Filtering by
- All Subjects: Culture
- Creators: School of International Letters and Cultures
For the Love of the Game is a 15-minute documentary highlighting what the culture of soccer is like in Spain. Filmed completely in Valencia, Spain, this short film shows the actual atmosphere of everyday soccer. People of all ages and backgrounds give depth into what it's like to grow up in Spain with and fall in love with the game.
As the world becomes increasingly globally connected, more people than ever live away from their birth country. This means that more and more people will need to learn to adapt and integrate with new cultures and experiences. This can be a difficult process, because in their efforts to adapt, they might try to forget or abandon their previous culture in order to better assimilate to their new home. In this Creative Project, I examine my own transnational journey as a Russian living in America. I wanted to see how my identity as a person linked by two very different places has shaped who I am and what I want to be. Now that I am finishing college, how will my Russianness shape my possibilities in the future? In order to start this reflective process, I read 10 transitional novels to gain a sense of how other Russians processed their lives in America. I then used the insights I gained from these texts to design a set of questions that I asked myself and two other people, both with backgrounds that were similar to my own. Based on these discussions, I gained a greater appreciation for how my Russianness could be a real strength as I chart my future path in life.
As Clifford Geertz describes it, culture is comprised of the social structures of which we attach significance to that ultimately gives our lives meaning. In the case of Taiwan, a 20th century democratic revolution, coupled with the introduction of modernism into Taiwanese literature, attaches significance to feelings of nostalgia, the importance of memories, and the struggle to find one's personal identity in a rapidly changing environment. This essay explores these themes under the guise of Bai Xian-Yong's "Taipei People" and Zhu Tian-Xin's "The Old Capital." Despite being written nearly forty years apart, these two books use modernist storytelling to directly challenge each other's idea of the Taiwanese collective consciousness, which greatly contributes to the narration of the formation of Taiwanese culture post-1949. What emerges from a tumultuous 20th century is an assured, independent Taiwanese culture that both accepts foreign influence and also expresses a distinct personality.