Browsing by Subject "Reception studies"

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Celebrity and fandom on Twitter : examining electronic dance music in the Digital Age
(2012-12) Anaipakos, Jessica Lyle; Kumar, Shanti; Staiger, Janet
This thesis looks at electronic dance music (EDM) celebrity and fandom through the eyes of four producers on Twitter. Twitter was initially designed as a conversation platform, loosely based on the idea of instant-messaging but emerged in its current form as a micro-blog social network in 2009. EDM artists count on the website to promote their music, engage with fans, discover new songs, and contact each other. More specifically, Twitter is an extension of a celebrity’s private life, as most celebrities access Twitter from their cellphones and personal computers, cutting out gatekeepers from controlling their image. Four power player producers in EDM are used as case studies for analysis of the intimacy and reach Twitter provides. Chosen because of their visibility, style, and recognition, Deadmau5, Diplo, Skrillex, and Tiësto represent different EDM subgenres, run their own record labels, have dedicated fans, and are accessible through social media. All use Twitter to announce shows, interact with fans, promote contests and merchandise, and share stories and pictures of their personal lives with their fan followers. Tweets are a direct line for fans to communicate with these celebrities through the reply, retweet (RT), and mention functions on Twitter. Fan tweets to and from these EDM celebrities are also examined by looking at celebrity-fan encounters in the cyber world and the real world, aftereffects of celebrity RTs, and engagement with said celebrities. The internet is the lifeline for this subculture as it changed the way EDM is shared, promoted, and packaged. Twitter and other social media sites give producers the exposure they never experienced with traditional media and allow fans to participate in a global subculture. To sum up, this is a study on how Twitter influenced EDM and personalized the relationship between producers and fans.
“Hello America, I’m Gay!” : Oprah, coming out, and rural gay men
(2012-05) Miller, Taylor Cole; Kearney, Mary Celeste, 1962-; Staiger, Janet
Recent queer scholarship challenges the academy’s longstanding urban and adult oriented trajectory, pointing to the way such studies ignore rural and heartland regions of the country as well as the experiences of youth. In this thesis, I craft a limited ethnographic methodological approach together with a textual analysis of The Oprah Winfrey Show to deliver portraits of gay men living in various rural or heartland areas who use their television sets to encounter and identify with LGBTQ people across the nation. The overarching aim of this project is to explore the ways in which religion, rurality, and Oprah coalesce in the process of identity creation to form rural gay men’s conceptual selves and how they are then informed by that identity formation. I will focus my textual analyses through the frames of six of Oprah Winfrey’s “ultimate viewers” to elucidate how they receive and interact with her star text, how they use television sets in the public rooms of their homes to create boundary public spheres, and how they are impacted by the show’s various uses of the coming out paradigm. In so doing, this thesis seeks to contribute to the scholarship of rural queer studies, television studies, and Oprah studies.
Interview with the southern vampire : reviving a haunted history in contemporary film and television
(2015-05) Austin, Katharine Griffin; Frick, Caroline; Fuller-Seeley, Kathryn
It is difficult to imagine a time without vampires, a fixture of Western popular culture since the nineteenth century. The vampires of today, however, are a far cry from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stoker’s creation is a monster, a metaphor for all things feared by Victorian culture. Contemporary vampires, on the other hand, are increasingly depicted as marginalized figures striving for redemption and human connection. Within this shift from monster to social outcast, a peculiar trend has emerged: vampire fiction set in the American South that deliberately addresses the region's haunted history. As mythical beings, vampires often serve as mediators for an era's particular anxieties or fears. So why does current Western society need not just sympathetic vampires but sympathetic Southern ones? What particular concerns do these Southern vampires negotiate? And how does a Southern locale engender this purpose? To answer these questions, I first consider how such media engage with the Southern Gothic. Chapter one focuses on HBO's True Blood (2008-2014), examining how Southern vampire texts negotiate race and class structures and promote the possibility of a modern, integrated Southern society. Chapter two compares Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (Neil Jordan, 1994) and The Originals (The CW, 2013-Present) to explore how Southern vampires mediate feelings of collective guilt and motivate (or avoid) reparation efforts. To understand not only the elements but also the cultural import of this regionalized media trend, I next extend these readings with an examination of audience reception. Chapter three focuses on viewers of The Originals, surveying the diversity of audience engagement with the series as well as identifying recurring trends within that diversity. In combining all three threads of analysis, I conclude that vampire texts set in the American South perform a complex and at times paradoxical function, promoting feelings of nostalgia for an imagined South as well as engendering processes of critical self-reflection.
Let's have a gay old time : how lesbians shaped early Hollywood
(2021-07-30) Reinschmidt, Janet; Isenberg, Noah William
This thesis puts forth Alla Nazimova, Kay Francis, and Greta Garbo as case studies for early Hollywood lesbian stardom and reception and unpacks how their star personas were constructed as well as the fan responses to their image and work. Through intersections of star studies, reception studies, classic literature, and queer historical texts, I discuss each star’s life and career with textual analysis of their films and primary sources such as fan letters, fan magazines, advertisements, and newspaper articles. I argue that each star represents a queer, and more specifically lesbian and bisexual, sensibility within the early Hollywood film industry that deserves more scholarly attention. The fan letters columns within old Hollywood fan magazines such as Photoplay and Modern Screen particularly illustrate the construction of queer star personas and the impact that they had on informed movie fans. Nazimova, Francis, and Garbo were all-powerful and influential figures in the film industry during significant periods of change such as the rise of the studio era, the arrival of sound, and the shift from pre-Code to the production Code era. Their star personas reflect how they were influenced by and went on to influence these critical transitions in Old Hollywood. There is a fundamental activist function to this work, to remind audiences that queer people have always existed, even without a framework to discuss identity, and this work endeavors to show a dedicated lesbian influence and audience of early Hollywood.
