More than a millennia after the earliest-known version was committed to text, fairy tales continue to occupy our bookshelves and airwaves. The current popularity of fairy tale-based television programs such as Grimm and Once Upon a Time offer continued proof that the appeal of these tales is not lost on 21st century audiences. Beginning with the rise of fairy tales in the ancient cultures of China and India, this paper will follow their journey through Asia, long before these tales reached their traditionally recognized European birthplace. In this examination of the multicultural variations of a single tale—the Cinderella story—we begin to understand just how these stories have evolved. By means of textual analysis, I will examine the familiar French literary version (Perrault) of Cinderella using V. Propp’s morphology of “function” and character, and semiotic theories advanced by Scholes (1982) and Berger (2000). I will then apply this structure to three television adaptations of the Cinderella story: the 1957 live-television broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, the 2006 pilot episode of ABC’s Ugly Betty, and—adding a global aspect—the 2007 Mexican production of La Fea más Bella. Likewise, I will examine the ways that the Cinderella tale has retained its relevance as it crossed cultures—a literary example of globalization through cultural flow—and how the sharing of its ideas has contributed to its historical persistence.

Studies have shown that heavy exposure to visual media, such as television, negatively impacts children’s physical and emotional wellbeing. In a media-saturated contemporary American culture, it is imperative to critically evaluate how constant exposure to media and technology impacts children. Extensive research on the relationship between children and television by scholars such as Schor (2004) reveals that high consumption of media by children results in myriad negative effects, including, but not limited to, lowered self-esteem, depression, anxiety, obesity, strained parent-child relationships, and psychosomatic symptoms. An area less studied, however, is how parents understand and (potentially) mitigate their children’s exposure to media, and how widespread beliefs that children are unable to entertain themselves independent of technology effect patterns of media consumption. This study fills this gap in the literature through an examination of how parental philosophies regarding media use as well as socioeconomic factors impact how much television their children consume. Towards this end, the current research evaluates responses from 100 parents of children under 18 and living at home through an anonymous, ten question online survey. Drawing from prominent media scholars, this research applies Marshall McLuhan’s substantive theory, which holds that it is not the content on the television screen that is important, but rather the act of watching TV itself. The survey found that households with a high income or a single parent are more likely to have children who engage more heavily with media. The survey also found that children with parents who do not believe they are capable of entertaining themselves are more likely to be heavy television users. These findings underscore the importance of parents understanding how TV consumption impacts their children in order to contribute to the growth of a more creative and less screen-dependent world.

While writing the first quarter of a Gothic fantasy novel titled Deathwatch, I also carried out analytical research examining Romantic Gothic themes appearing in my creative text. I was largely unfamiliar with Gothic literature while planning this novel and these themes appeared naturally in my text from the start as a clear example of intertextuality. However, in order to gain a better understanding of the tradition I was referencing and use it effectively as a framework, I began researching features of Romantic Gothic literature. Key to Romantic Gothic literature is its villain-hero model of the outcast who is unable to determine whether his alienation is his own fault or the fault of the larger world. This model in turn leads to the Gothic features of doubles and the dangerous lover, both of which allow the hero frightening insight through physical confrontation with his own self. By identifying these literary themes in both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and my own work over the course of my research, I was able to better understand and deepen my own intertextual framework. As a result, during Deathwatch’s writing process, I was able to both reference and alter these unique features of the Gothic genre in a knowledgeable way, significantly enriching the quality of my own text.

As Korea is becoming internationally noticed due to its technology and pop culture, it is becoming more important for the rest of the world to understand its culture. One promising route to a deeper understanding of culture is through the study of its children's literature as an early medium that educates and socializes children into the native culture by exposing them to social norms present within the texts. Translating Korean children's literature into English requires a sophisticated but enlightening balancing act: a balance between the two languages often referred to as having "mirror image structures," a balance between the author's story and covert cultural messages, and a balance between the translator's literal and liberal approaches. To contribute to the cultural understanding, this project aims to experiment with various ways of balancing, in an effort to maximally retain cultural imagery and voices of the characters in each story, while conveying the sense and sounding elegant in translated work. The focus is on translating at least five different speech styles in Korean into what is structurally one in English. This project aims to contribute towards finding the best method in conveying the author's message both precisely while maintaining botha aesthetic and cultural values within the text for non-Korean readers.

This project strives to address the surprisingly high rates of eating disorders (ED) in southern Italy. Determinants for ED in southern Italy are characterized by perfectionist tendencies and parental criticism, rather than the low self-esteem and body image problems most often associated with ED. The high prevalence of ED and unique composition of symptoms and psychological determinants among southern Italian women point to a compelling paradox: Given the widely supported theory that the development of eating disorders in a population may be ascribed not only to media-stimulated body image concerns but also to processes of modernization and industrialization, why do women in southern Italy, which has not conformed to or successfully undergone these processes, exhibit relatively high rates of eating disorders? This thesis argues that ED in southern Italy is a symptom of transgenerational transmission of trauma related to collective regional fear of the end of WWII and loss of the precarious economic certainty of the Allied occupation. This fear and eventual loss could not be openly mourned because of its conflict with the Resistance and liberation myths that sustain WWII memory in the popular national narrative. To substantiate this claim, I will further propose that both culture-specific ED pathologies and acclaimed films represent ciphered articulations of the psychically “indigestible” nature of this conflict. I will analyze selected films of acclaimed southern Italian directors: Ettore Scola’s La famiglia, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, Francesco Rosi’s Tre fratelli, and Mario Martone’s L’amore molesto. Each film is analyzed anasemically—that is, completely wthin the bounds of its auditory, visual, and cinematographic language—before connecting it to historical and social contexts.