Browsing by Subject "American studies"
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Item The British experience with American independent photography, 1944-1980(2014-05) Jones, Andrew Wyn; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Abzug, Robert H; Lewis, Randolph; Hake, Sabine; Meikle, Jeffrey LThis dissertation explores the ways in which US-based photographic practices shaped British independent photography from the late stages of the Second World War to the beginning of the 1980s. America had become the center of the Western artistic and literary universes by the late 1940s, and the US had led the way in photography from at least the 1930s and arguably from the 1910s. American photographic technology, education, and aesthetics looked enviously advanced to Britons for most of the twentieth century, and those on the photographic vanguard in Britain cultivated relationships with their transatlantic counterparts in the hope of effecting change in British institutions. During the period studied, photographic traffic mostly emanated from the US, accompanying a broader stream of ideas, capital and cultural products that were eagerly consumed by many and resisted in other quarters as the pernicious products of American cultural imperialism. As ideas, images, and technology flowed into Britain from the US, photographic collections and personnel from Britain flowed out. American photographic practice in Britain was promulgated as much by its British recipients as their US counterparts. Influential professionals like magazine editor Bill Jay, Arts Council officer Barry Lane and freelance photographer Tony Ray-Jones sought to stimulate British independent photography by importing American institutional and aesthetic models. This catalytic process had the effect of invigorating photography in Britain which both developed along and ultimately diverged from American models. This work contributes to a larger body of scholarship examining the transnational lineages of artistic and cultural production through analyzing how actors in this flow of information sought to rework and domesticate artistic forms and ideas to suit their own purposes.Item Compost and consumption : organic farming, food, and fashion in American culture(2010-05) O'Sullivan, Robin; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-; Hoelscher, Steven; Davis, Janet; Engelhardt, Elizabeth; Davis, DianaThis research analyzes the history and cultural significance of organic agriculture as a social movement. It illuminates how organic production and consumption are polyvalent and socially embedded. Organic farming has been classified as a hobby and as a constituent of agribusiness; organic food has been dubbed as a hollow preference and as an exploited industry. At its core, though, organics is a social movement. From agricultural pioneers in the 1940s to contemporary consumer activists, the organic movement has preserved connections to environmentalism, agrarianism, health food dogma, and other ideological alignments. Organic farming has been a method of agriculture, social philosophy, way of life, and subversive effort. Organic consumption has been a practical decision, lifestyle choice, communicative performance, status marker, and political act. The dissertation embraces this multiplicity and expounds on the nuances of what the organic zeitgeist has meant in American culture. The study entails collection and analysis of historical and contemporary data, including archival, legislative, and regulatory documents. It applies discourse analysis, semiotics, iconographic study, and cultural analysis to texts and additional sorts of media. Observations of organic sites of consumption also enhance the historical and theoretical evaluations. This project includes scrutiny of rhetorical strategies used by organic farmers, business leaders, chefs, consumers, writers, and organizations that engage with the “organic lifestyle.” Despite the fluid intertextuality of these expressions, there are common themes. Unraveling the multivocality and interconnectedness of prevailing discourses provides insight into the movement’s epicenter.Item Gender, power, and performance : representations of cheerleaders in American culture(2012-05) Wright, Allison Elaine; Engelhardt, Elizabeth S. D. (Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche), 1969-; Davis, Janet M.; Smith, Mark C.; Kearney, Mary C.; Todd, Janice S.This dissertation reveals that the various, often conflicting media representations of cheerleaders are responsible for the many ways gender and power are refracted through the lens of American popular culture and on the bodies of American youth. Beginning in the circumscribed nineteenth century world of elite male privilege, the history of cheerleading is intimately connected to the discourse of masculinity in America. It is not until almost one hundred years after the activity’s birth that its primary narrative changes from one of masculinity to one of power. This project calls attention to the ways in which sociohistoric context impacts representations of cheerleaders. My interdisciplinary project draws on sources from the popular press; children’s, adult, and mainstream literature, film, and television; material culture; and interviews with cheerleaders themselves; and engages with existing cheerleading scholarship as well as literary criticism and feminist scholarship. Each chapter interrogates a different, related trend in the cultural representation of cheerleaders, including: competing narratives of victimization, im/perfection, and popularity; a third wave feminist vision of gendered superpower; prescriptions of beauty and behavior; pornography and its connection to the professionalization of cheer; and the performance of representation by actual cheerleaders. Taken together, these chapters trace patterns of representation, fraught with nuance and complexity, to provide a picture of a shifting cultural icon whose relationship to larger social movements is often reciprocal and who challenges societal expectations of gender and generation over three centuries.Item Heroes of the past, readers of the present, stories of the future : continuity, cultural memory, and historical revisionism in superhero comics(2014-05) Friedenthal, Andrew J.; Davis, Janet M.This dissertation is a study of cultural memory, exploring how superhero comic books, and their readers and creators, look back on and make sense of the past, as well as how they use that past in the creation of community and stories today. It is my contention that the superhero comics that exist as part of a long-standing "universe," particularly those published by DC and Marvel, are inextricably linked to a sense of cultural memory which defines both the organization of their fans and the history of their stories, and that cultural memory in comics takes the twinned forms of fandom and continuity. Comic book fandom, from its very inception, has been based around memories of past stories and recollections about favorite moments, creators, characters, etc. Because of this, as many of those fans have gone on to become creators themselves, the stories they have crafted reflect that continual obsession with the histories -- loosely termed "continuity" by creators, fans, and comic