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Yes / This article argues that older age inequality within and across working life is the result of vampiric forms and structures constitutive of contemporary organizing. Rather than assuming ageism occurs against a backdrop of neutral organizational processes and practices, the article denaturalizes (and in the process super-naturalizes) organizational orientations of ageing through three vampiric aspects: (un)dying, regeneration and neophilia. These dimensions are used to illustrate how workplace narratives and logics normalize and perpetuate the systematic denigration of the ageing organizational subject. Through our analysis it is argued that older workers are positioned as inevitable ‘sacrificial objects’ of the all-consuming immortal organization. To challenge this, the article explicitly draws on the vampire and the vampiric in literature and popular culture to consider the possibility of subverting existing notions of the ‘older worker’ in order to confront and challenge the subtle and persistent monstrous discourses that shape organizational life.

La bit lit, un genre littéraire très contemporain qui associe le récit amoureux et le récit vampirique et s'adresse principalement à un public adolescent féminin, a acquis une visibilité mondiale avec la parution de Twilight de Stephenie Meyer en 2005. Ce mouvement littéraire reprend l'un des thèmes les plus récurrents et centraux des histoires d'amour comme des histoires de vampires occidentales : la construction du féminin, la position attribuée à ce dernier, et ses interactions avec un univers majoritairement hostile et dangereux. Or, malgré des représentations très conservatrices, voire rétrogrades, le genre connaît un succès très important en particulier auprès des jeunes femmes. Il est donc indispensable de s'interroger sur cette apparente contradiction, qui amène des auteures exclusivement de sexe féminin et un lectorat très majoritairement féminin à écrire et lire des récits sentimentaux peu féministes. Pour ce faire, la présente étude se penche sur trois oeuvres de bit lit : Twilight de Stephenie Meyer, The Vampire Diaries de L. J. Smith et House of Night de P. C. et Kristin Cast. Elle s'appuie sur trois approches, les études culturelles et l'étude de la réception, la narratologie, puis les études de genre. Les influences littéraires qui nourrissent les romans, le mode de lecture qu'ils encouragent et les choix narratifs qu'ils déploient sont analysés afin de comprendre ce qu'ils mettent en scène : la rencontre entre le sujet féminin et une conception patriarcale du monde. / Supernatural romance (or 'bit lit' in French) is a contemporary literary genre which associates sen-timental and vampiric stories and is primarily aimed at a female teenage audience. It acquired global visibility in 2005 with the publication of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. This literary movement takes up one of the most recurring and central themes of Western love stories and vampire stories alike: the construction of the feminine, of its positioning and its interactions with an essentially hos-tile and dangerous environment. Despite very conservative and even reactionary representations, the genre has met a huge success among young women. It is thus necessary to question this ap-parent contradiction: why do exclusively female writers and mostly female readers write and read sentimental stories that can be qualified at best as 'hardly feminist'? To do so, the current study focuses on three supernatural romance series: Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, The Vampire Diaries by L. J. Smith and House of Night by P. C. and Kristin Cast. It relies on three approaches: cultural and reception studies, narratology and gender studies. The literary influences that inform the nov-els, the reading mode they incite and the narrative choices they unfold are analyzed in order to understand how they stage the encounter between the feminine subject and a patriarchal worldview.

This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic discourses are remediated or developed in selected works of contemporary interactive fiction. These works, which are wholly text-based and proceed via command line input from a player, include Nevermore, by Nate Cull (2000), Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998), Madam Spider’s Web, by Sara Dee (2006) and Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). The interactive fictions are examined using a media-specific, in-depth analytical approach. Gothic fiction explores the threats which profoundly challenge narrative subjects, and so may be described as concerned with epistemological, ideological and ontological boundaries. In the interactive fictions these boundaries are explored dually through the player’s traversal (that is, progress through a work) and the narrative(s) produced as a result of that traversal. The first three works in this study explore the vulnerabilities related to conceptions of human subjectivity. As an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” Nevermore, examined in chapter one, is a work in which self-reflexivity extends to the remediated use of the Gothic conventions of ‘the unspeakable’ and ‘live burial’ which function in Poe’s poem. In chapter two, postmodern indeterminacy, especially with regard to the tensions between spaces and subjective boundaries, is apparent in the means through which the trope of the labyrinth is redesigned in Anchorhead, a work loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft’s terror fiction. In the fragmented narratives produced via traversal of Madam Spider’s Web, considered in chapter three, the player character’s self-fragmentation, indicated by the poetics of the uncanny as well as of the Gothic-grotesque, illustrates a destabilized conception of the human subject which reveals a hidden monster within, both for the player character and the player. Finally, traversal of Slouching Towards Bedlam, analyzed in chapter four, produces a series of narratives which function in a postmodern, recursive fashion to implicate the player in the viral infection which threatens the decidedly posthuman player character. This viral entity is metaphorically linked to Bram Stoker’s vampire, Dracula. As it is the only work in the study to present a conception of posthuman subjectivity, Slouching Towards Bedlam more specifically aligns with the subgenre ‘cybergothic,’ and provides an illuminating contrast to the other three interactive fictions. In the order in which I examine them, these works exemplify a postmodern development of the Gothic which increasingly marries fictional indeterminacy to explicit formal effects, both during interaction and in the narratives produced.

