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  • 1. Hauser, Brian Haunted Detectives: The Mysteries of American Trauma

    Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, English

    In this dissertation, I investigate American motion picture narratives from the 1990s in which detectives encounter the supernatural. These narratives did not originate during this decade, but there were a remarkable number of them compared to previous periods. I argue that the supernatural is often analogous to personal, national, or cultural trauma. I further suggest that a detective investigating the supernatural stands in for the psychoanalyst, who studies and treats this trauma. I then trace the origins of the supernatural detective in history, as well as in British and American popular fiction. To begin, I discuss Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999) as an example of a supernatural detective, who is himself traumatized but who also manages to solve the supernatural mystery in the eponymous village. That solution points to the obscured narrative of women's rights in the early-American republic. Next, I suggest that spaces can be traumatized like people. I introduce the concept of the chronotope of the traumatized space, which I then apply to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and its various film and television adaptations to argue that these influential haunted house tales have helped repress scientific research into the paranormal as a reputable field of inquiry and the paranormal researcher as an admirable calling. Next, the entire country of the United States is portrayed as a traumatized space in The X-Files, which presents its primary supernatural detective, Agent Fox Mulder, as an analyst of the state, exposing the national guilt concerning the treatment of Native Americans. Finally, I investigate several turn-of-the-millennium fake documentaries. I argue that in The Last Broadcast (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and the novel House of Leaves (2000), rational investigators are more likely to meet impossible moments than they are to meet supernatural entities. These impossible moments reflect a growing desensitization to the slippage (open full item for complete abstract)
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    Committee: Jared Gardner (Advisor); James Phelan (Committee Member); Linda Mizejewski (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Motion Pictures
  • 2. Mathews-Pett, Amelia Finding Televisual Folklore in the Supernatural Procedural

    Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, English

    The makers of commercial popular culture often incorporate folklore into their works. Although their definition of folklore is generally restricted to pre-modern narratives and beliefs that form only a small part of what folklore is, their works relate to traditional content in a more expansive way. This dissertation examines a contemporary television genre that not only incorporates traditional content but, I argue, functions as folklore in its own right by negotiating truth and belief, constructing social Others, and, at the meta-level, constituting an archive. Since the 1990s, serial narratives in which everyday people investigate and solve supernatural disturbances in a procedural format have become a mainstay of North American television and streaming media. Such programs, including The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have generally lacked a cohesive genre designation. I argue for “supernatural procedural” as the genre's preferred term and trace its history from predecessors in Victorian-era occult detective fiction to early forms in 1970s television, through solidification in the 1990s into its current permutations. I outline conventions that include, among others, realistic worldbuilding, a blend of episodic and serial storytelling, and, notably, a tendency to engage with folklore. Employing an approach blending folkloristics and popular culture studies, I argue that specific characteristics of the supernatural procedural allow series to function as televisual folklore: folklore not just adapted by, but actually occurring within the television medium. This emphasis contributes to newer avenues in folklore studies, which has only recently begun seriously analyzing television, and popular culture studies, where folkloristic perspectives are often overlooked. This work considers the abovementioned series at length alongside subsequent programs like Supernatural and Grimm, using supporting analysis from Lucifer, Evil, SurrealEstate, and Wellington Pa (open full item for complete abstract)
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    Committee: Dorothy Noyes (Advisor); Angus Fletcher (Committee Member); Merrill Kaplan (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Folklore; Mass Media
  • 3. Coleman, Isaiah Someone to Live For, Someone to Die For

