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- Creator:
- Bailey, Aaron
- Description:
- In the fantasy world of South Park, Colorado, the town named in the popular Comedy Central show, everything is not always as it seems. Eruptions of chaos and melodramatic human relations play out in scores of situations that at times seem fantastic, and at other times, not far from reality at all. Issues of race, free speech, sexuality and gender, war, current political events, poverty, the arts and creative subjectivity, and other topics are addressed in an animated cartoon format by creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. South Park has been airing for 16 seasons, is well-known, and has been praised for its critical approaches. It has been nominated for 7 Emmy awards, has won 4 awards, and has been the subject of two collections of critical essays. Furthermore, South Park frequently refers to widely known and taught works of literature, including Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” The complexity of synthesizing current events and canonical texts in parody indicates a clear potential for South Park to be effective as a pedagogical tool in the post-secondary classroom. In expanded critical discussions, teachers and students can learn to relate literary criticism to contemporary media. Employing M.M. Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and the carnivalesque as well as critical analysis by scholars in English Studies, I illustrate how the show’s content can be applied in discussing canonical literature. I explicate themes from an episode that parallel themes in Jackson’s story. The greatest potential of such a demonstration is to show how students and teachers can form relations based on a common understanding of the “old” and the “new” in an attempt to increase students’ analytical skills. Using Bakhtinian concepts, I explored the pedagogical and ethical considerations of using South Park in the classroom, and found conflicts and complexities that require a balanced pedagogical approach. To illustrate these considerations, I used the South Park episode “Britney’s New Look,” to look for moments of parody and pedagogical potential.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Humboldt
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Jones, Adrienne
- Description:
- This paper examines the social nature of affect as it intersects with trauma. Affect is a feeling or emotion experienced subjectively. At the root of trauma theory, affect theory attempts to categorize affects and link them with their respective sources and reactions. Current studies of affect reveal trauma and shame as inescapable consequences of patriarchy’s affect/culture interaction. Trauma theorists have examined how trauma obscures memory and representation. Contemporary trauma theorists are now investigating how gender, sexuality, race and class complicate the posttraumatic. I argue that we must consider the social, political and cultural nexus of trauma to more effectively understand the posttraumatic. These cultural factors are situated within patriarchy’s hierarchal network of institutions, which inform affective experience. Feminist and trauma theorist Maria Root conceptualized a term called “insidious trauma,” which places trauma at the center of patriarchy’s unequal power distribution surrounding identity categories such as race, sexuality, gender and class. My analysis of the works of Virginia Woolf and Cherríe Moraga reveals that insidious trauma pervades oppressed minority subjectivities which stems from these ranked power relationships. Woolf observes how traumatizing systemic oppressions, such as sexism, imperialism and classism, collide with devastating traumatic events at the level of daily lived experience. Forging a connection between trauma and queer studies, Moraga consistently foregrounds her lesbian identity and sexual pleasure within a painful history of silence, abuse, racism and colonization. The literature of Virginia Woolf and Cherríe Moraga compels us to confront the traumatogenic nature of social oppression, especially that which is endemic to the structure of the heteropatriarchal family and racism, colonialism and classism. Since trauma resists linguistic representation, the language used to express it will always be figural; for this reason figurative language provides us with a means of representing the ineffable experience of trauma. Affect and queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich promotes expressing trauma through a process she calls trauma archiving. Trauma archiving is the process of articulating the specific nature of one’s trauma(s) and observing the associated affects and traumas that ensued after the traumatic experience(s). This activity provides an avenue for shifting one’s trauma composition and re-writing the subjective with intention. Virginia Woolf anticipates Cvetkovich’s conceptualization of trauma archiving by producing auto-biographical and experimental narratives. Cherríe Moraga’s process of trauma archiving takes form in her retelling of ancestral indigenous myth to reconfigure individual and collective Chicana lesbian traumas. Additionally, Moraga turns to her mythological cultural roots to create new communities. She conceptualizes a “xicanadyke” nationalism in calling for the creation of Queer Aztlán, an internal and physical nation-state based on accepting difference. By unearthing trauma as a form of resistance to Chicano gender and sexuality norms, Moraga reconfigures a valid sexual, multi-ethnic self as a critical component to fashioning new communities.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Humboldt
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Maccarthy, Jamie
- Description:
- This project aims to (re)imagine the threads of connection between the erotic, darkness, and the Shadow-Beast in the writing of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Joy Harjo. I focus on the construction of the erotic and consider how darkness and the Shadow-Beast can inform an understanding of the erotic. A (re)imagination allows me to see and understand how the Shadow-Beast as a representation of the erotic and the erotic’s creative potential reveals itself in poetry and how that revelation can (re)imagine what it means for women across various differences, myself included, to become in touch with our own Shadow-Beast.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Humboldt
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Cowherd, Stephanie G.
- Description:
- My Master’s Project explores the construction of place/space in Harjo’s poems as a form of ceremony. I argue that Harjo utilizes language as a tool to construct the place/space necessary for her as well as her communities to engage in discourse with each other in resistance. The following elements of ceremony, time/memory and song/dance/drum are linked together with place/space through Harjo’s continued membership and contribution to her communities of women of color. Ultimately, I argue Harjo uses the strength she gains from her membership and contribution to her communities to confront and transform from her encounter with cultural knowing. I do so through a close analysis of the connections between Harjo, Harjo’s persona as speaker, and her communities in her poems “Anchorage,” “Call it Fear,” and “Strange Fruit.”
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Humboldt
- Department:
- English
- Creator:
- Exline, Laura
- Description:
- Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have recently been suggested as a way to radically transform higher education. This revolutionary rhetoric speaks to many democratic educators’ goals, but its use warrants closer inquiry. This project first defines MOOCs, looking at the uses and possible limitations of their current technology, their pedagogical background, and their characteristics. Then, using the Bakhtinian concept of centripetal and centrifugal forces, it examines thematic narratives present in popular discourse about MOOCs that reflect these forces. To do so, it analyzes a range of popular media articles, primarily sources with wide distribution to general audiences, like the New York Times, that made up the early media flurry surrounding MOOCs. While MOOCs offer real benefits for some students, MOOCs are largely presented as a tool for those outside the US or as a supplementary resource for university graduates with little consideration of what this means for educationally underprivileged within the US. Hidden behind a rhetoric of radical change, these articles take an economic approach to an educational issues. This focus constructs a view of universities as economic institutions and students as passive consumers of an educational product and so overlooks pedagogical considerations. As such, this discourse is placed in a capitalistic context that displaces the meanings used by educators.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Humboldt
- Department:
- English