Team Edward or Team Jacob? The Portrayal of Two Versions of the Ideal Male Romantic Partner in the Twilight Film Series

The popularity of the Twilight saga, enhanced by the film adaptations of the books, sparked a series of interesting reactions of fans. One was the creation of “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob,” in which fans aligned with one or the other character and argue about which one of them could be a better romantic partner. This study explores the messages the movies are sending to young girls around the world about what are the traits of the “ideal” male romantic partner as portrayed through the characters of Edward and Jacob. A textual analysis of the first three movie adaptations of the saga, Twilight (2008), New Moon (2009), and Eclipse (2010) was conducted. Based in social cognitive theory and using a feminist critical approach, I argue that these messages might be teaching young girls lessons about relationships that are up to certain degree dangerous, some of them perpetuating patriarchy

Media Cognizatti: Critical Frames for Free Speech and New Interpretations

The First Amendment creates a space where new readings in media (new knowledge and understanding) can be assessed through qualitative research and content analysis of contentious topics found in liminal zones. The truth (critical thinking) needs to be born in this arena and vetted through this adversarial process. Speech should never be suppressed. Without total freedom of speech, many truths are restricted, hidden, considered subversive, pushed into the dark corners of the internet, or lost to history. At a time when people are actively calling for colleges and governments to restrict and censor speech, it is not surprising that many people get their information from sources once considered to be on the fringe of society, and they are using technology as their guide to reach it. This study comprises research into transgressive literature in chapter one, the male gaze in film in chapter two, class warfare in chapter three, suicide in chapter four, censorship in chapter five, monsters in chapter six, and dictatorships in chapter seven. This thesis argues that the First Amendment protects individuals in these liminal areas of discourse, and it is in the arena of adversarial dialogue that new and dominant arguments surface. The arguments that prevail are appropriated by the group through media cognizatti (the experience of media culture) that guide and allow for more accurate critical world views to be assessed and expressed by individuals, groups, and organizations about what is comparatively true

‘No, she’s not going anywhere’: Subversions of Virtuous Passivity and Condemned Agency in Modern Retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Snow White’

This thesis examines how the depictions of femininity found in traditional versions of the fairy tales ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Snow White’ are challenged in modern retellings from the 20th and 21st centuries. Analysing Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s version of these tales in their historical context, this thesis details how portrayals of femininity are reduced to the archetypes of the passive angelic heroine and the villainous assertive woman, to fit a socialisation process by the German middle class. Comparing Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) and Soman Chainani’s Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales (2021) with the traditional tales demonstrates two vastly different approaches to using retellings as a mode to criticise the virtuous association to passivity and the punishment following an act of agency in female-led fairy tales. Carter uses erotic and pornographic elements to emphasise the imbalanced power structures between men and women seen in the traditional tales, whilst Chainani offers a more direct solution to the removal of the passive heroine with the inclusion of intersectionality and society’s role on the perception of identity. The main theoretical framework consists of using Marxist literary criticism as argued by Jack Zipes and Terry Eagleton and feminist literary criticism by Toril Moi and Marina Warner. By giving an account of their theories on how literature reflects society’s plights and the desire to rise from exploitation and how this, in turn, shape expectations of gender roles, this thesis examines how the fairy tale retelling manage to portray these struggles using the fairy tale structures without the misogynistic archetypes

Sex, sadism and spain: the spanish horror film, 1968-1977

This project explores how a group of films produced, distributed and exhibited under the crumbling dictatorship of Francisco Franco\u27s Spain can potentially lead us to a better understanding of the political, social and cultural conditions during this contentious period in Spain\u27s long history. Between the years of 1968 and 1977 Spain experienced a boom in horror movie production that rivaled other sectors of production and yielded impressive statistics. This work canonizes these films in relation to their historical genesis, aesthetic characteristics and their social reception

Screen Dreams:a practice-based investigation of filmic dream sequences, using the dream theories of Freud, Jung, Revonsuo and Hobson

