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It is very difficult to construct an explicit definition of Jewish humor and, thus, even harder to identify examples of the use of this type of humor. In this paper, I use a literature review to set forth a list of characteristics of Jewish humor to aid in its identification

It is very difficult to construct an explicit definition of Jewish humor and, thus, even harder to identify examples of the use of this type of humor. In this paper, I use a literature review to set forth a list of characteristics of Jewish humor to aid in its identification and I explain the common reasons for the use of this humor. I use the characteristics of Jewish humor to aid in my identification of Jewish humor in five popular Jewish films from Argentina. I examine what aspects I believe to be exemplifying this type of humor and what this type of humor adds to the films in question. The films that I have chosen to analyze are: El abrazo partido directed by Daniel Burman, Cara de queso—mi primer gueto directed by Ariel Winograd, Relatos salvajes directed by Damián Szifron, Sol de otoño directed by Eduardo Mignogna, and Anita directed by Marcos Carnevale. Judaism is central to the plots of these five films and three of the directors (Burman, Winograd, and Szifron) are Jewish themselves. I show how the directors’ experiences with the Argentinian-Jewish community inform their use of Jewish humor. Lastly, I demonstrate how these examples of Jewish humor help to bring Judaism into Argentinian popular culture and, by doing so, allow Jewish stories and history to be told on a large scale.
Created2018-05
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Description
Japanese animated film director Hayao Miyazaki is famous for his numerous film featuring female protagonists. These protagonists have been examined for their conformance and deviance with regard to widespread stereotypes of masculine and feminine traits. Miyazaki's female characters tend to exhibit nuanced and varied traits, with a balance of traditionally

Japanese animated film director Hayao Miyazaki is famous for his numerous film featuring female protagonists. These protagonists have been examined for their conformance and deviance with regard to widespread stereotypes of masculine and feminine traits. Miyazaki's female characters tend to exhibit nuanced and varied traits, with a balance of traditionally masculine and feminine characteristics. They also tend to demonstrate and moralize on larger social issues such as environmentalism and gender equality, advancing ideals for both Japanese and Western feminism. The status of these female protagonists as cultural icons is contrary to wider film trends that exclude women from the spotlight except when they conform to rigid gender roles.
ContributorsNevitt, Stephanie Nicole (Author) / Facinelli, Diane (Thesis director) / Creamer, John (Committee member) / Whitesman, Linda (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2013-05
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Description
This thesis investigated the impact of word complexity as measured through the Proportion of Whole Word Proximity (PWP; Ingram 2002) on consonant correctness as measured by the Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC; Shriberg & Kwiatkowski 1980) on the spoken words of monolingual Spanish-speaking children. The effect of word complexity on

This thesis investigated the impact of word complexity as measured through the Proportion of Whole Word Proximity (PWP; Ingram 2002) on consonant correctness as measured by the Percentage of Correct Consonants (PCC; Shriberg & Kwiatkowski 1980) on the spoken words of monolingual Spanish-speaking children. The effect of word complexity on consonant correctness has previously been studied on English-speaking children (Knodel 2012); the present study extends this line of research to determine if it can be appropriately applied to Spanish. Language samples from a previous study were used (Hase, 2010) in which Spanish-speaking children were given two articulation assessments: Evaluación fonológica del habla infantil (FON; Bosch Galceran, 2004), and the Spanish Test of Articulation for Children Under Three Years of Age (STAR; Bunta, 2002). It was hypothesized that word complexity would affect a Spanish-speaking child’s productions of correct consonants as was seen for the English- speaking children studied. This hypothesis was supported for 10 out of the 14 children. The pattern of word complexity found for Spanish was as follows: CVCV > CVCVC, Tri-syllables no clusters > Disyllable words with clusters.
ContributorsPurinton, Kaitlyn Lisa (Author) / Ingram, David (Thesis director) / Dixon, Dixon (Committee member) / Barlow, Jessica (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2013-12
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Description
The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that

The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
Created2014-05
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Description
The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that

The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
Created2014-05
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Description
This work examines three common practices—yellowface in Cloud Atlas (2012), whitewashing in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and absence in Firefly (2002)—employed in popular science fiction that represent Asianness and disregard the Asian body. Though the creators purport to have progressive ideals at the center of their production choices, their

This work examines three common practices—yellowface in Cloud Atlas (2012), whitewashing in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and absence in Firefly (2002)—employed in popular science fiction that represent Asianness and disregard the Asian body. Though the creators purport to have progressive ideals at the center of their production choices, their works call on Techno-Orientalist and Orientalist tropes and divorce them from the Asian body, implicitly continuing the Orientalist argument of Western supremacy even in representing Asianness.
ContributorsTse, Kassidy Laurane (Author) / Miller, April (Thesis director) / Rondilla, Joanne (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
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Description
Currently the Chinese marketplace is very much influenced by its economic, demographic, political, technological, and sociocultural trends. The Chinese population is aging, and the gender ratio is being tipped to favor the male population. Also, the urbanization of rural parts of China has lead to a rising middle class with

