged values in order to highlight their incoherencies. "Quand les huissiers se saisissent de la scène : l’absurde bureaucratique dans le théâtre contemporain" is an essay that analyzes the processes and also points out the stakes at work in the theatre of the "bureaucratic absurd". The "bureaucratic absurd" is a phrase used to designate plays that, through nonsense, a playful and creative use of bureaucratic jargon and through the importance given to the characters’ and locations’ social connotations, express the terror felt by the playwrights towards the institutionalization of human relationships. Using four plays (Arthur Adamov’s "Le Professeur Taranne", Michel Vinaver’s "Les Travaux et les Jours", Lydie Salvayre’s "Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers" and Normand Chaurette’s "États financiers"), theoretical works on the theatre of the absurd (Esslin, Hubert), sociocriticism (Duchet) and sociology (Crozier and Friedberg, Le Breton), we will show that, through the expression of a constant tension between the intimate and the professional, the bureaucratic absurd offers a glimpse of the individual’s power and of the persistence of personal responsibility within social organizations.

This study has analyzed the relationship between trauma and otherness in two autobiographical graphic narratives. The study suggests that autobiographical graphic narratives are better equipped to represent the effects, mainly that of otherness, on the self as a result of trauma. In the ten volume manga series Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa details his childhood survival of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II. As he rebuilds his life, fellow survivals that look like his deceased family members recall his trauma of the bombing. Like we see in Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, Art Spiegelman also uses repetitious imagery and a fragmentary form of comic narration to represent the experience of trauma throughout In the Shadow of No Towers. However, while Nakazawa repeats specific imagery of the atomic bombing throughout Barefoot Gen based on his eyewitness testimony, Spiegelman manipulates imagery of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to reject the notion that only one specific set of images can represent a traumatic event. Thus, by the end of the second section of In the Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman creates a multiplicity of images to reenact the trauma of 9/11. / Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only.