Browsing by Subject "Authorship"
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Item Agents of change : Enlightened, HBO and the crisis of brand identity in the post-network era(2014-05) Swords, Collins David; Frick, CarolineAs a result of changing cultural, economic and technological factors, television always exists in a perpetual state of transformation. The fragmentation of the mass audience and the disintegration of the network oligarchy catalyzed the emergence of a multi-channel universe and niche cable markets in the post-network era. HBO, perhaps the most successful premium cable channel to emerge during the changing TV landscape, implemented a subscription-service economic model, enabling it to produce uncensored, commercial free content unavailable on broadcast television. HBO has since been labeled as the leading purveyors of quality, auteurist-centered TV. For this report, I analyze how HBO has been constructed in the realm of academic discourse. Using Enlightened and showrunner Mike White as a case study, I examine how the series conforms to and deviates from HBO's established brand and reflects the network's struggle to redefine itself in the post-network era. Ultimately, I aim to reveal the mythologized, idealized and manufactured culture of production at HBO and examine how journalistic discourse surrounding the series presents the HBO brand identity in a state of crisis and transition.Item Crafting digital cinema : cinematographers in contemporary Hollywood(2011-08) Lucas, Robert Christopher; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Strover, Sharon; Schiesari, Nancy; Hunt, Bruce; Hay, JamesIn the late 1990s, motion picture and television production began a process of rapid digitalization with profound implications for cinematographers in Hollywood, as new tools for “digital cinematography” became part of the traditional production process. This transition came in three waves, starting with a post-production technique, the digital intermediate, then the use of high-definition video and digital production cameras, and finally digital exhibition. This dissertation shows how cinematographers responded to the technical and aesthetic challenges presented by digital production tools as they replaced elements of the film-based, photochemical workflow. Using trade publications, mainstream press sources, and in-depth interviews with cinematographers and filmmakers, I chronicle this transition between 1998 and 2005, analyzing how cinematographers’ responded to and utilized these new digital technologies. I analyze demonstration texts, promotional videos, and feature films, including Pleasantville, O Brother Where Art Thou, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, The Anniversary Party, Personal Velocity, and Collateral, all of which played a role in establishing a discourse and practice of digital cinematography among cinematographers, producers and directors. The challenges presented by new collaborators such as the colorist and digital imaging technician are also examined. I discuss cinematographers’ work with standards-setting groups such as the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the studio consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives, describing it as an effort to protect “film-look” and establish look-management as a prominent feature of their craft practice. In an era when digitalization has made motion pictures more malleable and mobile than ever before, this study shows how cinematographers attempted to preserve their historical, craft-based sense of masterful cinematography and a structure of authority that privileges the cinematographer as “guardian of the image."Item ‘I am for an art’ : the struggle of the San Diego group and the Women’s Caucus to reinvent photography in the Society for Photographic Education, 1962-1982(2018-09-11) Evans, Ariel (Ariel Cecilia); Smith, Cherise, 1969-; Albers, Kate P; Charlesworth, Michael; Reynolds, Linda D; Reynolds, Ann MThis dissertation orbits around three discursive spheres within the Society of Photographic Education (SPE): that of its early founders and members (Nathan Lyons, John Szarkowski, Robert Heinecken); that of younger graduates from the University of California San Diego (Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Fred Lonidier, Phel Steinmetz); and that of the SPE Women’s Caucus such as Rosler, Sally Stein, and Catherine Lord. Conversations and arguments between these communities propelled a turn in the history of photography’s institutionalization in the arts, a process that since 1962 had owed much to Szarkowski et al. This dissertation considers the effect of leftist (particularly feminist) ethics and pedagogies on American photographic practice. The San Diego photographers entered the SPE intending to change photographic praxis. Yet while their critiques circled questions of documentary, at stake were the photographer’s role and responsibilities to her subjects and audiences. For founding SPE members such as Lyons and Heinecken, the authenticity of the cameraman’s vision to himself was of prime importance. Rosler, Sekula, etc. critiqued these views as exploitative, connecting artist-centered rhetorics to unequal social exchanges in the photographic act, in which the photographer’s voice becomes