This thesis is a practice-based investigation into the production of filmic dream sequences. The research aims to demonstrate how the dream theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Allan J. Hobson and Antti Revonsuo, incorporated into film-making practice, affects the production of dream sequences. The thesis asks: Which techniques denote a film sequence as depicting a dream and how closely do filmic dream sequences correlate with the dream theories of Freud, Jung, Revonsuo and Hobson? In support of answering this question, the thesis investigates what variations in styles of dream sequence are produced by using different combinations of dream-denoting elements. As part of the practice-research, I explore methods for incorporating representations of latent dream content. After reviewing and comparing the selected dream theories, I compare two opening film sequences with similar content, 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963), depicting a dream, and Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993), depicting waking reality, discovering eight dream-denoting film-making techniques. Building on these findings, I analyse a further 49 dream sequences, revealing four additional dream-denoting techniques. I then analyse the dream sequences for correlation with the selected dream theories, including to discover if latent content is ever explicitly represented. I use the findings from my analyses to inform the production of a series of filmic dream sequences, with each film incorporating one or more of the selected dream theories into each stage of production. The thesis addresses several gaps in theoretical and practice-based film research. In film theory, the thesis provides a structured, repeatable methodology for filmic analysis specific to dream sequences and summarises the form and content of dream sequences up to the present, identifying twelve dream-denoting elements. In practice, the thesis researches detailed methods for producing dream sequences in narrative film including representing latent content, by creatively interpreting and using different combinations of psychoanalytic and neurocognitive dream theories

Subversive blood ties: gothic decadence in three characters from murnau's and coppola's renderings of bram stoker's dracula

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, Florianópolis, 2013Esta dissertação consiste em investigar a construção do tema da decadência Gótica em Drácula de Bram Stoker e duas adaptações fílmicas do romance - Nosferatu, de Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, e Drácula de Bram Stoker, de Francis Ford Coppola - tendo como centro da análise como três personagens - Drácula, Jonathan Harker e Mina Harker - se relacionam com tal tema. A decadência Gótica é um padrão literário do contexto fin-de-siècle da sociedade vitoriana inspirada pela crise social que acontecia na Inglaterra no fim do século XIX (Punter e Byron 39-40). Autores como Bram Stoker escreveram histórias que refletiam medos morais e sociais da sociedade vitoriana, retratando imagens de monstros que representavam a transgressão de fronteiras morais e sexuais estabelecidas pelas tradições vitorianas (Botting 88). Tendo tal discussão em mente, este estudo busca conectar a retratação de tal tema do romance às adaptações, também utilizando uma análise fílmica para identificar técnicas que destacam a representação do tema relacionado aos três personagens, finalmente ligando tal tema a crises e confusões sociais que aconteciam nos contextos de ambos os filmes.Abstract : The present dissertation consists of an investigation of the construction of the Gothic theme of decadence in Bram Stoker's Dracula and two film adaptations of the novel - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula - having as the centre of analysis how three characters - Dracula, Jonathan Harker and Mina Harker - relate to that theme. The Gothic decadence is a literary motif from the fin-de-siècle context of the Victorian Era inspired by the social crisis that took place in England in the late nineteenth century (Punter and Byron 39-40). Authors like Bram Stoker wrote stories that reflected moral and social fears of the Victorian society, depicting images of monsters that represented the crossing of moral and sexual boundaries established by the Victorian traditions (Botting 88). Bearing that discussion in mind, this study aims at connecting the portrayal of such a theme from novel to the two adaptations, also making use of a filmic analysis to identify techniques that highlight the depiction of the theme related to the three characters, ultimately linking such a thematic depiction to crises and social commotions that were taking place in both films' social contexts

Metamorphosis and Human-Animal Relationships in Angela Carter’s Fairy Tales: Liminal Subjectivities in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

This dissertation focuses on the analysis of the female characters and human-animal relationships in Angela Carter collection of fairy tales The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) and examines how Carter’s reassessments of traditional fairy tales address the construction of women’s identity in its full complexity, thus departing from reductionist, binary oppositions by offering a satisfactory communion between animality and humanity. I argue that the use of liminal metamorphosis and animal transformation in Carter’s narratives serve the purpose of deconstructing traditional gender roles in literary fairy tales in order to create an idiosyncratic conception of female subjectivity and sexuality. The different formal and ideological possibilities of the short story genre are explored in connection to Carter’s postmodern rewritings. This dissertation is also informed by significant findings in the field of animal studies in order to deal with the symbolic and empirical treatment of animals and women through anthropomorphism and zoomorphism

