College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men: Official Narratives and American Meaning-Making in World War II(2021) Kirchner, Christine; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During World War II, the U.S. government attempted to shape how Americans made sense of the war and control how they understood its meaning. Despite the government’s comprehensive efforts and major accomplishments like changing American geographic identity and reinterpreting enduring cultural artifacts, they could not comprehensively define the war. Audiences, then as now, brought their own perspectives to media and propaganda, interpreting governmental messages and narratives in their own ways and according to their preexisting opinions and worldviews. Ultimately, the government could not control or anticipate how their messages were received. And in fact, a great deal of World War II propaganda continues to circulate today in new ways that its creators probably never anticipated, accruing new meanings as changes in context and culture offer new interpretive possibilities.Item Transversal Media: Power, Peril, and Potential in the Ever-Expanding 3D Multiverse(2021) Bauer, DB; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Transversal media move. They move with ease across a variety of interfaces, communities of practice, and applications. With highly compatible file formats, they move across a multitude of 3D-friendly devices, like virtual reality, holograms, and augmented reality projections, and now with the 3D printer, can enter the physical world, more often than not, as plastic. Transversal technologies, like 3D scanning and computer-aided design (CAD), grant an unprecedented control and access, in both magnitude and kind, to the spatial, material, and physical world. Because of this, media illustrate the biopolitical complexity and nuance of the term capture—long used in media praxis—whose meaning can imply both a desire to do justice to a subject, often by means of representational accuracy, and also a desire to do violence to by means of seizing, possessing, or trapping. In turn, this project explores the many affective, epistemological, and aesthetic contours of meaning and impact when transversal media are read through the lens of capture. Organized by five major keywords—making, transversal, play, capture, and preservation—this project illustrates the far-reaching impact of this particular media type that does particular things in this particular moment. Specifically, this project coins the term, transversal media, to discuss this unique media ontology and concretize it through hands-on creative practice and the work of artists, designers, scholars, and activists by centering the methodological richness of hands-on making, creativity, and play. It also addresses the connections between technical affordance and theory, culture, and ethics, as media scholars have modeled with other emerging media formats of the past, like McLuhan on television, Deleuze on film, and Sontag on photography. This approach reveals how various interface affordances and applied practices converse with, and with varying implications, the people, places, and things they mediate. Overall, this project addresses how cultural ideologies are reflected in the design, practice, and rhetoric of 3D transversal media, and how this media genre pushes notions of materiality, embodiment, and power into new realms of thinking, doing, and being.Item Subjacent Culture, Orthogonal Community: An Ethnographic Analysis of an On-Line Buffy the Vampire Slayer Fan Community(2013) Ali, Asim; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents an ethnographic analysis of the community of fans of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer whose members frequented the online linear posting board known as The Bronze. Buffy originally aired from 1997 until 2003, but the community that formed at the official Buffy fan site in 1997 continues on in real life and on line, having survived the end of Buffy and the closure of all three of its official posting boards. This study uses an interdisciplinary combination of textual analysis and ethnographic techniques (interviews, participant observation, autoethnography, cyberethnography) to ascertain the importance, relevance, and meaning of The Bronze community to its members, known as Bronzers. I argue that the nature of the linear posting board allowed Bronzers to form a unique and long-lived community by using The Bronze in creative and imaginative ways. In particular, language--to some degree appropriated from Buffy--was used by Bronzers to write a better world for themselves on line. Hence, the community is built on (and maintained by) language that is used in an unusually postmodern manner. As a group, Bronzers tend to be highly educated, literary, and artistic. To Bronzers, much of Buffy's appeal was its emotional realism and imaginative depth. Unusually for television, these elements were combined with strong female leading roles, a cast of bookish and somewhat countercultural characters, and a foregrounding of emotionality and interpersonal relationships. Bronzers were drawn to these aspects of Buffy--which formed its "gothic aesthetic"--and in turn created their own somewhat countercultural community, one that came to reflect their own close ties and emotional attachments. I argue that The Bronze community exists subjacent to mainstream cultural formations, and orthogonal to real life communities. Using this framework, a number of implications emerge for computer-mediated communication in general, including an explanation for the prevalence of hostility in online communication. Furthermore, when situated in its broader context, The Bronze can be seen as a meager palliative to the damaging effects of contemporary post-industrial capitalism, one that nonetheless illumines the brightly stultifying commonplaces that lead people to seek shelter in dimly-lit imagined spaces.Item Worlds Trodden and Untrodden: Political Disillusionment, Literary Displacement, and the Conflicted Publicity of British Romanticism(2013) Byrne, Joseph E.; Fraistat, Neil; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study focuses on four first-generation British Romantic writers and their misadventures in the highly-politicized public sphere of the 1790s, which was riven by class conflict and media war. I argue that as a result of their negative experiences with publicity, these writers--William Wordsworth, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Blake--recoiled from the pressures of public engagement and developed in reaction a depoliticized aesthetic program aligned with various forms of privacy. However, a "spectral" form of publicity haunts the subsequent works of these writers, which troubles and complicates the traditional identification of Romanticism with privacy. All were forced, in different ways, to negotiate the discursive space between privacy and publicity, and this effort inflected their ideas concerning literature. Thus, in sociological terms, British Romantic literature emerged not from the private sphere but rather from the inchoate space between privacy and publicity. My understanding of both privacy and publicity is informed by Jürgen Habermas's well-known model of the British public sphere in the eighteenth century. However, I broaden the discussion to include other models of publicity, such as those elaborated by feminist and Marxist critics. In my discussion of class conflict in late-eighteenth-century Britain, I make use of the tools of class analysis, hegemony theory, and ideology critique, as used