more significant than camera subject and audience. The endeavor to link photographic subjects to the medium’s discursive sphere had activist intent. Rosler, for example, linked author-centric values in photography to the aesthetic and real-life sexism displayed by men long-ensconced in the SPE; and she connected these men’s physical and photographic approaches to women’s bodies with the lack of professional opportunities for living women photographers. Importantly, she also worked to correct this absence, in 1980 helping organize a Women’s Caucus and series of panels within the SPE to advocate for female photographers as a labor group and new forms of less authorial documentary. Many consider essays and others by Rosler and Sekula as watershed publications in histories of photography, conceptual art, and institutional critique. However, these essays were only a portion of a praxis toward social liberation. This dissertation recovers the contexts and conversations of these works, showing how these artists and photographers negotiated and articulated their relationships to audiences, images, and photographic subjectsItem Imperial authorship and eighteenth-century transatlantic literary production(2011-08) Hardy, Molly O'Hagan, 1977-; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Baker, Samuel; Bertelsen, Lance; Harlow, BarbaraMy project examines eighteenth-century struggles over literary property and its part in England’s control over its colonies. Debates over literary property set in the context of the larger colonial struggles over ownership help us to understand the relationship between authority and authorship: in the colonies, booksellers and authors worked together to make authority and authorship local, to separate it from England, English constructions of authorship, and the book trade system in London. The figures I analyze––Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Mathew Carey––brought new models of print capitalism to the colonies, dispersing an understanding of copyright that was an assertion of local affiliations. In the case of Ireland, these affiliations manifested themselves in a nationalist movement, and in Scotland, in an assertion of equality under the union of Great Britain. In the newly formed United States, the affiliations were among those still struggling for legal recognition after the American Revolution. Using book history in the service of literary analysis, my study is the first devoted to reading the way that liminal figures such as George Faulkner, Alexander Donaldson, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen have influenced the work of these largely canonical authors, and thus local politics, through their literary production practices.Item Literal figures of speech : the book and the body politic in Milton's Areopagitica(1991) Dobranski, Stephen B.; Not availableItem The lovers and dreamers go corporate : re-authoring Jim Henson’s Muppets under Disney(2011-05) Leader, Caroline Ferris; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Kearney, Mary C.The Walt Disney Company's acquisition of the Muppets in 2004 caused a significant rupture in the authorial history of a beloved franchise. Created in the 1970s the late media icon Jim Henson and his creative team, the classic Muppets enjoyed many years in the spotlight during the 1970s and 1980s -- on The Muppet Show (1976-1981), and in The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984). The physically wacky and colorful puppets are known for their irreverent and chaotic antics, and they still have a sizeable cult following devoted to them. Fans attribute the character's "Muppetness" to Jim Henson's creativity as an author. However, Henson worked with a team of creative artists who all contributed to the Muppet franchise. As a result, is both impossible and inadvisable to try and breakdown Muppet authorship by contributor. Instead, I label Henson's authorship a brand in order to analysis the value of his perceived authorial power. These perceptions are what put the Muppets in such opposition with the corporate image of Disney. Disney, by contrast, has a reputation for commercial, family-oriented entertainment. The production studio has grown into a media conglomerate that saturates the market with merchandise, cross-promotions, and advertisement campaigns. Its dominant position in the media industry affects fan reception of any Disney-led project, so the re-launch of a long-dormant, independent brand like the Muppets creates an understandable tension among critics, popular press writers, and fans. By tracing media industry shifts the 1990s and 2000s and Disney's changing image and corporate structure, I analyze how it has "authored" the Muppets in the past few years. Both in its Muppet advertising campaign and in particular its treatment of the infamous character Miss Piggy, Disney has re-branded the Muppets for a new time and new generations, while attempting to hold onto the historical traits that make the Muppet brand appealing and profitable.Item "Mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation" : writing Nabokov's life in the age of the author's death(2014-05) Leisner, Keith David; Carton, EvanIn her introduction to a special issue of the South Central Review on literary biography published in 2006, Linda