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Description
An investigation into the cultural phenomenon surrounding books and movies that are considered critical failures, but are nonetheless championed in popular culture. Stories are an essential part of American culture, and many people not only tolerate but truly enjoy those stories that are shocking, confusing, and, in some cases, those that were created by storytellers with almost no talent at all. The continued production of these lackluster stories was considered, with an eye to the corporate influences on film studios and publishers. This paper also looked at two storytellers, the filmmaker Ed Wood and the author Stephen King, whose value as artists has been debated by passionate fans and their strongest critics. The sociological concepts of taste and cultural capital, as defined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the art movements of postmodernism and metamodernism, particularly the style of camp as defined by Susan Sontag and the value of bad taste in art as defined by John Waters, were investigated in regards to their connection to the popularity of bad films and novels. A brief investigation into the psychological effects of consuming bad stories, especially in children, was also included. From this foundation of the bad story as an important part of our culture's ideas about art and its consumption, the paper then addresses some of the popular methods of consumption of the bad story. For novels, the paper examines the trend of pulp fiction novels and of romance novels, going into depth on the role of E.L James' Fifty Shades of Grey in popular culture. For film, the paper examines the impact of the midnight movie trend on the popularity of subversive, counter-culture films, the role of camp genre films like Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show in our culture, particularly with an eye towards audience participation screenings, and the way in which other projects, like Joel Hodgson's Mystery Science Theater 3000, transform bad films into new, enjoyable entertainment. Overall, this paper investigates all of the positive aspects around a failed story that allow these missteps in writing and directing to still find success in our culture.
ContributorsPehoushek, Scott James (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis director) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
This thesis will examine the novels and poetry of Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna) and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), exploring how they are working to maintain, control, protect and develop their spiritual Indigenous identities. I link their literary work to Article 31.1, from the United Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which states that “Indigenous people have the right to maintain, control, and protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies, and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.” I argue that both Silko and Tapahonso create narratives and characters that illustrate how indigenous identity is self-determined and maintained through resistance to colonization and assimilation. I examine how these stories and characters incorporate new knowledge, about modern lifeways, into traditional Indigenous oral traditions and histories. Both Silko and Tapahonso connect nature and history, as they illustrate how oral traditions are passed down through the continual sharing of inter-generational stories and ethnobotanical information about plants, animals and food. This study will track how oral stories help the characters (re)connect with the land, and with foodways, by re-establishing a relationship of resistance against the exploitation, assimilation, and colonization of indigenous peoples, lands, and resources and the maintenance of spirituality through oral traditions.
ContributorsWauneka, Devennie (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The need to draw a more explicit connection between literature and the daily lives of students has become an increasingly pressing issue. Preeminent literary scholars have long argued that the design of many undergraduate classrooms only engages the student with literature to a degree that, long term, does not produce habits of criticism that engage students with wider contexts of conflict. The yield instead primarily takes place in a classroom. Leading scholars tend to draw connections of value between the work they are teaching and the lives of students by focusing on how they negotiate specific power discourses. However, placing an emphasis on having habits of criticism function regarding specific biases in contexts restricts the kinds of conflict students are prepared to negotiate. To encourage a habit of critical thinking in undergraduate students that can be applied to any context of conflict and bias, a vocabulary on language failure should be taught and analyzed through its implications in origin myths that explain and justify division. Language failure, or the failure of symbols to represent subjects in their full capacity, is a concept and theory introduced by Kenneth Burke to examine conflict at a conceivable root. Burke suggests that language failure is the core of misrepresentation and conflict and is inevitably the result of any ‘identification’, or selection of meaning that is assigned to symbols. Identifications are selections of meaning and conceptions of value that organize bodies towards a social purpose, under a limited perspective. The danger of language failure is present when it goes unacknowledged. In identifications, the repercussions of language failure continually complicate, divide and propagate in discourse; assumptions about the validity of identifications encourage more complex ‘blind-spots’ and misrepresentations that exclude populations and have violent potentials. The more complex the layering of association between identifications becomes, the more obscured their foundational failure, their nature of non-innateness, is, faced as truth, affective as justice. The ‘affective’ foundation behind these powerful associations and assumptions is myth. Origin myth, or a narrative that explains the beginning of some worldly phenomena, founds, and adapts to the needs of culture and society. Teaching students to regard risks of language use as being foundational in their cultural thought, their criticism, and their communication, enriches their capability to negotiate and participate ambivalently in conflicts faced during their daily lives.
ContributorsNewcomb, Lily R. (Author) / Jensen, Kyle (Thesis advisor) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Small fires in Black American women’s literature have been briefly and disconnectedly studied by numerous scholars. No scholar thus far, however, has aggregated the multitudinous symbolic presentations of small fire in Black American women’s literature. This thesis performs a literary criticism of several texts written by several Black American female authors, all of which contain deliberate uses of small fire. The conclusive product is a revelation of the way small fire functions within Black American women’s literature to imitate the cycle of the legendary phoenix—birth, flight, self-combustion, and rebirth—and to catalyze the multi-generational uplift that exists for Black American women who indefatigably create personal, domestic, and community renewal, and who undauntedly combat systems of racial, sexual, economic, and patriarchal oppression.
ContributorsBrooks, Jeremy David (Author) / Brown, Lois (Thesis advisor) / Clarke, Deborah (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Criminal detection emerged as a significant literary element in mid-Victorian Realist and Sensation novels. These fictional detectives, much like their 20th-century successors, promised clarity and resolution as they solved crimes, caught criminals, helped victims, and explored complex narrative and social connections as they did so. However, while these fictional detectives may solve crimes and mysteries, they rarely provide the narrative resolution of later fictional detectives.This dissertation examines how Victorian Realist and Sensation fiction demonstrate how corrupt individuals and institutions legitimize themselves through displaced responsibility. The literature does this by subverting the expectations of the detective plot: those the detective pursues as criminals may be the real victims when the real villains – those in privileged and protected positions – persist without official consequence. Rather than provide narrative resolution, fictional detectives contribute to and reinforce these legitimizations while the literature displays how corrupt characters exploit their positions in social institutions, such as the law, the family, philanthropy, etc., that contribute to the victimization and criminalization of other characters. The literature responds to these conditions with the formation of care communities, or smaller social organizations where individuals can attend to these needs of one another. Rather than strike out at these corrupt social institutions’ pretenses of innocence, care communities provide havens for the abused and opportunities at recuperation, repentance, and forgiveness. Demonstrations of the ability or inability of detection, care, and social corruption to resolve social problems provide nuanced representations and the consequences of providing help or harm.
This study focuses on 3 novels with investigative plots. First, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3) as an example of Realist fiction that critiques how legal and philanthropic endeavors can be exploitative and contribute to crime and the social problems they are designed to prevent. Second, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) as an example of Sensation fiction and how mismanaged domestic spaces can lead to crime and wrongdoing in other social spaces. Third, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as an example of Sensation fiction turning into detective fiction that considers how ingrained social and cultural values and practices initiate and perpetuate crime and wrongdoing.
ContributorsHatch, Michael P. (Author) / Bivona, Dan (Thesis advisor) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023