Currently the Chinese marketplace is very much influenced by its economic, demographic, political, technological, and sociocultural trends. The Chinese population is aging, and the gender ratio is being tipped to favor the male population. Also, the urbanization of rural parts of China has lead to a rising middle class with higher inclinations to spend their income. Along with these changes, China has fully embraced technological innovation, from mobile payments to sharing economies, to allowing social media access to almost all functions of daily life. The Chinese film market used to consist of mainly government-produced domestic films, but since the the first insurgence of foreign imports, China’s desire for Hollywood films has sparked and grown immensely.
However, while the general public has a high demand for foreign films, the key player in exporting a film and distributing it into China is the Chinese government and related censorship bodies. Since China is a widely untapped marketplace for foreign filmmakers, it makes sense to enter, and there are three ways a film can do so: a flat-fee export, the revenue sharing, and the co-production model. The flat-fee export model entails a straight export into China, including only a flat price, no sales revenue. The revenue-sharing model is the desired choice for big-budget studios since they get a percentage of the ticket sales in China, but there are only a select few spots that are filled each year. The co-production model is when an American film studio partners with a Chinese production company and they create a film together. This model allows the film be considered domestic, but comes with many stipulations regarding Chinese presence and influence in the film.
For an independent film company looking to expand in the most lucrative international market, the best way to effectively create, market, and distribute a movie in China is to first craft a broad, unique, and attainable mission statement. Once the goals of the company are created, then key factors for success are choosing the best method of entry into the marketplace while adeptly taking the government influence into consideration, hiring locals who have previous experience in the Chinese film industry and have a deep understanding of Chinese history, culture, and the current social trends, and taking advantage of all the avenues that are available to market and distribute the film. Overall, the best options for a small independent film company in America would be to create an animated feature with two versions, or a live-action film featuring prominent Chinese actors. These are the most feasible under the flat-fee model for those with a limited financial budget, or a co-production approach for those interested in a more long-term investment plan with China.
Overall, there are many moving parts and aspects to consider when entering the Chinese movie marketplace, and this research and suggestions are geared towards making sure that if going to China is possibility, then this information provides the best tools and resources to ensure that venture is a success.
ContributorsCrozier, Julianna (Author) / Eaton, Kate (Thesis director) / Schlater, John (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
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Description
A posthuman figure like the female cyborg challenges traditional humanist feminism in ways that make room for theorizing new subjectivities and feminist epistemologies. Rather than support a traditional feminism that assumes common experiences within patriarchal society and erases differences among women, cyborg feminism moves beyond naturalism and essentialism to acknowledge

A posthuman figure like the female cyborg challenges traditional humanist feminism in ways that make room for theorizing new subjectivities and feminist epistemologies. Rather than support a traditional feminism that assumes common experiences within patriarchal society and erases differences among women, cyborg feminism moves beyond naturalism and essentialism to acknowledge complex, individual, and ever-changing identity. Three films, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), all offer such a vision of the female cyborg. In these films, the cyborg subject is a composite of machine and human—sometimes physical, dependent on the corporal mixing of flesh and machine, but just as often mental. Human sentiment, human memories, and human emotion merge with mechanical frames and electronic codes/coding to produce cyborgs. Importantly, every main cyborg in these films is coded as female. For each cyborg, a female body hosts preprogrammed sexuality and the emotions each creator thinks a woman should have, whether those are empathy, compassion, or submissiveness.

The cyborgs in these films, however, refuse to let categorizations like female, or even their status as human, alive, or real, restrict them so easily. As human-robot hybrids, cyborgs bridge identities that are assumed to be separate and often oppositional or mutually exclusive. Cyborgs reveal the structures and expectations reified in gender to suggest that something constructed can as easily be deconstructed. In doing so, they create loose ends that leave space for new understandings of both gender and technology. By viewing these films alongside critical theory, we can understand their cyborgs as subversive, hybrid characters. Accordingly, the cyborg as a figure subverts and fragments the coherency of narratives that present gender, technology, and identity in monolithic terms, not only helping us envision new possibilities but giving us the faculties to imagine them at all.
ContributorsMargolis, Madison Lawry (Author) / Dove-Viebahn, Aviva (Thesis director) / Miller, April (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
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Description
There exists a prejudicial influence in the way that psychological thrillers depict their mentally-ill subjects. Accordingly, this creative project closely examines scenes from the following four seminal films: Psycho, Taxi Driver, American Psycho, and Joker -- each of which exemplifies four psychosocial themes that have a dominant presence within the

There exists a prejudicial influence in the way that psychological thrillers depict their mentally-ill subjects. Accordingly, this creative project closely examines scenes from the following four seminal films: Psycho, Taxi Driver, American Psycho, and Joker -- each of which exemplifies four psychosocial themes that have a dominant presence within the ‘psycho-thriller’ sub-genre. These include themes of toxic masculinity, urban corruption, social class, and latent trauma. Each of these are then discussed in terms of their presence and meaning within the genre -- particularly the method in which they reinforce prejudicial understandings of severe mental illness (SMI) despite reflecting the dominant beliefs of medico-scientific communities, criminological theorists, and psychoanalytic schools of thought of the eras in which they were released. Given that these theories continue to inform the public’s understanding of severe mental illness (SMI), this thesis seeks to expose how the enduring presence of these psychosocial themes within the ‘psycho-thriller’ subgenre has conflated the presence of mental illness with criminal disposition. After discussing the representation of these themes in each film, this paper highlights how psychological thrillers may function as instruments of advocacy for mental health in spite of their ‘horrific’ elements, and provides examples of how other entertainment media have helped normalize neurodivergence in a neurotypical society.
ContributorsHernandez, Martin (Author) / Miller, April (Thesis director) / Cavanaugh Toft, Carolyn (Committee member) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-12