Browsing by Subject "Cultural studies"
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Item Bless Her Hearth: Domestic Advice Media in the American South, 1920-present(2024-01) Bayne, CarolineThis dissertation begins with the assertion that, well into the twentieth century, the American South did not contribute to cultural production on a mass scale. Instead, cultural production was the domain of the urban North, Midwest, and later, the West Coast as publishing firms, film and television studios, production companies, and advertising agencies were found predominantly in these regions. The South’s earliest cultural productions, instead, appeared in the form of domestic and lifestyle advice produced locally utilizing emergent domestic technologies beginning in the 1920s. This project presents a history of southern cultural production and the women and media institutions responsible for defining southern culture and identity from the twentieth century to the present. The ongoing (re)defining of southern culture during periods of industrialization and modernization was facilitated through the region’s domestic and lifestyle media texts as many of the South’s earliest cultural productions. Domestic advisors and lifestyle institutions utilized emergent domestic technologies such as radio, television, and VHS tapes to create, teach, and preserve the region’s traditions, instructing white, middle-class women audiences towards the production of a uniquely southern domesticity and femininity. The southern home and media texts devoted to its upkeep – physically, emotionally, and ideologically – form the case studies presented here; a successful life, region, and nation depended first on a successful home. Questions of how to be and live southern require ongoing training and adaptability as the region continues to change. From radio programs of the 1920s to home construction in the contemporary moment, southern domestic advisors instruct women to perform a distinctly southern domesticity steeped in the region’s past for guidance on how to navigate the present and future.Item Off-Screen scares: the critical-industrial practices of contemporary horror cinema(2013-01) Tompkins, Joseph F.This project examines the marketing and reception discourse of contemporary horror cinema, exploring in particular how Hollywood's "ancillary" media platforms (television, DVD, the Internet, and soundtrack albums) allow for new industrial strategies for mobilizing consumers. It considers how commercial practices of transindustrial synergy, branding, and repurposing affect the circulation and mediation of horror films, and how these practices in turn contribute to a host of new promotional forms (e.g., brand-name auteurs, corporate "re-imaginings," soundtrack albums, conglomerated video-on-demand networks and web 2.0 sites), which are designed to manage an increasingly diversified field of niche markets. Accordingly, the dissertation explores the way the horror genre has increasingly come to function as a transindustrial site for organizing reception and consumer activities across multiple media platforms and entertainment industries. In doing so, it aims to contribute to scholarly understanding of the way film genres are stabilized and reproduced by institutional discourses (critical, industrial, popular), which are essential to the very existence of commercial-film categories.Item Stasis, change, and pedagogic struggle in the teaching of technical writing: a cultural study of Houp and Pearsall’s Reporting Technical Information.(2012-02) Anheier, Paul MarcoeBy casting Houp and Pearsall's textbook Reporting Technical Information (RTI) as a historically significant site for excavating both stasis and change in pedagogical practice, this study identifies and examines struggles for pedagogic dominance in the history of technical writing, focusing particularly on how such struggles may or may not have contributed to an alleged tradition of hyperpragmatism in technical communication pedagogy. A cultural studies approach to investigating such pedagogic struggles leads to examining a broad network of institutional pressures and scholarly exchanges surrounding technical writing instruction, all of which is aimed at gauging hyperpragmatism's genesis and power. Throughout, a number of central themes emerge from this analysis, including the definition of technical writing, rhetorical theory, process pedagogy, the notion of the workplace, information technologies, and ethics instruction, as well as how approaches to all of these, at various points in time, fall along a spectrum of more civic-minded versus more vocationally-minded pedagogy. Ultimately, this cultural study seeks to assess the degree to which RTI embodies the characteristics often associated with hyperpragmatism, as well as contextualize the contributions of technical writing teachers and scholars who, at their varying points in time, were responding to institutional pressures in their teaching.Item Teutonic time-slip: travels in electronic music, technology, and German identity, 1968-2009(2013-04) Nye, Sean Culhane"Teutonic Time-Slip" traces intersections between popular electronic music and German identity from 1968 to 2009, examining identity representations in electronic music both as cultural export and import. Broadly speaking, it traces the transformation of Germany's reputation as a nation of classical music to a nation of electronic music. Its history begins with the forming of Krautrock bands amidst the cultural shifts of 1968 and ends with the self-reflective, though fractured, position of German electronic music in 2009, twenty years after German unification. The project demonstrates that electronic music, often considered a purely international music of the computer age, has represented new forms of regional, national, and European identities both within Germany and abroad. Furthermore, the dissertation examines both the construction and political-social critique of German identity through electronic music. It focuses on how German electronic pop emerged in the constant exchange with two distinct musical traditions: first, pop and rock cultures in the United Kingdom and the United States; and second, German classical music and avant-garde electronic music. Finally, as an American scholar, I frame the cultural constellations of musical sound, modern travel, technology, and performance with an examination of constructions of contemporary Germany identity that have been central to the cultural exchange between the United States and Germany.