My history, finally invented : Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and its readers
(2012-05) Wallace, Laura Knowles; Bremen, Brian A.
In this report, I examine the reception of Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936) from contemporary reviews in periodicals to twenty-first century online reviews. I am interested in how the novel has been situated in both historical and personal canons. I focus on how Nightwood has been read through the lenses of experimental modernism, lesbian feminism and postmodern queer theory, and how my own readings of it have changed over the years.
The politics of film adaptation : a case study of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of men
(2010-05) Nelson, Patricia Elise; Staiger, Janet; Fuller, Jennifer
This thesis investigates the political and social contexts of the adaptation of the 1992 novel The Children of Men, written by prolific British mystery writer P.D. James, to a 2006 US film of the same title, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Both novel and film share the same premise, imagining a future world where human reproduction is no longer possible; however, each deals with drastically different ideological and political concerns. As a case study of the politics of adaptation, this project considers adaptation as both a product and a process, analyzing representation, medium specificity, genre and political contexts as well as issues of production and reception.
Queer novelty: reading publics and canon formation in 20th century US fiction
(2016-08) Wallace, Laura Knowles; Bremen, Brian A.; Wilks, Jennifer; Cvetkovich, Ann; Bennett, Chad; Staiger, Janet
Queer Novelty investigates the reception histories of four mid-twentieth-century novels that are now read as LGBTQ+ fiction in order to demonstrate how popular reading contributes to and complicates the constitution of gay and lesbian literature as a category in the academy and how early- to mid-twentieth-century print networks provided a framework for today’s digitally networked LGBTQ+ culture. Queer Novelty tracks the reception histories of four novels: Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles, and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. The archive for these histories encompasses scholarly analyses; reviews from newspapers and magazines; and online discussions on Goodreads and Amazon. Queer Novelty argues that reception studies demonstrate the force and effects of literary texts more fully than close reading, literary theory, or historical context alone, because reception study includes and accounts for shifts and variations in public reading practices and literary circulation. Queer Novelty brings together the investments of queer theory and affect theory, the methods of reception studies, and the writing practices of feminist criticism to demonstrate the possibilities of fiction reading in contemporary US culture. Chapter 1, “Thinking We Know Them, What Do We Know?” establishes the methodological framework for the project, focused on my theory of reading as public. Chapter 1 examines arguments for LGBTQ+ literature as a category, from Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America to discussions on Twitter and Tumblr in the 2010s. Chapter 2 reveals the feedback loop between popular and academic reception through the history of Nightwood, a canonical modernist text and a central text for queer female counterpublics. In Chapter 3, my analysis of Two Serious Ladies’ publication and reception histories is an investigation into the changing horizons of expectation that make yesterday’s odd novel today’s cult classic. In Chapter 4, I analyze the reception history of Giovanni’s Room and of Baldwin as a public intellectual to demonstrate how expectations about “gay literature” as a category have changed. Queer Novelty demonstrates that mid-20th century public cultures around books performed the groundwork necessary to keep them circulating, so that canons could be expanded when LGBTQ+ studies reached universities.
The youth respondent method : an exploration of reception studies with youth in New Work development for Theatre for Young Audiences
(2012-05) Leahey, Kristin Ann; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Wolf, Stacy; Jennings, Coleman A.; Paredez, Deborah; Kearney, Mary C.
I define the youth respondent method as a process by which artists and/or producers involve children and/or young adults through planned theatre activities or discussions with the objective of answering specific questions about the development of the work and collect feedback to improve the text or further the production. This pluralistic practice grants agency for the target audience, while informing the creators of the possibilities of the play and answering challenging questions regarding the work. Considering a continuum that places creative dramatics and children’s theatre at its poles, the youth respondent method demonstrates a merger of the two genres affiliated with youth, theatre, and play. My dissertation documents the youth respondent method’s application in a number of mid-twentieth century and contemporary case studies from the U.S., all of which received national attention through festivals and professional productions at regional theatres throughout the country. These case studies include: Playwright Charlotte Chorpenning’s work with the Goodman Theatre (1940s), Deni Kruger’s play MUDDY BOOTS (2005), Jason Tremblay’s play KATRINA: THE GIRL WHO WANTED HER NAME BACK (2009), Lydia Diamond’s play HARRIET JACOBS (2008), and Duncan Sheik and Stephen Sater’s musical SPRING AWAKENING (2006). This diverse group of plays and musicals relied on variations of the youth respondent method at different stages of their development and production processes, in which youth took the reins to serve as collaborative creators. The child is another essential collaborator in determining how their generation can make a better future through the practice and art of theatre. I examine the dialectics between artists, scholars, producers, and children, applying the youth respondent method. This model strengthens Theatre for Young Audience (TYA) plays while it gives children the agency to learn, exchange ideas, and address subjects that are important to them. TYA is a continually expanding field, although there is a significant lack of scholarship documenting its growth and such important practices as this method. By documenting various forms of the best of this practice, I hope to educate other scholars and practitioners about its vitality.