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Character culture : the cultural bargain between ownership and appropriation

This thesis is about the cultural bargain; the balancing relationship between author monopoly and user affect desires, as applying to the ambiguity of characters. Character culture is a hybrid of the characters that are created and sold by authors with artistic and legal concerns, and the character-affect-relationship of the audience users of those characters. This study examines the law and industry practices in the United States and Canada as it relates to character and the limited scope of the law in defining just what exactly a character is. Also, I examine the major issues in the cultural bargain between the ownership of characters of authors, and the appropriation of characters by audiences, through the dominate arguments for both authors and audiences and the issue of privileged accessibility to characters. By "appropriate", I am referring to any act of an audience member, utilizing a character they do not own, in new ways, that the original author of the character did not give permission for, or approve. Finally, I present my analysis of how the cultural bargain may experience a balance between both authors and audience, by defining characters using the audience affect interpretation as criteria.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.33884
Date January 2001
CreatorsChinappi, Franco.
ContributorsHamilton, Sheryl (advisor)
PublisherMcGill University
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Formatapplication/pdf
CoverageMaster of Arts (Department of Art History and Communication Studies.)
RightsAll items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
Relationalephsysno: 001875946, proquestno: MQ78998, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest.

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