This study builds on the Uses and Gratifications body of knowledge as applies to motivations surrounding television use, specifically the cult television program Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Through the distribution of online survey it was found that respondents who read and/or wrote fanfiction were more likely to engage in the variable of parasocail relationships. One hypothesis was disregarded due to the invalidity of the variable. Through two research questions it was found that the variable of affinity was indicative of a viewer's involvement with the show. The second research question found only two marginally significant variables, personal identity and realism, with regard to the number of years one had been a fan of the show. Age was found to be significant in all the variables and was accounted for. / Department of Journalism

This thesis explores the ways in which the television adaptations of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries become more homogenized during the adaptation process, thus contributing to an implied exclusivity from which Alloy, Inc.—the media and marketing company that owns these products—might benefit. This paper points out the ways in which the three products become structurally similar to one another during the adaptation process through the implementation of soap opera conventions. An exploration of consumption and class in each of the three works reveals an emphasis on class-based exclusivity in the adaptation process. Finally, a focus on portrayals of race within the source texts and their respective adaptations reveals the ways in which African American characters are presented as invisible, outsiders, or antagonists, thus creating products that become more exclusive on a race basis.

M.A (Audiovisual Communication) / In 2008 a film about a Gothic Romance between a teenage girl and a vampire became a pop culture phenomenon (Edwards, 2009:26). The ‘chick flick’ or ‘women’s film’ genre was suddenly in the spotlight at the box office as droves of female spectators of all ages were entranced by the neo-Gothic fantasy-Romance entitled Twilight (2008) (Em & Lo, 2009; Parekh, 2009:16; Puente, 2009:1; Ryan, 2008). More than 75% of the audience members were female with 55% being under 25 years (Ryan, 2008). Despite Twilight’s (2008) soaring status as a pop-culture phenomenon, much debate has ensued emphasizing the problematic representations and thematic elements that surround the gender roles and relations depicted in the film. As Lezra (2009:1) argues: “The cultural and social values…are so regressive that they would make people in Victorian London stand up and angrily defend the rights of women and minorities”. Twilight (2008) has been criticized for perpetuating traditional, oppressive, patriarchal values and glorifying a female character who has been termed “a feminist’s nightmare” (Czech, 2009) and “a 1950s-robot housewife” (Gassley, 2009). In 2009 the second instalment of the Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) was released which had far more success than Twilight (2008) at the box office, as well as attracting a slightly older demographic (Gray, 2009a:1; Gray 2009b:1; Puente, 2009:1; Seltzer, 2009:1). The thematic conventions surrounding heterosexual relationships depicted in New Moon (2009) make the film particularly interesting. The film shifts focus from the relationship between Bella and her vampire love-interest Edward, as seen in Twilight (2008), to the relationship between Bella and her best friend Jacob, a werewolf. This relationship has been praised as the ‘ideal’ heterosexual relationship and Jacob, the ‘ideal’ partner: “Edward is not the ideal boyfriend-lover. In fact, Jacob is…Edward will only lead to black eyes, rape, torture, and possibly even death” (Housel, 2009a:188). Thus the representation of heterosexual relationships and gender roles within those relationships is brought into question in New Moon (2009). What makes the situation more complex is that despite these criticisms, so many women of multiple age groups are fans of the films. While there are many elements of the film which may contribute to this mass interest, such as fascination with the ‘undead’, or film being a temporary escape for spectators in times of economic instability and uncertainty (Olson, 1995:16), the appeal of this neo-gothic romance for women in particular needs to be examined more closely: “What did it mean that millions iv of girls were fantasizing about men who could barely repress the desire to kill them? In 2008?” (Mann, 2009:132). By integrating genre analysis and audience ethnography, this study explores the representations of gender roles and heterosexual romance in the films Twilight (2008) and New Moon (2009) and the perception of these representations by selected, female South African viewers. It further aims to situate the films within the sociocultural context in which it emerged and thus uses postfeminism as a theoretical framework.

