Browsing by Subject "Genre"
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Item Click-through rhetoric : genre and networks in content marketing(2015-12) Wall, Mary Amanda, 1985-; Spinuzzi, Clay; Charney, Davida; Miller, Carolyn R; Longaker, Mark; Boyle, CaseyThrough interviews with content marketers and analysis of examples of their work, this dissertation presents an exploratory study of content marketing: the creation of valuable, free-to-users content in order to increase desired business outcomes. Using insights from rhetorical genre studies and workplace communication studies, this dissertation examines the ways that participants performed and conceptualized their work, how they produced and networked pieces of content together into persuasive content ecologies, and how they defined and measured their success with both quantitative and qualitative feedback. This study finds that content marketers must navigate a tension between selling and not selling, a tension that emerges both as a defining characteristic of content marketing and as a locus for change in marketing. This dissertation thus addresses a gap in scholarly focus by providing implications that can be combined with the literature as a foundation for future studies in content marketing.Item Genre trouble : embodied cognition in fabliaux, chivalric romance, and Latin chronicle(2014-05) Widner, Michael; Heng, Geraldine; Johnson, Michael A., 1976-This dissertation examines the intersection between theories of body and of genre through the lens of cognitive science. It focuses, in particular, on representations of bodies in exemplars of fabliaux in Old French and Middle English, chivalric romance that feature the figure of Sir Gawain, and the Latin Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds. This dissertation establishes genre theory on cognitive-scientific ground by considering how embodied cognition influences both theories of genre and the representations of bodies. It argues that, rather than a container into which works fit, genre is a network of associations created in the minds of authors and audiences. This network finds expression in the bodies of characters, which differ across genres. It argues, moreover, that genre and bodies influence, in fundamental ways, interpretations of literary works. Finally, this work discusses the possibilities for future research using methods for quantitative textual analysis and data visualization common in the digital humanities.Item La novela policial alternativa en hispanoamérica : detectives perdidos, asesinos ausentes y enigmas sin respuesta(2008-05) Trelles Paz, Diego, 1977-; Lindstrom, Naomi, 1950-Despite the great popularity and increased prestige of classic detective fiction, as well as the American hard-boiled novel, since their introduction in the nineteenth century many readers and authors have perceived them as genres incompatible with Latin American realities. The inherent conventions of the whodunit, the presence of a detective whose legitimacy is never in doubt, and its conservative ideology, which presupposed the punishment of criminality and the reestablishment of the status quo, were incongruous in societies in which people had no faith in justice. The genre, then, was regarded as unrealistic for third world countries. In this way, in order to be plausible, the detective novel in Latin America needed a different approach. In broad terms, these pages propose the emergence of a new genre that can be observed in the works of contemporary authors such as Vicente Leñero's Los albañiles (1963), Ricardo Piglia's Nombre falso (1975), Jorge Ibargüengoitia's Las muertas (1977) and, most notably, in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes (1998), which I consider the most prominent and complex example of this type. The present study examines how this innovative Spanish American detective fiction incorporates and restates some of the structures and conventions of the hard-boiled novel and shares some features of contemporary Spanish American fiction, while developing its own characteristics in contrast with both detective fiction schools. Due to the necessity of the native writers to adopt, formally and thematically, alternative approaches when creating credible detective stories, I have named this emergent genre: Spanish American alternative detective fiction.Item La Problématique Postcoloniale et la Question du ‘Genre’ dans le Roman Francophone: Kateb Yacine et Nina Bouraoui.(2011-05) Mailhe, Alexandrine; Gafaiti, Hafid; Edwards, Carole; Wood, DianeIt was not requiered on the Graduate School websiteItem Malice in Wonderland : the perverse pleasure of the revolting child(2010-05) Scahill, Andrew, 1977-; Staiger, Janet; Kearney, Mary; Fuller, Jennifer; Benshoff, Harry; Mickenberg, Julia“Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child,” explores the place of “revolting child,” or the child-as-monster, in horror cinema using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and historical reception study. These figures, as seen in films such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and The Exorcist, “revolt” in two ways: they create feelings of unease due to their categorical perversion, and they also rebel against the family, the community, and the very notion of futurity. This work argues that the pleasure of these films vacillates between Othering the child to legitimate fantasies of child abuse and engaging an imagined rebellion against a heteronormative social order. As gays and lesbians have been culturally deemed “arrested” in their development, the revolting child functions as a potent metaphor