Seeing death : portraiture in contemporary postmortem photography

This thesis focuses on the aesthetics of the photographic representation of the actual dead body in Elizabeth Heyert's The Travelers (2004), Pieter Hugo's The Bereaved (2005) and Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta's Life Before Death: Portraits of the Dying (2004). The use of portraiture in each of these artist's series is crucial as it suggests an interest in the 'subjectness' of the corpse. Katarzyna Majak's (2011) theory of socialization as an attempt to lessen the scandal of the corpse through representation is central throughout this thesis. Majak argues that for the viewer the corpse is a scandal, because it discomfortingly presents the transformation of a body from subject to object. For Majak, socialization is essentially the taming of the dead body, achieved by re-presenting the corpse as an individual. Socialization emphasizes the subject-ness of the deceased individual, rather than the object-ness of the corpse, of pure unadulterated matter. The use of portraiture in each of the above series socializes the corpse by presenting the individual identity of the deceased as a subject, in varying degrees. Death is approached through the recognizable conventions of portraiture itself, thereby to some extent taming or domesticating the corpse. This thesis expands on Majak's valuable theory by establishing a continuum of socialization from subject-ness to object-ness. Importantly, this continuum reveals varying degrees of socialization within the three series. Socialization is used here as an analytical tool with which to explore the photographs, drawing out similarities and differences. I argue that through various aesthetic techniques, these three series encourage the viewer to look at these different images of the corpse with varying degrees of comfort

Streams of Nurture - A Sustainable Aquaculture Game

Streams of Nurture is a kinetic visual novel that explores the practices and socioeconomic implications of aquaculture (fish farming) and salmon industries. Supported by extensive research and an iterative development methodology, our team leveraged the Ren\u27Py game engine and Style Transfer software to weave a visually and narratively unique experience. The authors argue that portraying a niche topic through the gaming medium can make for an engrossing experience when dramatic storytelling and a detailed treatment of real- world issues are seamlessly blended

Leśmian Internationally: Contextual Relations

This book shows the literary legacy of Bolesław Leśmian, the great Polish writer, as engaged in a dialogue with the tradition, and forged on the crossroads of literatures, and epochs. Exploring American, French and Russian contexts (Poe’s writing, Baudelaire’s oeuvre, Balmont’s texts, the symbolist style, the bylinna tradition), highlighting the correspondences between Leśmian and the romantics (Pushkin, Gogol) as well as the modernists (Jesienin, Gorodetsky) and connecting his work to Ukrainian culture through the evocation of old Slavic folklore, the book showcases Leśmian’s work as an example of interliterary and inter-cultural transfer of aesthetics, styles, genres and motifs. A crucial outcome of this research is the codifying of a contextual analysis as a method of comparative studies

A Hip-Hop Joint: Thinking Architecturally About Blackness

“A Hip-Hop Joint: Thinking Architecturally About Blackness” beings by recognizing that hip-hop visual culture’s rapid global expansion over the last four decades complicates its lasting connection to blackness. Instead of arguing that blackness is the content of contemporary hip-hop, this project considers blackness as the aesthetic that coheres the diffuse genre. Thus, blackness serves a distinctly architectural function in hip-hop visual culture—it is the architectonic logic of the genre. Therefore, this project illustrates the value of alternative definitions of blackness; specifically, this dissertation approaches blackness as a distinct set of spatial relations that can be observed in the many places and spaces hip-hop is produced and consumed. “A Hip-Hop Joint” argues blackness and hip-hop exist in a recursive loop: blackness generates the spatial organization of hip-hop and hip-hop is so racially charged that it produces blackness. As a result, hip-hop images can serve as the site for unexpected encounters with blackness—specifically, visualizing blackness in spaces that are not occupied by actual black bodies. Because visual culture organizes space through the positioning of the black body, this dissertation argues hip-hop images that defy the presumed appearance and visibility of blackness are not only capable of reconfiguring image relations, but also the aesthetics of anti-blackness. This project relies on black studies, visual culture studies, and architectural theory. The visual objects analyzed include: music videos directed by Hype Williams, Beyoncé’s “Formation,” WorldStarHipHop.com, William Pope.L’s “Claim,” the trailer for Apollo Brown’s Thirty Eight album, and “Until the Quiet Comes” directed by Kahlil Joseph