book scholars -- of these fictional universes. Often, this obsession translates into an engagement with actual events from the past. In many of these cases, as with much art and ephemera that is immersed in cultural memory, these fans-turned-creators combine their interest in looking at the history of the fictional universe with a working out of actual traumatic events. My case studies focus on superhero comic books that respond to such events, particularly World War II, the Vietnam War, and 9/11.Item “The most popular humorist who ever lived” : Mark Twain and the transformation of American culture(2011-05) Wuster, Tracy Allen; Davis, Janet M.; Bremen, Brian A.; Barrish, Phillip; Engelhardt, Elizabeth; Fisher Fishkin, Shelley; Thompson, ShirleyThis dissertation examines Mark Twain’s literary-critical reputation from the years 1865 to 1882, as he transformed from the regional “wild humorist of the Pacific Slope” to a national and international celebrity who William Dean Howells called “the most popular humorist who ever lived.” This dissertation considers “Mark Twain” not as the name of a literary author, but as a fictional creation who was narrator and implied author of both fictional and non-fiction texts, a performer who played his role on lecture platforms and other public venues, and a celebrity whose fame spread from the American west through America and the world. The key question of this dissertation is the historical position of the “humorist,” a hierarchical cultural category that included high culture literary figures, such as James Russell Lowell and Bret Harte; literary comedians, such as Artemus Ward and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby; and clowns and minstrels, who were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. I argue that Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the canonical literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular. Through the success of The Innocents Abroad (1869) and the promotion of William Dean Howells, Mark Twain was elevated into critical discussions of literary value, and in the 1870s he entered into venues of higher prestige: so-called “quality” magazines such as the Galaxy and the Atlantic Monthly, lecture stages on the lyceum circuit and in England, and the personal realm of friendship with other authors. While Twain was accepted into some literary cultures, other critics attempted to consign him to literary oblivion, or simply ignored him, while Twain himself betrayed keen anxiety about his role as “stripèd humorist” in respectable literary realms. This dissertation thus focuses on written works, critical interpretations, and performative instances in which “Mark Twain,” as both agent and subject, brought debates over “American Humor,” “American Literature,” and “American Culture” to the fore.Item The rocket and the tarot : the Apollo moon landings and American culture at the dawn of the seventies(2010-08) Tribbe, Matthew David; Oshinsky, David M., 1944-; Lawrence, Mark A.; Hunt, Bruce J.; Pells, Richard H.; Meikle, Jeffrey L.Although the Apollo 11 moon landing was one of the most remarkable events of the twentieth century, it was also among the most abstruse—what did it mean, after all? With implications ranging from the everyday benefits of “spinoff” to the cosmic questions of existence, it seemed like it had to signify something important. But the United States was undergoing a profound cultural shift as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, a transformative moment when the rationalist, technological optimism of the high Space Age began losing traction to the more intuitive, relativistic, neo-romantic cultural aura of the 1970s. This turn left many Americans who reckoned that Apollo should be important—somehow, in some way—unable to adequately integrate the event into their worldviews, their American mythologies. This study examines how Americans attempted to make sense of Apollo in the 1960s and 1970s. This period saw a noticeable retreat from the faith in science and rationalism that had driven American thought and culture in the decades following World War II, and which formed the foundation of the successful space program. In its stead emerged a new understanding of “progress” that was divorced from its previous equation with technological advancement for its own sake and reconsidered in terms of its impact on sustainability and personal fulfillment. In this environment, Apollo—an endeavor that that ultimately seemed to offer no deeper meaning that itself—provided bold evidence that the crucial answers to life’s quandaries would not be discovered through technological journeys to the near planets; indeed, that the prolonged emphasis on these sorts of materialist endeavors had only obscured humanity’s quest for true meaning and its continued sustenance on what Apollo made abundantly clear was the only planet it would inhabit for a long time to come. This cultural turn spelled doom for a space program that for all its futuristic trappings was actually firmly rooted in the past, in a mindset that had flourished throughout the middle of the twentieth century but was now falling under wide suspicion.Item Voices that matter : hearing the corseted body in American domestic performance(2016-12) McLemore, Bethany Shae; Carson, Charles, Ph. D.; Seeman, Sonia; Dell'Antonio, Andrew; Buhler, James; Tusa, Michael C; Davis, JanetMusical performance and curation provided artistic outlets for middle- to upper-class women in the nineteenth-century U.S. and their resulting collections, called binder’s volumes, provide a valuable record of their musical practices. Moving beyond earlier musicological studies which use binder’s volumes to reconstruct performance practice, I argue that binder’s volumes can, when taken in dialogue with women’s other material goods and the material of their actual bodies, show how women created and expressed their own identities through material culture and how the continual intra-actions among their bodies and objects impacted their lives, performances, and contemporary notions of femininity. In this dissertation, I examine the material agents involved in women’s musical and gendered performances in the nineteenth-century United States, as well as their material and ideological repercussions. Specifically, I consider the intra-actions of the body, the corset, musical curation, and musical and gendered performances to understand how performance animates the body, how music, marketing, and mass products alter the body, and how the body experiences and impacts performance. I argue that the practice of corseting had a concrete impact on women’s singing and both corseting and popular song performance impacted the body, the voice, and notions of ideal femininity. Considering musical performance through and beyond performativity—as an act that has tangible bodily repercussions—brings the “material turn” of recent feminist theory into dialogue with musicological studies. Going beyond considerations of embodiment and performativity to consider the material impacts of art on bodies, as well as the impact of bodies on music and social constructions deepens our understanding of musical and gendered performances, and also allows the body to act as a locus of performers’ agency.