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- All Subjects: Italian Neorealism
- All Subjects: Superheroes
- Creators: Gilfillan, Daniel
- Creators: Gutierrez, Jairo Gerardo
Description
This dissertation examines the influential relationships between popular culture depictions of superheroes and the substantive, malleable, and real possibilities of human body transformation. Cultural discourses condition and constrain the ways in which identity and bodies are formed and expressed. This includes popular culture texts that, through their evocative narratives, provide guidance or solutions for dealing with real world problems. From the perspective of communication studies, this project involves examining ways people project and perform fantastic future versions of humanity in relation to popular culture artifacts, like superheroes, but also examines how such projections are borne out of and get expressed through our everyday, less than extraordinary experiences. Key theoretical tensions regarding identity and culture are elucidated. These tensions are then developed discursively into a genealogy of body transcendence that features the historicizing of social functions to determine from where such tensions and changes manifest, and how they ultimately affect us. Several key artifacts are introduced to help inform the investigation, including eight specific superhero body types that provide an ideal perspective through which transformative power can be observed. The superhero discourse is particularly relevant because it offers a utopian/dystopian tension regarding how the splendor and seduction of the discourse materializes in both liberating and problematic ways. Another aspect of this embodied approach involves adopting the alternate superhero persona of Ethnography Man. By undertaking my own identity transformations, I am better able to investigate spaces that encourage such identity slippage and play, such as the annual San Diego Comic Con International. The once strongly held perception that our bodies are fixed and stable is fast disappearing. In bridging the body with culture through a genealogy, it becomes much more apparent how body transformations will continue to manifest in the future. Therefore, from the experiences and analysis contained herein, implications regarding powerful discursive conditions and constraints that influence our ability to change take form in revealing, problematic, and sometimes unexpected ways. More specifically, implications of who has power, how it is exercised, and the effects of power will materialize and indicate whether or not everyday humans have the potential to become superheroes.
ContributorsBoras, Scott Daniel (Author) / McDonald, Kelly (Thesis advisor) / Goodall, Jr., H. L. (Committee member) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
History and art have always had an intersecting relationship, and each helps us to acquire a better understanding of the other, since artistic works help us to visualize the zeitgeist of a particular point in history. The connection between art and history is most apparent when the radical changes that befall society through historically important events, especially conflict, are followed by sweeping changes in society, which trickle their way down into the minds of artists and creators, whose works subsequently reflect these changes. We cannot understand these works and their relationship to their respective period of time simply by isolating them into individual components like art style, artist, and location. They are socially and historically charged, part of a larger network of intersecting relationships that factor in concepts like ideology, material, and culture. We can examine the analytical power of this framework, better known as actor network theory, in a post-WWII European landscape, a period heightened by rapid social changes as the citizens of the formerly war-torn continent worked to rebuild and recover. When examining the artistic output of vanquished nations, mainly Italian neorealist films and German Trümmerfilmen, in a framework built around the principles established in actor network theory, we can see how the historical, political, social, and cultural developments established in the wake of European fascism’s unceremonious collapse is reflected on film when compared to the victorious United States, whose infrastructure and film industry remained mostly unscathed.
ContributorsBrown, Tristan Michael (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis director) / Vitullo, Juliann (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
For the sake of this thesis, two scholarly collections edited by Dr. Robin S. Rosenberg – Our Superheroes, Ourselves (2013) and The Psychology of Superheroes: An Unauthorized Exploration (2008) – were reviewed. From these two collections and the multitude of psychological theories they cite, those most relevant to adolescent character development are considered. Three broad theories are examined first: positive psychology, equity theory, and attachment style. Then, six additional specific theories that define temperament (behavioral activation system and behavioral inhibition system), personality theory, duel identity, media identification, parasocial interaction, and comparison theory are reviewed. After reviewing each theory, Heroes in Crisis (2019) , a recent bestselling DC offering that addresses superhero trauma, is analyzed through the lens of these psychological theories in order to provide insight into the psychology or both superheroes and their adolescent fans.
ContributorsGutierrez, Jairo Gerardo (Author) / Gruber, Diane (Thesis director) / Amparano, Julie (Committee member) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
This thesis evaluates how films from Western Europe portray the social, political and economic degradation that allows the American influence to rise leading up to the Cold War. Specifically, this thesis evaluates classic films from Weimar Germany, the Soviet Union, post-fascist Italy and post-Vichy France as historical and cultural artifacts that depict the harsh conditions of postwar life and how American influence revitalized daily European life. While the American influence (defined as the support of democracy, technological modernization and a capitalist economy) was supported by many struggling Europeans who looked to the United States as a standard to rebuild, critics from each country viewed American influence as a threat to the stability of national independence which they sought to maintain as recovery balanced postwar society.
ContributorsBarney, Clinton (Author) / Gilfillan, Daniel (Thesis director) / Hedberg Olenina, Ana (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Sch (Contributor)
Created2022-05