by new historicist literary critics. To explain media war in the 1790s, I utilize the media theory of Raymond Williams, particularly his conception of media as "material social practice." All the writers in this study were profoundly engaged in the class conflict, media war, and politicized publicity of the British 1790s. They were similar in that they were negatively impacted by these phenomena, but different in their responses, depending on their discrete experiences and concerns. The various results were new conceptions of sensibility and the Gothic, new attitudes towards solitude and obscurity, all eventually incorporated into a new kind of literature now called "Romantic."Item MEDIA FRAMING OF TERRORISM: VIEWS OF "FRONT LINES" NATIONAL SECURITY PRESTIGE PRESS(2010) Epkins, Heather Davis; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research investigates a critical tier in the global flow of information about terrorism. This qualitative study employs 35 in-depth interviews with national security journalists in the Washington, D.C. prestige press (Stempel, 1961) to explore their perceptions surrounding the collection, interpretation and dissemination process of terrorism news content. This study includes a review of the recent rhetorical shift from the Bush Adminstration "War on Terrorism" to "Overseas Contingency Operation" attempted by the Obama Administration. Rarely studied, but extremely influential, these particular "front line" reporters offer substantial insider knowledge on evolving trends in the news media production process on terrorism and national security. Their unique geographical position allowing for daily interaction among American governmental leadership, combined with their responsibility to cover what could be argued as one of the most influential topics of our time - terrorism - offers readers an inside view of the daily constraints, strategies and perceptions of this elite group. Data analysis adhered to grounded theory methods. Findings include evidence of new and evolving journalist routines with implications for public policy and the evolving integrity of journalist practices. Moreover, extending the published literature in the mass communication theory and national security realms, this research offers value by analyzing and describing the news production processes and perceptions - for the first time - of the D.C. national security prestige press. Reported results should also offer practitioners new insight into best practices and an opportunity for information users to better understand and evaluate what they are receiving.Item Learning From The Media: Perceptions of "America" From Chinese Students and Scholars(2008-02-16) Roberts, Quincy; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research examines the perceptions that international students and scholars from China form of the United States. This thesis tracks the participants' recollection of their beliefs about the U.S. before arriving and examines the transformations that occurred because of lived circumstances and experiences. The research participants eagerly took advantage of the opportunity to visit and study at American universities, believing that this country had the best there was to offer in terms of educational quality. This perceived superiority of the U.S. was believed to extend into other social and cultural categories as well. Through examining the participant's imagined ideals of life in the U.S. the objective is to understand the importance individuals and lived experiences play in the reception and interpretation of cultural images, as well as foreground the "individual" as the main site to examine the intersection of the "global" and the "local". This is meant to elevate the importance of the individual when studying the impact and influence of globalization in the lives of individuals. By using Appadurai's notion of mediascapes as a means to study popular culture the goal is to understand the local and the global in studying the connection between the imagination and globalization.Item NATIONAL THEATER OR PUBLIC THEATER: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE THEATRICAL GEOGRAPHY OF WASHINGTON, D.C., CIRCA 1970 - 1990(2005-08-01) Oliver, Robert Michael; Schuler, Catherine A; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)NATIONAL THEATER OR PUBLIC THEATER: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE THEATRICAL GEOGRAPHY OF WASHINGTON, D.C., CIRCA 1970-1990 explores the changes in the theatrical landscape of the nation's capital. Using a paradigm of Theater of Commerce, Theater of Community, and Theater of the Public, the study examines the growth of theaters that began in the 1970s. The study combines theoretical approaches--Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space, Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, Jürgen Habermas' The Transformation of the Public Sphere, and others--to explore the meaning of theater generated by interactions among theaters, social spaces, publics, and media representations and simulations. The study begins prior to the opening of the Kennedy Center when Theaters of Commerce and Community dominated the landscape. Washington's National Theater struggled in a declining downtown while amateur theaters boomed. Although Washington supported two regional theaters, they existed as anomalies within the larger framework. The founding of the Kennedy Center and the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts signaled the beginning of government's support for theater. For two decades, Theaters of the Public struggled to redefine theater's significance. Using identity politics and the aesthetics of intimacy they developed unique publics. Media coped with this variety, acknowledging that theater's purpose was as varied as its audiences were. In the 1980s, the Center initiated the American National Theater and area theaters inaugurated the Helen Hayes Awards. These developments signaled the reemergence of a unified view of theater. The two projects suffered different fates, however. ANT failed in its bid to generate a national theater-going public, collapsing in less than two years. The awards just completed their twentieth year, significantly altering the meaning of the theater community. As the media's simulation of the theater-going public shifted from a diverse set of communities to one community--a community of sophisticated cultural consumers--the city's theaters faced growing pressure to compromise, replacing their own concerns with those of their national sponsors. Although Washington's theater artists continue to resist those demands, the socio-aesthetic implications of their work rarely is heard in the public sphere.Item Violent Delights: Towards a Cultural History of Media Violence Debates(2004-12-06) Kaleba, Casey; Hildy, Franklin J; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Efforts to censor or restrict violent images are actions by which a culture imagines itself through its relationship to aggression and violence. Throughout the twentieth century critics and audiences of violent content in film, television, theatre, and video games have renegotiated their relationship to the images and the degree to which those images affect a national identity. Through an examination of five moments in North American history when controls were publicly discussed or imposed, an analysis of the scientific rhetoric used to support these discussions, and an examination of the possible hegemonic benefits of censorship, this thesis examines attempts to proscribe visual content using Allen Freedman's "scopic regime" as a theoretical framework.