Bradshaw Stanley Abstract. in This Thesis I View Th
Stanley 1 MA VCS Thesis Proposal Title: But We, To Whom The World Is Author: Bradshaw Stanley Abstract. In this thesis I view the animated children’s show Adventure Time as a 21st century “surrogate,” in the sense developed by performance theorist Joseph Roach, for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By viewing “surrogation,” reconstruction, and even re-enactment as occurring between two artworks rather than two artists, I outline a theory of desubstantialized “body-to-body transmission” that does not rely on “real” or substantial bodies for its support. I conclude by arguing that embodiment can be understood as a formal problem rather than one defined by organic function or phenomenological sensoria. Research Areas. Embodiment, Affect Theory, Formalism, Animation Theory, Performance Studies, American Studies, Childhood Studies, Queer Theory, Film Studies, New Media, Visual Studies, Critical Theory Agenda. Popularly acclaimed as “the trippiest show on television” (Rolling Stone), “groundbreaking…[and] ever more experimental” (AV Club), “sneakily sophisticated” (New York Times), and “dark, gripping and almost nightmarish” (Indiewire), Adventure Time may sound more like an HBO series than a Cartoon Network animated children’s program. Because such accolades are typically reserved for adult (not to mention live- action, "underground" or foreign) productions, it is unsurprising that Adventure Time has been used to satirize conservative cultural anxieties, as in a ChristWire article that, perhaps picking up on the show’s “trippiness” and eagerness to experiment, asks whether it is “a gateway drug to LSD, homosexuality, and the rave lifestyle.” Such satire indicates a bleed between the formal qualities of a work and the embodied responses its viewers, in this case young children, may have: being exposed to trippy and experimental work, the thinking goes, may incline one to seek out trips and experimentation in other contexts.
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