Taylor Doctoralthesis Complete
21st Century Zombies: New Media, Cinema, and Performance By Joanne Marie Taylor A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Peter Glazer, Chair Professor Brandi Wilkins Catanese Professor Kristen Whissel Fall 2011 21st Century Zombies: New Media, Cinema, and Performance © 2011 by Joanne Marie Taylor Abstract 21st Century Zombies: New Media, Cinema, and Performance by Joanne Marie Taylor Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies and a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Peter Glazer, Chair This project began with a desire to define and articulate what I have termed cinematic performance, which itself emerged from an examination of how liveness, as a privileged performance studies concept, functions in the 21st century. Given the relative youth of the discipline, performance studies has remained steadfast in delimiting its objects as those that are live—shared air performance—and not bound by textuality; only recently has the discipline considered the mediated, but still solely within the circumscription of shared air performance. The cinema, as cultural object, permeates our lives—it is pervasive and ubiquitous—it sets the bar for quality acting, and shapes our expectations and ideologies. The cinema, and the cinematic text, is a complex performance whose individual components combine to produce a sum greater than the total of its parts. The cinema itself is a performance—not just the acting—participating in a cultural dialogue, continually reshaping and challenging notions of liveness, made more urgent with the ever-increasing use of digital technologies that seem to further segregate what is generally considered real performance from the final, constructed cinematic text.
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