Thesis Theater Recording
Event Announcement
Join us on Friday, July 19, at 10:30 am for a Thesis Theater with Stephen Wiseheart, who will present his MA thesis on “Textual Raiders: Fan Remediation and Indiana Jones’ Grail Diary.” Stephen will be joined by Dr. Maggie Parke, who will facilitate the discussion.
Abstract
“Textual Raiders: Fan Remediation and Indiana Jones’ Grail Diary” examines the ways in which fan communities interact with popular culture texts. Following both Henry Jenkins, who depicted fan remediation as textual poaching, and Kurt Lancaster who portrays the fan as textual performer, this thesis follows prop replication as a means of textual performance while acknowledging that performance involves a fan’s appropriation of a popular culture text to create their own artistic product that is both an original work of art and a part of a larger intertextual web of texts, in a way not dissimilar to the intertextuality of medieval literature. The case study of this thesis is the Grail Diary prop from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the fandom of which was created in the early 1990s during the rise of internet fan communities and VHS tapes, which changed the way fans interacted with texts, technology, and one another in a unique way.
About the Presenter
Stephen Wiseheart graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from Huntington University. Taking a cue from C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, his studies as Signum University have focused on Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Literature. Stephen currently works as a librarian at the Floyd County Library in Indiana where he specializes in youth programming, which includes everything from bird watching talks to dinosaur escape rooms to Shakespearian murder mysteries. He also does volunteer programming with the Indiana State Parks.
