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Shades of Iconoclasm in Orson Welles' Film Noirs
Verma, Jyoti ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
This diploma thesis is an effort towards unfolding the various dimensions of Orson Welles' originality of expression in his film noirs. For this purpose the films in focus are not only the noir classics from Welles' oeuvre like The Lady From Shanghai, Touch of Evil, Mr. Arkadin, and The Trial but also Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons which were important for his complete maturity in the noir tradition. The critical positions of various critics, mainly James Naremore, Simon Callow, Clinton Heylin, and Erik S. Roraback have been studied and cited to develop my arguments. The first chapter will be a study of characters in his films and Welles' acting methodologies, along with the treatment of female agency. The second chapter will be a thematic study of Welles' critique of major social shifts and attitudes that prevailed in the US. Events like Spanish-American War, Operation Wetback, and concerns like Yellow Journalism, attitudes towards immigrants, and racism will be studied in how they materialized in his films. The last section of this study will be a renewed study of theories of film critics and philosophers, namely Andr'e Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Ranci`ere. It broaches how their respective theories about cinema apply to Welles' oeuvre of film noirs. The last section of this...
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Notes from the House of Sleep: Reading the Hieroglyphs of Night-Language in Anais Nin, H.D., and Anna Kavan
Gezer, Yaren ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
English Abstract This thesis aims to explore the works of three writers and their relations to their nighttime dreams as well as daydreaming and how the combination of their sessions with their psychoanalysts, their parental traumas, and their close approach to their dreams affect their creativity in developing their writing. The first writer to be dealt with is Hilda Doolittle or H.D. The main point of examining H.D.'s work Tribute to Freud will be her close account of the sessions she had with Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst's approach to H.D.'s creative side as well as her dreams and "visions", and the clash between her womanhood and Freud's ideas on the female inferiority complex and on her relationship with her mother. His interpretation of her writer's block, the nature of inspiration, and her struggle with artistic creativity along with his uneasy paternal role vis-à-vis H.D. will be dealt with in detail. Carl Jung's focus on the symbols and their connection to one's nature will be discussed as well for Doolittle's interpretation of her own dreams and visions can be considered in relation to him. The second writer to be mentioned will be Anais Nin. Her work, House of Incest in which she collects her dreams. Mainly her nightmares will be taken as the main source of discussing her dreams and her...
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The Development of African-American Rights in the United States
Marková, Kristýna ; Maderová, Blanka (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
This diploma thesis deals with the development of fight for civil rights in the United States with particular focus on the movement Black Lives Matter. Furthermore, it focuses on the feminist aspect of activist movements, and explores the neglect women are usually forced to deal with when it comes to this particular social issue. In specific examples, I show how women are often overlooked when it comes to cases of police brutality and basic human rights. Using the enlightening literature by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Toni Morrison and Leila Mottley, but also important works by activists and scholars such as Robin DiAngelo, bell hooks, Mikki Kendall, and Angela Y. Davis, I attempt to demonstrate the depth of this particular problematics, and the importance of understanding it, in order to eradicate police brutality and systemic racism. This thesis will consist of four chapters: in the first chapter I take a look at the history of development of civil rights and what preceded, and also influenced the Black Lives Matter movement. The second chapter then focuses on Black Lives Matter itself, how it came to be and how it evolved from a simple hashtag into the world-known movement it is today. The third chapter focuses on the main theme of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is police brutality and the...
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Indie Rock Poetry: Arctic Monkeys' Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Kiristaev, Michail ; Delbos, Stephan (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
The following thesis creates an academic discourse in order to prove that the lyrics on Arctic Monkeys' debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (2006) should be considered as literature and referred to as indie-rock poetry. The argument in favor of the lyrics being literature is based on the theoretical framework proposed by Terry Eagleton, Stanley Fish and Anthony Easthope: literature is a construct, with literary value being impossible to identify in universal terms. Literary value exists within an interpretative medium, in the context of which the value can only be artificially assigned. To prove that Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not has literary value, the thesis functions as an interpretive medium within which the value is assigned. It begins by presenting Eagleton's and Fish's notions about the nature of literary value, supported by Easthope's idea of the denouncement of literary value as a concept. It is then supported by the notion of the vanishment of the split between high culture and popular culture, which makes the academic study of Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not possible, since it is an item of popular culture. The next chapter provides a sociocultural framework for the literary analysis of the lyrics in the later chapters. It introduces...
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"It must have been the nigger blood in him": The Mechanism of Lynching in William Faulkner's Light in August
Matoušková, Magdalena ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Race and the American South are inseparable from both the literary work of William Faulkner and the practice of lynching. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the mechanism of lynching in Faulkner's novel Light in August. Lynching served as a racial and social control tool to scare Black Americans into submission and acceptance of a lower social rank. Black people were cruelly treated - shot, beaten, burned alive, tortured, or hung from trees. The thesis argues that the character Joe Christmas from Light in August is a victim of such practice when he is hunted and shot on the pretense of being a Black criminal. The thesis explores how his identity has been created by the communities - first as a Black man and then as a Black criminal. From his early childhood, Joe Christmas has passed through different communities that created assumptions about his racial origin. Since his race is never revealed in the book and Joe is unsure of it himself, his racial identity is socially constructed as a Black man. His Blackness is further stereotyped by two myths - the myth of the tragic mulatto and the myth of the Black rapist. The myth of the tragic mulatto is based on the notion that a person of mixed Black and white origin does not belong anywhere and is doomed to end tragically. The idea of the Black rapist...
