scholarly journals Mickey’s Trailer and Environmental Thought: Disney Cartoons and Countryside

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-60
Author(s):  
Joe Goddard

The influence of popular cartoons on environmental cognition is explored in this essay through readings of Mickey’s Trailer, a 1938 cartoon directed by Ben Sharpsteen for Walt Disney. Other materials considered include Ford Motor Company’s 1937-38 film coproduced by Wilder Pictures, Glacier International Park, which promotes motor-tourism and automobile ownership, and Ben Sharpsteen’s other work for Walt Disney. The article also examines the ideas of physical and “illusional” zoning in the city, especially the way that they were applied in the mid-twentieth century. Physical zoning involved separating incompatible land uses, whereas illusional zoning entailed seeing what you wanted to see. What does Mickey’s Trailer say about how people can live, and can it inform where people choose to live? The essay muses that appreciations of nature and the environment are influenced by popular culture.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Piitz

This applied thesis is focused on the full cataloguing and contextualizing of a collection of one hundred and sixteen postcards at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) depicting scenes of Toronto a the beginning of the twentieth century. Twenty-seven publishers representing international, national and regional manufacturers are identified with their imprint on the verso of the postcard. The applied thesis includes a literature survey discussing a rationale for the cataloguing of postcards, as well as a brief overview of the history of postcards and the history of the urbanization of the City of Toronto. A description and analysis of the AGO postcards provides information about the production cycle of postcards, the scope of commercial photography and the dissemination of photographic imagery in Toronto. The thesis also examines the way images were altered in the production cycle and the manner in which photographers and publishers exchanged photographs intended for postcard production.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Piitz

This applied thesis is focused on the full cataloguing and contextualizing of a collection of one hundred and sixteen postcards at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) depicting scenes of Toronto a the beginning of the twentieth century. Twenty-seven publishers representing international, national and regional manufacturers are identified with their imprint on the verso of the postcard. The applied thesis includes a literature survey discussing a rationale for the cataloguing of postcards, as well as a brief overview of the history of postcards and the history of the urbanization of the City of Toronto. A description and analysis of the AGO postcards provides information about the production cycle of postcards, the scope of commercial photography and the dissemination of photographic imagery in Toronto. The thesis also examines the way images were altered in the production cycle and the manner in which photographers and publishers exchanged photographs intended for postcard production.


Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans

“The letterless canon” argues that Jewish literature from the mid-twentieth century onward is not restricted to fiction, poetry, and theater. The book as a tool for the dissemination of knowledge has undergone a metamorphosis. Along the way, the border between high-brow and popular culture has been erased. Comic strips like Superman and graphic novels can be viewed as literary artifacts. Indeed we should consider the work of Will Eisner (A Contract with God), Art Spiegelman (Maus), and Alison Bechdel (Fun House), each of whom offers different contributions. There is also the matter of stand-up comedy, film scripts, and television shows which examine, from a Jewish perspective, gender, racial, and class issues.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-311
Author(s):  
Ilja Nieuwland

THE DINOSAUR’S AMBIGUITY Sea snakes, Iguanodons and why Brussels did not receive its Diplodocus In the opening years of the twentieth century, the Scottish magnate Andrew Carnegie used the donation of plaster casts of the dinosaur Diplodocusas a means to influence European heads of state in favor of his scheme for conflict arbitration. This contribution examines the way in which these casts became a border object between the worlds of science, high and popular culture, and politics, by looking at the history of the public assimilation of dinosaurs. Specifically, it focuses on an earlier example of such donations: the Iguanodons which were given away by the Belgian state and the Belgian king Leopold II personally, after 1890. These developments collided when Carnegie’s donation of a Diplodocus was cancelled after Leopold’s reputation began to suffer when details of the Congolese genocide became known to the public. This illustrates that for Carnegie, despite the cultural and scientific appeal of his donations, politics remained at the center of his campaign.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Nohelani Teves

"Aloha" is at once the most significant and the most misunderstood word in the Indigenous Hawaiian lexicon. For Kānaka Maoli people, the concept of "aloha" is a representation and articulation of their identity, despite its misappropriation and commandeering by non-Native audiences in the form of things like the "hula girl" of popular culture. Considering the way aloha is embodied, performed, and interpreted in Native Hawaiian literature, music, plays, dance, drag performance, and even ghost tours from the twentieth century to the present, Stephanie Nohelani Teves shows that misunderstanding of the concept by non-Native audiences has not prevented the Kānaka Maoli from using it to create and empower community and articulate its distinct Indigenous meaning. While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity.