Dying in Full Detail

In 'Dying in Full Detail' Jennifer Malkowski explores digital media's impact on one of documentary film's greatest taboos: the recording of death. Despite technological advances that allow for the easy creation and distribution of death footage, digital media often fail to live up to their promise to reveal the world in greater fidelity. Malkowski analyzes a wide range of death footage, from feature films about the terminally ill (Dying, Silverlake Life, Sick), to surreptitiously recorded suicides (The Bridge), to #BlackLivesMatter YouTube videos and their precursors. Contextualizing these recordings in the long history of attempts to capture the moment of death in American culture, Malkowski shows how digital media are unable to deliver death "in full detail," as its metaphysical truth remains beyond representation

From Onegin to Ada: Nabokov's Canon and the Texture of Time

The library of existing scholarship on Vladimir Nabokov circles uncomfortably around his annotated translation Eugene Onegin (1964) and late English-language novel Ada, or Ardor (1969). This dissertation juxtaposes Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin (1825-32) with Nabokov's two most controversial monuments and investigates Nabokov's ambitions to enter a canon of Western masterpieces, re-imagined with Russian literature as a central strain. I interrogate the implied trajectory for Russian belles lettres, culminating unexpectedly in a novel written in English and after fifty years of emigration. My subject is Nabokov, but I use this hermetic author to raise broader questions of cultural borrowing, transnational literatures, and struggles with rival canons and media. Chapter One examines Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, the foundation stone of the Russian canon and a meta-literary fable. Untimely characters pursue one another and the latest Paris and London fashions in a text that performs and portrays anxieties of cultural borrowing and Russia's position vis-à-vis the West. Fears of marginalization are often expressed in terms of time: I use Pascale Casanova's World Republic of Letters to suggest a global context for the "belated" provinces and fashion-setting centers of cultural capital. Chapter Two argues that Nabokov's Eugene Onegin, three-quarters provocation to one-quarter translation, focuses on the Russian poet and his European sources. Nabokov reads Onegin as a masterpiece of theft and adaptation: the lengthy notes painstakingly examine precedents, especially in Byron and Chateaubriand, and evaluate for originality by comparison. When does Pushkin engage in derivative "native" imitations, and when in subtle and brilliant parody? Chapter Three concludes that Nabokov attempts his own timeless masterpiece with Ada, or Ardor. Planet Antiterra, Nabokov's personal "world republic of letters," transplants and conflates his beloved literatures. To create this Russo-Franco-Anglophone world, Ada lifts lines, characters, and fabula from Onegin but also from works by Byron and Chateaubriand. A pattern emerges of great English, French, and Russian triads; it repeats more faintly with Dickens, Flaubert, and Tolstoy (Nabokov hoped one day to translate Anna Karenina); but the most fraught iteration is Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov himself. Chapter Four looks at traces of Joyce and Proust in Ada. The two modernists serve as signs by which great readers recognize one another, as indexes to the "real" and the beautiful, and as carriers of tradition; but Ada subsumes its rivals through imitation and parody. However, the incestuous lovers Ada and Van Veen, heirs to the greatest literary traditions in the world, die childless. Is Ada a dead end, Nabokov's Finnegans Wake? Or can masterpieces interbreed indefinitely? Chapter Five examines Ada in the context of its working title, The Texture of Time. Van is a scholar of Henri Bergson, of the duration of the past into the present, and of spatial metaphors for time. Van aspires to an eternal present, but the one-way time of ordinary mortality threatens to take over the narrative. The structure of the novel mimics Zeno's paradox, famously refuted by the French philosopher: Part Two is roughly half the size of Part One, and so on. The arrow (Ardis in Greek, the name of the Veens' lost paradise) speeds towards the final target, but the Veens aim for immortality and to die into their book. Chapter Six turns to the visual arts. Nabokov's novel reads like a gallery, with Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in pride of place. Ada animates the Old Masters, but there are also no fewer than three film adaptations depicted in the novel, betraying an ongoing struggle between the media (and echoing Stanley Kubrick and Nabokov's skirmishes over Lolita the film). If it is to survive beyond inbreeding with diminishing results, the novel form must subsume more than its own recent greats. I conclude with Nabokov as an image in the work of contemporary novelists, a source and a transcultural precursor to a new generation of international writers