for queerness, and the films provide a mise-en-scène of desire for queer spectators, as in the “masked child” who performs childhood innocence. This dissertation begins with concrete examples of queer reception, such as fan discourse, camp reiterations, and GLBT media production, and uses these responses to reinvestigate the films for sites of queer engagement. Interestingly, though child monsters appear centrally in several of the highest-grossing films in the horror genre, no critic has offered a comprehensive explanation as to what draws audiences this particular type of monstrosity. Further, this dissertation follows contemporary strains in queer theory that deconstruct notions of “development” and “maturity” as agents of heteronormative power, as seen in the work of Michael Moon, Lee Edelman, Ellis Hanson, Jose Esteban Muñez, and Kathryn Bond Stockton.Item The niche network : gender, genre, and the CW brand(2013-05) Lausch, Kayti Adaire; Beltrán, MaryIn 2006, the merger of the WB and UPN broadcast networks created a new network, the CW. As the fifth major broadcast network, the CW occupies an interesting, hybrid space within the television industry. The CW behaves like a cable channel, yet it usually receives the coverage of a broadcast network. Its target audience is women ages 18 to 34, an extremely small target demographic by any standards. Despite its unique status with the television industry, the CW remains woefully under-studied. This project aims first to provide a context for the CW moment and compare the network's trajectory with that of its predecessors in order to illuminate the myriad of changes that have occurred in the media industries. This project considers how the CW's branding strategies shape perceptions of the network, how the CW brand is produced and how the network's branding practices demonstrate an investment in postfeminism. In order to analyze the CW's branding, this paper examines the network's promotional materials and other paratexts, focusing primarily on print ads, since they are the most circulated. This project also asks how the CW constructs its audience in this age of postfeminism. In order to expose the contradictions and assumptions that underpin the network's project of audience construction, this paper considers both statements from network executives and the network's penchant for reviving 1990s programs with nostalgic appeal. Finally, this paper considers how the category of the "CW show" functions as a genre, and, through textual and narrative analysis, how that genre works to limit the possibilities for female representation on the network. This analysis draws attention to the complicated ways that postfeminist ideas are integrated into young women's programming today, and how conversations about female audiences have changed in the last twenty years. This project draws attention to an as-yet-unstudied site dominated by what Rosalind Gill calls the "postfeminist sensibility" (148).Item Reality TV's "queen of all :" genre, transgression, and hierarchy in Here Comes Honey Boo Boo(2014-08) Hicks, Shannon Nicole; Cloud, Dana L.This thesis examines the reality television (RTV) series Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (HCHBB) as a rhetorical text in and through which the cultural significance of race, class, and gender stereotypes—and the meanings they hold for different individuals and groups—are actively contested and negotiated. I argue that recurrent themes of symbolic transgression of hierarchical structures in HCHBB operate as a modality through which cast and audience(s) alike might make or interpret potentially subversive/resistant meanings. This focus on the RTV series as a dynamic site for making and contesting meaning—rather than a static text encoded/decoded by members of the discrete categories of producers and consumers—enables critical attention to the discursive and affective elements at work in HCHBB without forsaking analysis of the political and material frames in which they circulate. These frames are explored throughout a brief history of the RTV genre and an overview of the scholarship that has engaged it. Ultimately, I argue that while HCHBB and the genre of RTV may potentially provide the opportunity to challenge class antagonism and discrimination, it also perpetuates structural, material inequality. By linking themes of symbolic transgression as they operate in and through the text with Kenneth Burke’s (1969) analysis of hierarchy and mystification of class relations, I show how HCHBB doubly participates in the stratification of economic class when symbolic transgression is offered as an affront to social class morality rather than pervasive structural, material inequality. Despite an ethos of rebellion against bourgeois norms, HCHBB displaces rather than cultivates critical class consciousness by encouraging performances of redneck identity which also consign the Shannon/Thompson family to their fate as working class celebrities.Item Some versions of the fragment, 1700-1800(2014-08) Schneider, Rachel Marie; Bertelsen, Lance; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Moore, Lisa L; Baker, Samuel; Pagani, KarenSome Versions of the Fragment, 1700-1800 examines the eighteenth-century literary print fragment archive to redefine the fragment as a genre typified by its materiality. Eighteenth-century fragments included not just sentimental poems, but novels, satires, and political pamphlets. They are both long and short; written by famous and anonymous authors; canonical and unknown. This dissertation, in recuperating the eighteenth-century fragment’s rich variety, offers a