Where the Dead Remain is a murder mystery set in a Post-Katrina New Orleans where the gods, magic and monsters of various world mythologies actually exist. The story follows a week in the life of Jude Duboisson, a once magician who is struggling with the loss of his magic and the life he had known in the wake of the storm, as he is pulled out of his torpor and into the affairs of the mighty once again. He is tasked with discovering who murdered Dodge Renaud, the fortune god of New Orleans. What he discovers, though, are some surprising truths about the fundamental nature of things: about loss, about New Orleans, and about himself.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T18:14:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Juliana Porto Chacon Humphreys.pdf: 12878114 bytes, checksum: ed308dd65205bd7b257546c767ff93fe (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-03-17 / This research aims to examine the route of the vampire figure in film, tracing a line of ancestry that starts in early influences found in medieval art, through the transmutations within the Gothic and Romantic literature, until contemporaneously, their cinematic recreations. It is about to understand the factors that forged the figure of the vampire in current cinema, especially regarding to its status as an undead male and to the arising horror effects. Thus, the object of study assumes two distinct phases: primary, enclosed by the figure of the vampire in film; and secondary, comprising a cutout of fantastic literature. Being hybrid, the research corpus comprises, at first, a set of works of the XV century called Dance macabre, plus a small sample of tales of the XVIII and XIX centuries with vampire theme, culminating in the work Dracula, by Bram Stoker, on 1897. Secondly, but more importantly, about a century set of extensive and representative vampire filmography that includes the transformation of the vampire image, starting with Nosferatu, on 1922; and finishing with Shadows of the Night, on 2011. The assumptions that guide the study deal with the relationship between the attraction exerted by the vampires and their increasing aestheticization; detachment between cinematic vampires and the literary array of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the consequent spread of reconfigurations of character retrieve the medieval influences. Forcibly multidisciplinary, the theoretical references of research include studies in Art History, History of Literature and the History of Cinema, as an instrument of semiotic analysis, which in this case will be Greimas for literature and Peirce for images. Supported by this background, the study also aims to contribute significantly to the study of the figure of the vampire, highlighting the influences that determined the existence of one of the most important horror characters of the first century of cinema / Esta pesquisa tem como principal objetivo examinar o percurso da figura vampiresca no cinema, traçando uma linha de ancestralidade que se inicia nas primeiras influências encontradas na arte medieval, passando pelas transmutações no âmbito da literatura romântica gótica e chegando, contemporaneamente, a suas refigurações cinematográficas. Trata-se de compreender os fatores que forjaram as imagens e a figura do vampiro no cinema atual, especialmente no que se refere à sua condição de morto vivo do sexo masculino e aos efeitos de horror daí decorrentes. O objeto de estudos assume, desse modo, duas faces distintas: uma primária, delimitada pela figura do vampiro no cinema e outra secundária, constituída por um recorte de literaturas fantásticas. Sendo híbrido, o corpus da pesquisa compreende, num primeiro momento, um conjunto de obras do século XV, denominadas Danças Macabras, além de uma pequena amostra de contos dos séculos XVIII e XIX com tema vampiresco, que culminaram na obra Drácula, de Bram Stoker, de 1897. Num segundo momento, porém mais relevante, um extenso conjunto de filmes representativos de cerca de um século de filmografia vampiresca contempla as transformações da imagem vampiresca, iniciando por Nosferatu de 1922 e terminando com Sombras da Noite de 2011. As hipóteses que norteiam o estudo versam sobre: as relações entre a atração exercida pelos vampiros e sua crescente estetização; o distanciamento dos vampiros cinematográficos da matriz literária do Drácula de Bram Stoker e a consequente disseminação de reconfigurações da personagem que recuperam as influências medievais. Obrigatoriamente multidisciplinares, os referenciais teóricos da pesquisa compreendem estudos em História da Arte, História da Literatura e História do Cinema, assim como um instrumental de análise semiótica, que, neste caso, será greimasiano para a literatura e peirceano para as imagens. É com esse referencial que o estudo pretende contribuir de forma relevante para o estudo da figura do vampiro, destacando as influências que determinaram a existência de uma das mais importantes personagens de horror do primeiro século de cinema