Subjective Excess: Aesthetics, Character, and Non-Normative Perspectives in Serial Television After 2000

This dissertation aims to fill gaps in contemporary television scholarship with regards to aesthetics and character subjectivity. By analyzing eight series that have all aired after 2000, there is a marked trend in series that use an excessive visual and aural style to not only differentiate themselves from other programming, but also to explore non-normative perspectives. Now more willing to explore previously taboo topics such as mental health, addiction, illness, and trauma, the shows featured in this dissertation show how a seemingly excessive televisual aesthetic works with television’s seriality to create narrative complexity and generate character development. Chapters are arranged by mode of production with the first chapter focusing on the series Grey’s Anatomy and Hannibal as a means of exploring the production and distribution practices surrounding network TV. The second chapter examines the basic cable series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Legion and posits how the narrowcasting of cable allows for more nuanced character representations through aesthetics. In the third chapter, the impact HBO has had on the television medium is explored through Carnivàle and Euphoria. The final chapter looks at contemporary series The Boys and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt as a way to better understand how the medium’s production and distribution has shifted during the convergence era. Ultimately, this dissertation will argue that in addition to further explorations of aesthetics, television studies is in need of a medium specific vernacular for creating meaningful textual analyses that avoid an overreliance on cinematic terminology

Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good

Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin—or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds

Film Noir as the Sovereign-Image of Empire: Cynicism, White Male Biopolitics, and the Neoliberal Cinematic Apparatus

This dissertation develops a theory of film noir as sovereign-image, a meta-generic and meta-cinematic discourse that confronts the viewer with the biopolitical ambivalence of the cinematic apparatus but enjoins her to nonetheless affirm its normative use. I argue that classical American noir deploys a proto-neoliberal ideology to turn the indeterminacy at its core into a spectacle of victimized white men, offering emphatically gendered and racialized images of a pathological entrepreneur of the self who is not ashamed to exhibit his wounded private life as the source of his singular market value. I claim, however, that even in his fully developed contemporary form in which his classical predecessors trauma induced shamelessness turns into a cynically calculated affective display, noirs neoliberal hero is not the self-made man he appears to be but remains delegated by a homosocial group to be the sovereign arbiter of their lifes value for them, instead of them. As an individual whonot unlike the film vieweris temporarily isolated from his peers he is in the exceptional position to freely decide what kind of life to consider productive for the process of capital accumulation, turning his body into the arbitrary link between what Agamben calls bare life and a qualified form of lifea link I call the sovereign-image. I track the evolution of film noirs sovereign function alongside the expansion and transformation of the United States from a territorialized nation state to a deterritorialized global financial network (what Hardt and Negri call Empire) to shed light on how Hollywoods anomalous noir crisis, its war trauma induced state of exception, became the expression of the governing paradigm of unbridled global biocapitalism in the age of North Atlantic unilateralism. In contemporary neo-noirs like The Usual Suspects (1995), Trainspotting (1996), Inception (2010), Fight Club (1999), or Drive (2011) becoming a self-made neoliberal subject coincides with gaining membership in a hybrid and flexible white male bios, the old-new flesh of Empire now cynically framed as the condition of possibility for autonomous selfhood as such. In critiquing neo-noirs cynical paradigm I demonstrate that its reactionary force can be mobilized only if the films first construct a biopolitical zone of indistinction where the inevitability of the western capitalo-patriarchal status quo is questioned and the equality of all forms of life is posited