taxonomy that includes three versions of the fragment: the unintentional, the intentional, and the complete. Examining the fragment in this way not only provides categories that can help us better understand how fragments fit within various social and cultural conditions in the eighteenth century, but also how these ways of understanding the fragment can help critics account for its evolutions today. Previous analyses of the literary fragment have emphasized its metaphorical qualities and its formal dimensions. This dissertation argues that the genre is defined no less by its materiality: prefaces, punctuation, and page arrangements are the common constitutive elements shared by all three versions of the fragment. By paying attention to the eighteenth-century fragment’s materiality, critics today can better account for the fragment’s role in the period’s generic developments, as well as its evolving literary marketplace.Item "This novel social fabric" : genre, liberalism, and political idealism in fiction of the British Empire, 1913-1936(2013-08) Nunes, Charlotte Louise; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Shingavi, Snehal; Carter, Mia; Engle, Karen; Slaughter, JosephThis dissertation brings together British and Anglophone Indian novels published between 1913 and 1936 that address the conditions of economic globalization in contexts of late British imperialism. I use genre as an entry point to examine how fiction writers situated in the metropolitan administrative center of the British Empire reckoned with the liberalism informing interwar political idealism, represented most saliently by the 1919 institution of the League of Nations and its operations during the subsequent two decades. The primary novels in this study—Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913), Winifred Holtby’s Mandoa, Mandoa! (1933), and Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie (1936)— engage tragic naturalism, satire, and the bildungsroman, respectively. Along with the novels I address in a supplementary capacity—E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief (1932), and George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934)—the fiction under review vividly, and at times graphically, evokes the social, political, and economic injustices attending ostensibly “liberal” British economic and humanitarian interventions in areas of Asia and Africa. In studies of the novel, there is a well-established alignment between the rise of the novel, the cultivation of empathy, and the establishment of liberal international institutions. The novels in my study represent the dynamic encounter of influential non- European nationalist voices and self-determination struggles with metropolitan legal, political, economic, and cultural institutions—from the League of Nations and the Anti- Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society to the international progressive writers’ movement and the political economy of British imperialism. In order to understand how the novelists critically examine the functions of liberalism as the prevailing Western legal-political discourse during the early twentieth century, I consider how they manipulate literary genres with historic relationships to the institution of liberalism. Given that the novel traditionally offers an ethical education by modeling processes of identification with difference, I argue that the genre engagements under discussion deemphasize the traditionally liberal value of empathy (premised on the belief that the other is a version of the self) and assert the value of humility (born of the realization that there are always unintended consequences of engaging with difference).Item Trauma and the rhetoric of horror films : the rise of torture porn in a post Nine-Eleven world(2013-08) Tiffee, Sean R.; Gunn, Joshua, 1973-The events of September 11, 2001 fundamentally changed the world for many in the United States. It was shocking and horrifying -- it was, in a word, traumatic. This trauma took on a new dimension with the release of the horrifying Abu Ghraib "torture photographs" in 2004. Large-scale traumatic events such as September 11 and the Abu Ghraib revelations can impact not only the individual and his or her personal identity, but entire social bodies and its corresponding national identity as well. This study investigates how the American social body psychically dealt with the horror of these national traumas and socially negotiated what it means to "be an American." Specifically, it examines a disparate group of rhetorical artifacts, from articles in mainstream news reports to popular horror films, and looks for emergent patterns to provide insight into the larger whole. This study draws on a variety of theoretical perspectives and employs a method of close reading and frame genre analysis to organize and understand the complex interplay of forces tuned toward a deeper understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of horror in times of social upheaval. It focuses first on the mainstream news organizations reporting of both September 11 and Abu Ghraib to outline the master narrative and counter-narrative that emerged. It then analyzes three sets of films in the popular culture to better understand how the nation attempted to rhetorically constitute an "American Subject" in the wake of a horrifying trauma. The study concludes with an analysis of the different psychical subject positions that may be taken in the rhetorical negotiation of the American Subject and offers an explanation of the rhetorical function of the torture porn horror genre in this time of national trauma.