Leavell writes, "Many would trace the disdain for literary biography—in both senses of the word “literary”—back through Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” to the New Critics’ division of text from context all the way to T. S. Eliot’s theory of impersonality. Critical theory of the past century has generally deemed an author’s life, personality, and intentions irrelevant to the text" (1). Leavell’s explanation of how critical theory of the twentieth century came to shape the current scholarly attitude towards literary biography establishes the genre’s status in an era of literary theory that is commonly characterized by the diminishment of the author as the source of meaning in a text, an era in which we remain. This characterization, however, overlooks the different ways that the theorists of the era displaced the author as the dominant figure in literary studies. This paper demonstrates how these different ways, despite whatever damage they might have done to the status of literary biography, actually benefit the study of the genre. Additionally, this paper argues that they not only comprise one side of Vladimir Nabokov’s contradictory views on his own authorship, which makes him an ideal subject for the study of authority over biographical representation, but also gave rise to new methodologies of literary biography, which are the methodologies of Nabokov’s biographers themselves. As a result, this paper concludes, “an author’s life, personality, and intentions” in turn have assumed new relevancy in literary studies.Item Negotiating documentary space(2012-05) Rudin, Daniel; Perzyński, Bogdan, 1954-; Lewis, RandolphThis essay attempts to propose an art practice based on an ethical and aesthetic relation of author, subject, and viewer. This relationship is productive of results that are seen as critical to a precise, useful, and ethical representation of social problems.Item Post-socialist regime and popular imagination in Chinese cinema in the twenty-first century : Lu Chan and his films(2012-08) Shu, Yongzhen; Chang, Sung-sheng, 1951-; Staiger, Janet; Kumar, Shanti; Li, Huaiyin; Tsai, Chien-HsinUnder the tensions of nationalization and globalization, mainland Chinese cinema has undergone tremendous changes in terms of industrial transformations, diversification of film language, style and genre, revenues, etc. in the new century. This is epitomized in a new surge of commercial entertainment cinema. This dissertation examines Lu Chuan and his films among this surge and as a representative of the new development of Chinese popular cinema. The study reveals a new political regime and a new popular imagination in China with its greater integration into the international system of global capitalism in in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I apply Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production to explore structural transformations in the field of Chinese cinema, and trace these changes to the shaping forces in the larger fields of Chinese power and economy. This structural examination is related to the agency of individuals as cultural entrepreneurs maneuvering their way within the state system through alliance of power, capital and talent, and forming their own voices and a public space. Theories of popular cultural studies help me analyze Lu Chuan’s films as a site where different international and domestic social, political, and cultural forces contend and negotiate with each other. I also draw upon theories of film studies to illustrate Lu Chuan’s application of international film language and styles including classical Hollywood cinema and the art film in rendering Chinese socialist stories in the age of globalization. Instead of treating Lu Chuan as an auteur or artistic creator, I look into his authorship as a site of different discourses and a technique of the self, which helps him distinguish his films from others and establish his position in the field. Trauma studies provide a useful tool in discussing Chinese cinematic representations of the national trauma, the Nanjing Massacre, during different historical periods, and Chinese nation’s continuing effort in grappling with this trauma. This textual analysis is to illustrate the newest development in Chinese cinema. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the historical transformation of Chinese society and to identify the forces that shaped Chinese cinema, which took form in a new alliance amongst power, capital, and art, and contributed to a post-socialist popular imagination in China in the first decade of the new century.Item Preventing heresy : censorship and privilege in sixteenth-century Mexican publishing(2012-12) Palacios, Albert Anthony; Twinam, Ann, 1946-; Wade, MariaPrevailing Catholic thought in the sixteenth century perceived heresy as a cancer on society and the printed word an effective carrier. Acceptance of this view throughout the Spanish kingdom resulted in the vigilant scrutiny of printed works, in particular those imported or produced in the Americas. Who reviewed manuscript works destined for or written in Mexico before the printing block hit the paper? Did the New Spanish bureaucracy repress colonial authors intellectually or financially? This thesis examines preventive censorship, or the