Browsing by Author "Greene, Justin R."

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    Auteurist Socio-Cultural Critique: Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight as Historical Present
    Greene, Justin R. (2017)
    Twenty-four years and eight films into his career, differing arrays of people are still drawn to Quentin Tarantino and his films. When viewers encounter “written and directed by Quentin Tarantino,” there are certain expectations that accompany these words. In his classic essay “What Is an Author?,” Michel Foucault claims “that an author’s name is not simply an element in a discourse (capable of being either subject or object, of being replaced by a pronoun and the like); it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function” (107). Following Foucault’s thinking, I associate Tarantino’s name with a particular style or mode of filmmaking, because audiences, no matter the racial or gendered dynamics, have granted Tarantino the opportunity to explore his representation of America. Most recently, by immersing a predominantly white male American audience in his depictions of United States society and culture, Tarantino’s films confront white America’s perceptions and epistemologies of American history. Tarantino’s America is violent, seedy, and vulgar. His films take mainstream, white mainstream audiences into a world vastly different from their own comfortable spaces, through his use of traditionally unrelateable characters...
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    Bloody Men: Masculine Violence in the Filmic Worlds of Quentin Tarantino
    Greene, Justin R. (2021-04)
    Nine films into a supposed ten film oeuvre, Quentin Tarantino has clearly established himself as a contemporary auteur in not only the U.S. but also throughout the world. Each rumor of a new Tarantino project elicits wild speculation about the narrative, the castings, and the release date. Fans and film critics alike seek out any piece of evidence that will develop the picture around Tarantino’s vision. His vision is purposeful, and he intends to craft films that reflect his interests, his ideologies, and his engagement with the larger discourses of society and culture. In a 2014 interview conducted by his friend and fellow director Richard Rodriguez, Tarantino defines the way he perceives his filmography: “A filmography is not a hit-or-miss thing. You have a vision. You have a voice. And each new film is your new conversation” (Tarantino, “Quentin Tarantino 2014 Interview…”). The authorial voice and the artist’s interaction with the world emerge as controlling ideas for Tarantino. In essence, his identity is built through his filmic art...
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    Digitizing the Intersections: Roxane Gay's Online Performance of Authorial Identity
    Greene, Justin R. (2019)
    As she has moved into literary celebrity status, Roxane Gay has developed into a central figure in the continued fight for equality. Her authorial identity is firmly entrenched in the intersections of literary culture, race, gender, and technology, which allows Gay to criticize and navigate the historical restrictions placed on women and people of color. However, Gay’s emergence as a digital author places her within the battle between print and digital culture. This paper illuminates how Gay uses her digital presences to perform an intersectional authorial identity. Through this mediated performance, Gay destabilizes literary tradition, not only through her validation as a serious author of difference, but also as an avid proponent for digital authorship.
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    Dressing up the author: Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace branding their masculine authorial identities through fashion
    Greene, Justin R. (Intellect, 2020-10-01)
    This article explores the use of clothes and other accessories as markers of masculine authorial identity. Fashion and literature are contentious partners, with literature attempting to keep a firm distance from the popular trappings of the fashion world. However, writers have historically used fashion to create their identities beyond the printed word. This can be seen in examples such as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain and the ways clothing items have become associated with their personae as men of letters. Contemporary writers are no different, yet many continue to exude ambivalence towards clothing having any effect on their images in the literary sphere. Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace are two examples of writers who downplay fashion’s role in their public images. Franzen and Wallace establish their positions at the forefront of American literature not only with their fiction and non-fiction works but also in the ways they adorn their bodies and present them within visual media. Nevertheless, both Franzen and Wallace perform as specific types of masculine authors through their fashion choices. Ultimately, they use fashion to brand their authorial identities in accordance with their literary output. Franzen’s and Wallace’s willing participation in the stylization of their images to meet the masculine standards of authorial identity reveals the preva-lence of gendered stereotypes regarding how authors should be represented within popular culture.
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    Tweeting the Author: Tao Lin’s Performance of Authorial Identity on Twitter
    Greene, Justin R. (Ghent University, 2018)
    This article takes a closer look at how the American author Tao Lin uses Twitter to perform his authorial identity. Twitter serves as a primary platform for Lin to shape and reshape the public images of him as an author. Lin’s Twitter presence operates as 140-character bursts of authorial self-presentation. The tweets he chooses to post combined with his views on Twitter as a presentational platform show that Lin is conscious of his identity performance, especially online. With this knowledge, he uses the language of Twitter to enact his authorial identity and influence the representations that circulate in the literary world, but he fell short because of the dominant role print media play in images of authorship. To counteract this and gain cultural legitimacy for his online identity in the literary world, Lin resorts to remediating his Twitter profiles into a fetishized print book. Lin’s coquettish relationship with Twitter shows his audience that the platform is more than a place to generate attention for oneself; it is a site for the continual reshaping of identity on a mass scale.