Browsing by Subject "Popular culture--United States"
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Item The American Marco Polo : excursions to a virtual China in U.S. popular culture, 1784-1912(2002-05) Haddad, John Rogers; Goetzmann, William H.Item The gossip industry : producing and distributing star images, celebrity gossip and entertainment news 1910-2010(2011-05) Petersen, Anne Helen; Staiger, JanetThis dissertation addresses the industrial history of American-based celebrity gossip over century, beginning with the first Hollywood stars in the 1910s and reaching into “celebrified” culture of the 2010s. Gossip, broadly defined as discourse about a public figure produced and distributed for profit, can operate within the star’s good graces or completely outside of the Hollywood machine; it can be published in “old media” print and broadcast forms or online and on a phone. Regardless of form, tone, and content, gossip remains a crucial component of the ways in which star images are produced and consumed. The dissertation thus asks: how has the relationship between the gossip industry and Hollywood in general changed over the last century? And what implications do those changes have for stars, those who exploit their images, and media industries at large?Item Orientalism in U.S. cyberpunk cinema from Blade runner to the Matrix(2004) Park, Chi Hyun; Watkins, S. Craig (Samuel Craig); Downing, John (John Derek Hall)This dissertation looks at the role of “oriental” imagery in Hollywood through case studies of two Hollywood cyberpunk films: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). Drawing from scholarship in Asian American Studies, Film and Media Studies, Postcolonial Theory, and Cultural Studies, my work explores why the futuristic mise-en-scène of such films looks and feels so uncannily “oriental.” It considers the relationship between these East Asian-inflected settings and changing attitudes about East Asians and Asian Americans in the U. S. from the 1980s to the present. Furthermore, it situates that relationship within larger shifts in national discourses around “race” during this time period. My analyses of these films are grounded in their industrial and historical contexts: economic and aesthetic developments in Hollywood since the 1980s, the rapid growth of the Asian American community during the same period, and the recent internationalization of East Asian popular culture, particularly Hong Kong cinema and Japanese animation.