inspection and licensing of manuscripts considered for publishing, and printing privilege in sixteenth-century Mexico. Mexican books printed 1540-1612 and official correspondence form the basis of this thesis. The overarching analysis is diachronic-bibliographic in nature. It starts with the origins of preventing censorship in Spain, its transference to New Spain, and its administration during the first decade of the American printing press (1487-1550). Thrusting ahead, it then delves into the bureaucratic, political, and economic nuances of the mature publishing practice at the turn of the century (1590-1612). The conclusion compares the bookend phases, defines factors, and looks at prevailing practices in Europe to contextualize Mexico’s unique publishing industry. In the Americas, religious authors established, financed, and developed the publishing economy to facilitate indigenous indoctrination and enculturation, enforce Christian hegemony, and promote higher education. As these authors came to dominate in the writing, censorship, and production of Mexican printed books throughout the sixteenth century, printers increasingly assumed a subordinate role. In the European printing industry, non-cleric officials predominantly censored manuscripts and printers assumed primary ownership of intellectual work. Inversing European practice, published authors in Mexico enjoyed significant influence over the censorship, printing, and economic potential of their intellectual fruits from the onset of colonization to the remainder of the sixteenth century and beyond.Item Supplement to a superficial education : didacticism and performance in Júlia Lopes de Almeida's Livro das Noivas (1896)(2011-05) Hixenbaugh, Dustin Kenneth; Roncador, Sônia; Salgado, CésarThe most prolific woman writer of belle époque Brazil, Júlia Lopes de Almeida is remembered chiefly for her proto-feminist novels like A Falência (1901). This essay extends critical analysis to the heretofore overlooked Livro das Noivas (1896), a domestic manual once reprimanded by Jeffrey Needell as counterproductive to the feminist cause. With theoretical references to Genette, Agamben, Butler, Woolf, Ludmer, and others, it contextualizes Noivas within late 19th-century discourse on women’s education and the tradition of conduct literature, ultimately determining that Almeida subverts the conventions of the latter in defense of the former. Like João Luso, who declared Noivas a “curso” for soon-to-be-married women, this essay reads the book as a remedial addendum to the superficial education that left women unprepared to confront what Almeida and her liberal contemporaries deemed their responsibility to ensure the nation’s future by supplying it educated and healthy sons. In a deep analysis of the author’s extended dedication to her husband, Filinto, this essay moreover redresses Needell’s division of Noivas from Almeida’s novels. Rather than an aberration, the manual is a companion piece to the author’s fictional corpus. As a performative dissimulation of moral femininity, it compensates for Almeida’s unorthodox and, for the time, questionably “feminine” career.Item “You’ve Become Part of a Bigger Universe” : authorship, Stan Lee, and the rise of superhero cinema(2024-02-05) Hamsher, Andrew Donaldson; Davis, Janet M.; Schatz, Thomas, 1948-; Smith, Mark; Cordova, CaryIn 1961 Marvel Comics’ editor/writer Stan Lee, artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and a group of other creative collaborators introduced a new, realistic approach to superhero comics. In the years that followed, Marvel’s creative team began to develop a heavily-serialized, continuity-reliant form of storytelling this dissertation terms “comic book poetics.” During the same period, Lee redefined the industrial process whereby comics were created and began to aggressively credit Marvel’s creative staff and assert his own authorial presence. After decades of cross-media efforts on the part of Lee and other Marvel executives, Marvel Studios has become one of the dominant forces in 21st century Hollywood, playing a key role in the larger wave of superhero cinema which has made comic book poetics one of the primary narrative techniques in American pop culture. Marvel Studios has also become a driving force in the reshaping of film authorship, as traditional sources of authorship are destabilized and a more explicitly industrialized creative system has emerged, one that bears striking similarities to that found in the comic industry. This study seeks to understand Marvel’s rise to prominence within the culture industries and its effect on pop culture authorship. It explores the history of Marvel’s cross-media efforts since 1961, investigating how they were affected by changes within the comic, film, and television industries and by larger cultural events such as the rise of Pop Art and the Women’s Movement. It also explores evolving ideas of authorship within the comic industry and their interaction with conceptions of authorship prevalent in other culture industries. This study conducts these explorations by focusing on the figure of Stan Lee, who was at the center of Marvel’s cross-media efforts for several decades and embodied the conflicting ideals of Romantic and collaborative authorship that defined the comic industry.