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On Animal Subjectivity in Contemporary US Cinema
Koilybayeva, Botagoz ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
With an aim to explore the possibility of depicting non-human subjectivity in film, the thesis centers on three contemporary American films that venture beyond the current state of human exceptionalism and bridge a caesura between humanity and animality. Therefore, the thesis puts forward a hypothesis whether film as a cultural and visual medium has an aesthetic, ontological and ethical potential to illustrate animal subjectivity. Terrence Malick's war film The Thin Red Line is an example of highlighting intersubjective experiences of human beings and non-human phenomena. Kevin Costner's western Dances with Wolves underscores reciprocity between humans and animals as well as animal agency and practical and spiritual engagement with animals. Okja, the Korean- American collaboration, is a dystopian satire that reveals the anxieties of the present state of farm animals. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, the thesis engages with philosophy, anthrozoology, animal studies, and critical theory, in an attempt to balance between examining visual representation of animals in film and deconstructing the state of dominant cultural and political ideologies that have locked actual animals within the ideological frameworks of anthropocentric status quo. These human-centered paradigms explicitly and implicitly...
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The Lacanian Concept of Sexuation as an Alternative to the Genderqueer Paradigm
Konoreva, Jevgenija ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Fulka, Josef (referee) ; Tupinambá, Gabriel (referee)
This thesis argues that today's presumably heterogeneous environment reveals a specific homogeneity of thought whose source and effects remain opaque for the contemporary subject. The realized prospect of universal emancipation reflected in the achievements of genderqueer agenda is accompanied by the increase of both individual and political confusion which requires additional consideration, whereas the theoretical means available within this framework reveal a delay preventing it from answering the initially stated questions. The main support for this research is Lacanian psychoanalysis which is a discipline in possession of sufficient tools for the accurate analysis of the situation where the contemporary subject finds itself. However, albeit the adaptations of Lacanian conceptual apparatus are traced within the entire field of critical thinking, they are quite frequently ill-fitted. Therefore, there is a need to problematize the very strategies of modern thinking procedures by focusing on the discursive conditions of the scene where they emerged. To propose a more accurate insight into the roots of the troubled modern subjectivity, this thesis presents a new reading of certain psychoanalytic conceptions elaborated by the Russian researcher Alexander Smulyanskiy. In addition to analyzing the...
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A Comparative Analysis of the New African-American Narratives and Critical Voices of Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, and Patrisse Cullors.
Leššová, Júlia ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
The struggle against racism is as old as the United States itself. Although the Civil Rights movement accomplished a significant transformation of the social and political system, it left many things unresolved. For this reason, the main argument of this thesis is that the movement did not really end in the 1960s but still continues to this day. The method used is that of comparison, where I compare the present "new" movement, which spans from the 1970s, with the original one. In this sense, the thesis also focuses on three major activists from the original movement, Martin Luther King Jr, James Baldwin and Malcolm X, to further analyze the attitudes in the original movement and compare them with the current ones later. However, the main focus of the thesis is on four personas who made a significant contribution to the "new" Civil Rights Movement in the era starting from the 1970s and who can be considered as ones of many rightful representatives of it. Firstly, Toni Morrison and Angela Davis are two prominent writers who adapted writing as an instrument for their activism. In the late 20th century, the general readership rapidly changed. Both writers were able to take this opportunity immediately as they focused their writing on portraying the harsh realities of slavery, racism, and its impacts on...
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Between Mainstream and Avant-Garde Filmmaking: The French New Wave and the Illusion of Realism
Ilić, Dunja ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
The thesis explores the French New Wave as a film school which made a break with classical filmmaking and became influential worldwide, but was then discarded as ideologically naïve in the politicized atmosphere before and after the year 1968. It aims to demonstrate that what allowed the New Wave to make groundbreaking changes in filmmaking, that is, what makes it avant-garde, is also what ultimately denies it this attribute: its concern for realism, an issue at the center of inquiries into the nature of film. The first chapter analyses the Wave's stylistic and ideological opposition to the Tradition of Quality in relation to the theory of André Bazin, the Wave's ideologue. The example of Chabrol's The Cousins shows the influence of Orson Welles's long takes and deep focuses which urge the spectator to judge him/herself, as in real life, the relations among characters, as opposed to the paternalizing editing devices of classical Hollywood and the Tradition of Quality. The second chapter analyses the Wave's most famous films, Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless, with the emphasis on the shift from Chabrol's formal realism to a psychological realism based in ambiguity, Bazin's key term. Breathless is understood as the Wave's avant-garde and a realist film which goes beyond realism. The third...
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(In)Sincere Authorship - Three Novels of Jeffrey Eugenides
Rydlová, Daniela ; Vichnar, David (advisor) ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (referee)
Above anything else, New Sincerity is characterized by responding to postmodern irony, not in the form of its abandonment, but rather in its unmasking, critique, redeployment and transcendence. What Jeffrey Eugenides shares with New Sincerity authors is a critical treatment of the heritage of postmodernism. Balancing between postmodernist techniques and their transcendence, Eugenides writes about contemporary issues plaguing the American society (gender identity, mental health, the American dream, migration) and addresses the literary tradition of American fiction. However, his response to the literary tradition of postmodernism differs from the majority of New Sincerity writers. The New Sincerity's "manifesto," David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram," is an essay about fiction, but it is also a text about American television and culture. Eugenides' books by and large avoid commentary on popular culture, and their socio-political commentary is often found inadequate: their reflection of the legacy of Reaganomics within the Bush and Clinton administrations is oblique, as is their treatment of the many other issues symptomatic of the 1980s and 1990s: the spread of HIV/AIDS, the ubiquitous television culture and its gradual replacement in the digital age, information oversaturation and the looming...
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