    Master of Fine Arts, University of Akron, 2020, Creative Writing

    Someone to Live For, Someone to Die For is a Y/A, Thriller, and Romance Novel based in the fictional city of Haven Hope Harbor, Connecticut. The protagonist, Lance, is a young adult attempting to overcome his severe pyrophobia in order to become a firefighter and prevent anyone from going through the horrific apartment fire that claimed the lives of his entire family when he was nine. Scars have been left on Lance from the experience, emotional, mental, as well as physical. Matters are further complicated when a stranger appears in his town, in which a strict and harsh nightly curfew is implemented, and begins asking questions that Lance himself had long since dismissed. The stranger, an enigmatic female drifter named Elena with dark secrets of her own, and apparent ties to immortality, joins forces with the young man and together they shed light on the shadowy figure pulling the strings throughout the entire city.
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    Committee: Imad Rahman (Advisor); Robert Pope (Committee Member); Julie Drew (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts
  • 4. McCain, Katharine Today Your Barista Is: Genre Characteristics in The Coffee Shop Alternate Universe

    Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

    This dissertation, Today Your Barista Is: Genre Characteristics in The Coffee Shop Alternate Universe, works to categorize and introduce a heretofore unrecognized genre within the medium of fanfiction: The Coffee Shop Alternate Universe (AU). Building on previous sociological and ethnographic work within Fan Studies, scholarship that identifies fans as transformative creators who use fanfiction as a means of promoting progressive viewpoints, this dissertation argues that the Coffee Shop AU continues these efforts within a defined set of characteristics, merging the goals of fanfiction as a medium with the specific goals of a genre. These characteristics include the Coffee Shop AU's structure, setting, archetypes, allegories, and the remediation of related mainstream genres, particularly the romantic comedy. The purpose of defining the Coffee Shop AU as its own genre is to help situate fanfiction within mainstream literature conventions—in as much as that's possible—and laying the foundation for future close reading. This work also helps to demonstrate which characteristics are a part of a communally developed genre as opposed to individual works, which may assist in legal proceedings moving forward. However, more crucially this dissertation serves to encourage the continued, formal study of fanfiction as a literary and cultural phenomenon, one that is beginning to closely analyze the stories fans produce alongside the fans themselves. Far from writing chaotically, fanfiction authors have spent the last six decades developing structured forms of literature for online spaces, of which the Coffee Shop AU is a part, yet most scholarship has yet to acknowledge that structure outside of overly broad categories (such as slash) or equally specific tropes (such as bed sharing). Defining what is currently one of the most popular genres written today—a genre that is the product of and is now helping to produce other genres—is the first step in filling this gap.
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    Committee: Sean O'Sullivan (Advisor); Matthew Birkhold (Committee Member); Jared Gardner (Committee Member); Elizabeth Hewitt (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Gender Studies; Literature; Mass Media; Romance Literature
  • 5. Harris, Jason The Angle of Desire and Other Stories

    Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2014, Creative Writing/Fiction

    This collection of stories explores a range of vengeful, disillusioned, grieving, and ambitious characters in adventurous and sometimes self-destructive pursuits of pleasure, passion, knowledge, wealth, art, order, and power. Some of the narratives inhabit an uncanny and uncertain borderland of psychological obsessions and supernatural disruptions. Many of these characters that pursue their desires or struggle with the misery of thwarted desires, travel on dark paths, but these are also quests towards identity, liberation, truth, and meaningful connection— even if the results are often sinister and disconcerting rather than heroic and redemptive.
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    Committee: Lawrence Coates Ph.D. (Advisor); Wendell Mayo Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature
  • 6. Nye, Bret Hauntings in the Midwest

    Master of Arts, Miami University, 2013, English

    This linked short story collection explores the concept of utilizing the genre of fiction to tell a true story. These nine stories all feature a single narrator-character, known simply as Nick, who interrogates his own past through the art of writing. The collection challenges the notions of conventional narrative tradition in terms of both its composition and its various styles of narration. In addition to their concern with fiction's ability to capture greater truths, these stories also investigate the themes of memory, trauma, and the subjective nature of reality, as well as the social and societal ramifications of working class life and the physical and psychological consequences of labor. Finally, the collection examines the ways in which place and region work towards the construction of persona.
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    Committee: Joseph Bates Dr. (Advisor); Margaret Luongo Professor (Committee Member); Kay Sloan Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Literature