Fowl feathered fox: Monsters, pipers, families and flocks

Fowl Feathered Fox: Monsters, Pipers, Families and Flocks is a doctoral work consisting of a full-length stage play and an exegesis. An introduction outlines the scope of the doctoral work, while a concluding chapter reflects on research findings and considers staging issues and implications. Appendices include images incorporated into the play’s action as well as photographed excerpts from a series of visual diaries used to document the play’s evolution. The play, Fowl Feathered Fox, explores the nature of delusion, deception and the tragedy of The Beast Within. Borrowing as it does from the traditions of revenge tragedy, comedy and horror, the style of Fowl Feathered Fox is both sensual and sensationalistic. Indeed, by virtue of overstepping traditional ideological, stage and venue boundaries to tap into an audience’s faculties of taste, physical sensation and smell, I aim to confront, seduce and repel on every possible sensory level. Here, in keeping with the conventions of Renaissance revenge tragedies as well as contemporary re-imaginings of the genre in popular culture, a tragic protagonist is forced to behave as a detective in order to put an end to a terrible, taboo curse. As a black comedy however, Fowl Feathered Fox makes light of taboo topics, as the darkness of the subject matter is buoyed by meta-theatrical gags, ironic humour, word-play and brief forays into interpretive dance. In the tradition of horror film and fiction, my eponymous ‘fowl feathered fox’ is a specifically Australian re-imagining of the archetypal shapeshifter, blending the qualities of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the false prophet, the Pied Piper and the werewolf. Surrealism, with its roots in psychoanalysis, underscores the play’s visual aesthetic: this stage is littered with fearful, surgically invasive and aggressively sexual forms, objects and images. The exegesis, Monsters, Pipers, Families and Flocks, interrogates various mythic, historical and fictional examples of charismatic cult leadership, locating patterns in the paradigmatic nexus shared by monsters, cults and families. A trio of exegetical essays considers the tragic nature of lycanthropy, Nietzsche’s conception of the Apollonian/ Dionysian dichotomy, the socio-cultural dynamics of charismatic cult leadership and the frightening, fascinating phenomenon of pseudologia fantastica. The first exegetical essay explores the lycanthropic and messianic qualities of two real-life malevolent cult leaders: Rock Theriault (Canada) and William Kamm (Australia). The second exegetical essay interrogates the enthralling, intoxicating qualities of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and Greek demi-god Dionysus, finding parallels in tragic revenge narratives wrought by infamous American cult leaders such as Charles Manson and David Berg. Finally, the third exegetical essay examines monstrous, messianic mothers from Greek myth, horror fiction and memoir: specifically, the goddess Demeter, Margaret White from Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976) and notorious Australian cult leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne

Pleasures of the spectatorium: young people, classrooms and horror films.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of Year 9 school pupils' responses\ud to horror films, and, in particular, The Company of Wolves (Jordan,\ud 1984). It employs social semiotic theory to analyse both film texts and\ud audience engagements with such texts, exploring how such\ud engagements involve transformations of subjectivity, particular kinds of\ud competence in reading visual codes, and certain types of affective\ud response to horror texts. It explores, briefly, histories of elements of the\ud horror genre, especially the figures of the werewolf and the folktale\ud heroine, in the period from the Enlightenment to the present day.\ud The thesis develops a theory of textual pleasure in relation to horror\ud films, drawing on Bakhtin's theory of carnival, Freud's theories of\ud pleasure, and Bourdieu's theory of taste. It argues that fear and\ud pleasure are related in this context; that such pleasures are socially\ud situated; and that they relate to forms of textual identification.\ud A theory of the sublime is also developed in the context of the social\ud semiotics of film, exploring the history of the sublime from Kant and\ud Burke to postmodernist theory. It is argued that sublime images operate\ud through a dialectic of revelation and concealment, and that audiences\ud replicate this mechanism in their viewing, and in the social sites in which\ud they spectate. These structures are associated, furthermore, with\ud socially-determined structures of aesthetic taste, and ways in which\ud these in turn determine texts as popular or elite (or a hybrid of the two).\ud Finally, the thesis addresses the pedagogies of English and Media\ud Studies, arguing that classrooms need to become spectatorial spaces,\ud open to new literacies of the visual, and equipped with the texts,\ud technologies, and practices adequate to these new competences