Author(s):  
Barbara Tepa Lupack

This chapter studies The Mysteries of Myra (1916). Although the Wharton brothers apparently abandoned some of the shorter pictures that they had been considering, early in the new year of 1916, they began preparations for The Mysteries of Myra. Pioneering in both subject and execution, The Mysteries of Myra aimed to avoid the hackneyed melodramatic lines of many early serials by offering instead what one contemporary reviewer called “a wonderful new theme that compels attention because of the puzzling thoughts regarding mental telepathy and spirits presented in a manner which follows authenticated scientific discoveries.” In other words, the serial purported to demonstrate the way that science had become powerful enough to “prove” the existence of the unscientific. Myra had other cultural reverberations as well. In addition to reflecting the unconventional “New Woman” type that had come into vogue in the 1910s, Myra Maynard was also emblematic of another early twentieth-century type in America popular culture: the adolescent girl as a liminal figure who, as she comes of age, uncannily mediates between the living and the dead. The scenario for the serial was written by Charles W. Goddard, a veteran of serial pictures who had scripted The Perils of Pauline and whose association with the Whartons dated back to their first Elaine serial production in 1914. On the Myra scripts, Goddard collaborated closely with American investigator of psychic phenomena Hereward Carrington, who supplied most of the occult story lines.


Author(s):  
Silvia Mazzetto

This paper presents some examples of architectural revivals created by a promising Venetian architect at the beginning of the twentieth century, in a marginal area of the city of Venice known as Rio del Gaffaro that was subjected to an intense phenomenon of redevelopment and urban development, following the construction of new road and rail links to the mainland. The original hypotheses for the evolution of the lagunar city, proposed by their author, use an innovative compositional syntax that becomes the thin line of division between traditionally antagonistic references such as classicism and modernism, or orientalism and localism, in some of the best examples of neo-medievalist revival in early 20th century Venice. In particular, the use of historical reference in the composition of the new architectural forms establishes an intense, but quiet and pacific dialogue between the ancient and the modern. In this comparison, all interruptions between past and present are removed, not only in the composition of the residential architectural cell but also in the formation of the new urban fabric into which it is inserted. This way of reinventing history was to open the way for many subsequent readings and interpretations by other Venetian architects. 


1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary G. Hamilton

This essay outlines research that has occupied much of my time for the past several years. It concerns regional associations in traditional China, or what is known as hui-kuan or tung-hsiang-hui. When I began this research, inspired in part by Ho Ping-ti's masterful survey (1966), I believed, as did Ho, that most of the stones on this particular field of knowledge had been turned.What remained to be done, it seemed to me, was to record the vicissitudes of these traditional associations in the modernizing atmosphere of early twentieth-century China. But the more I began to look into these associations—into the way they operated, what they implied about Chinese society, and how they seemed to put the countryside into the city—the less I felt I knew and the less I was satisfied with previous generalizations made about them.


2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA WILSON

AbstractSince 2000 a notable trend has emerged in the way in which Italian comic operas by composers from Donizetti to Puccini are staged. In British and American productions, such works are consistently updated to the mid-twentieth century, usually the 1950s. This article explores what such stagings – and their implied intertextual references to wider representations of the era in popular culture – can tell us about the reception of opera today and the ways in which opera is used to create romanticised notions of historical time. Specifically, the article considers the implications for Puccini historiography of updating Gianni Schicchi, an opera whose Renaissance setting might at first glance seem essential. Considering changing attitudes towards historicism from the nineteenth century to the present, the article proposes that ‘retro’ mid-twentieth-century stagings of Gianni Schicchi compel us to hear the opera itself in new ways and to rethink deeply ingrained assumptions about Puccini's place in music history.


Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Colin Pooley ◽  
Martin Emanuel ◽  
Tiina Männistö-Funk ◽  
Peter Norton

Abstract Walking is a neglected topic in the history of transport and mobility in cities. The four articles in this special section demonstrate the importance of travel on foot in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities in four different countries, and reveal the ways in which pedestrian mobility has persisted despite the development of a car-dominated society. Together they provide important new evidence on a neglected topic and hopefully pave the way for further research on this theme.


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