Brian L Ott
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 259158 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Brian L Ott |
| NOMBRES | Brian L |
| APELLIDO | Ott |
| FIRMA | OTT B L |
| AFILIACIONES | Texas Tech University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7212-9511 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 103 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The Digital Mind
Technologies of communication condition human sense-making. They do so by creating the social environment we inhabit and extending their structural biases and logics through human use. As such, this essay inquires into the prevailing habits of mind in the digital era. Employing a media ecology of communication, I argue that digital computers and microprocessors are defined by three structural properties and, hence, underlying logics: digitization…
YouTube and the restructuring of play
Toy unboxing videos are a popular and lucrative form of children’s entertainment on YouTube. This essay undertakes a media (auto)poetics of these videos and their relationship to children’s play through an integrated analysis of technology (media ecology), text (rhetorical criticism) and participant experience (autoethnography). Based on this analysis, I argue that toy unboxing videos foster and promote a form of ‘play as advertising’ via three k…
The Twitter Presidency
DONALD TRUMP IS NOTHING IF NOT PREDICTABLE. No matter how singular the situation or how serious the stakes—from his public response to Russian interference in the 2016 election to his comments on the devastation in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria to his statements about impeachment—President Trump reliably obeys his worst impulses: narcissism, nastiness, and deception. So, even in the context of the COVID-19 global health pandemic, it was f…
The Twitter Presidency
The Twitter Presidency explores the rhetorical style of President Donald J. Trump, attending to both his general manner of speaking as well as to his preferred modality. Trump’s manner, the authors argue, reflects an aesthetics of white rage, and it is rooted in authoritarianism, narcissism, and demagoguery. His preferred modality of speaking, namely through Twitter, effectively channels and transmits the affective dimensions of white rage by tak…
The age of Twitter
This essay explores the changing character of public discourse in the Age of Twitter. Adopting the perspective of media ecology, the essay highlights how Twitter privileges discourse that is simple, impulsive, and uncivil. This effect is demonstrated through a case study of Donald J. Trump's Twitter feed. The essay concludes with a brief reflection on the end times: a post-truth, post-news, President Trump, Twitter-world.
Affect in Critical Studies
Affect has historically been conceptualized in one of two dominant ways. The first perspective, which has its roots in psychology and neuroscience, tends to view affect as an elemental state. This tradition is reflected in Silvan S. Tomkins’s theory of primary affects and Antonio Damasio’s theory of basic emotions. Recent extensions of this tradition include the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lisa Cartwright, and Teresa Brennan. The second perspe…
Super Columbine Massacre RPG
This essay offers a counter-reading of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a controversial video game about the infamous school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 in which players adopt the roles of the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebod. Focusing on the game's unique procedural rhetoric, we argue that SCMRPG! juxtaposes interactive, non-realistic violence-reflected in a campy nineties video game aesthetic-with photographic evidence, extant …
B arthes, R oland
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was among the most important French intellectuals of the postwar era. Through his scholarship on myth, semiology, the Text, and pleasure, he made significant contributions to the fields of literature, philosophy, communication, media studies, and cultural studies. Barthes's work was unified by a concern with writing ( écriture ), a concept whose suppleness he demonstrated both in theory and practice.
On the aesthetic production of atmospheres
Drawing upon Foucault's notion of biopower and Böhme's theory of atmospheres, we analyze The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (The CELL), a nonprofit institution in Denver, Colorado dedicated to preventing terrorism. Specifically, we argue that The CELL rhetorically induces visitors to submit to and actively participate in continuous surveillance by subjecting them to a strategic succession of atmospheres that affectively and emotively enl…
Videoland
The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in Postmodernity
This essay inquires into the pedagogical and political dimensions of art in the contemporary moment. Specifically, it seeks to reanimate Fredric Jameson's notion of "cognitive mapping," which he introduced as a response to the postmodern problem of representing the social totality. To that end, the essay begins by explicating the twin impulses of cognitive mapping. It, then, undertakes a sustained rhetorical analysis of Jens Lien's award-winning …
Neoliberal Capitalism, Globalization, and Lines of Flight
In this essay we resist claims that neoliberal capitalism is all-encompassing and inescapably flat by attending the materiality of a specific site of globalization: Denver's 16th Street Mall. Taking vector and velocity as critical terms that demand attention to materiality and temporality, we suggest that globalization is rough rather than flat. Using vector and velocity, our critical engagement with The Mall demonstrates complex interplays of gl…
(Re)Imagining the West
In 2009, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (WGWA), located within the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (BBHC) in Cody, Wyoming, was redesigned-its art rehung and its vision of the West reimagined. The newly designed gallery replaced the structuring principles of history, artist, and genre that had governed the previous layout and design of the gallery with a thematic structure that elicits a series of affective dissonances. In this essay, we argue…
Memory and the West
The research collected in this special issue demonstrates that memory is mobilized symbolically and materially, spatially and temporally. It is fully embodied and often works affectively
Unnecessary Roughness
This essay undertakes an analysis of ESPN's coverage of the 'Penn State sex abuse scandal' during the first week following the release of the November 2011 Grand Jury presentment, which indicted former Penn State college football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on 40 counts of criminal sexual abuse. Understanding ESPN's coverage-its particular framing of this story-is important and instructive, for it reveals how the news media shape public …
(Re)Writing Mary Sue
This essay undertakes a critical re-assessment of Mary Sue fan fiction—a popular genre of fan writing in which (typically) female authors insert themselves as primary characters into the universe of a beloved media text. Despite being denigrated by scholars and fans alike, this essay contends that Mary Sue fan fiction—as an instance of écriture féminine—challenges the patriarchal economy of writing. It does so by allowing women to write their own…
Cinema and Choric Connection
The rise of the new information technologies, and corresponding proliferation of signs, images, and information, has contributed to a growing sense of alienation and dislocation. For many, the contemporary moment is an unending and disorienting sea of sensory-symbolic excesses. Lost in Translation is a film addressed to these anxieties. Engaging the film as a sensual experience, we argue that Lost in Translation equips viewers to confront the fee…
Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns
Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is "the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world."Footnote 1 The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesth…
Places of Public Memory
"Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside accident memorials that line America's highways, memory and place have always been deeply interconnected. This book investigates the intersections of memory and place through nine original essays written by leadin…
It's Not TV
The Small Screen
The Small Screen
Television as Lover, Part II
This article seeks to demonstrate how to engage with television in an ecstatic mode. Toward that end, it undertakes an auto[erotic]ethnography of the author's television viewing practices. The conclusion reflects on the implications of viewing in this mode for the practice of criticism
Television as Lover, Part I
Treating television as a semiotic system, this article charts the various pleasure/meaning/identity configurations that are possible when audiences engage televisual texts. Reflecting on the uniquely postmodern character of television as a communication medium, it is argued that traditional hermeneutic and interpretive approaches to television such as artistic or ideological criticism should be accompanied by alternative approaches rooted in erot…
Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting
Museums, memorials, and other historic places are key sites in the construction of collective memory and national identity. The Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming is one such space of memory where the (pre)history of “America” and its native peoples is told. Based on the view of texts as experiential landscapes, it is argued that this museum works to absolve Anglo-visitors of the social guilt regarding Western conquest through a rhetoric of re…
Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns
Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is "the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world."Footnote 1 The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesth…
Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting
Museums, memorials, and other historic places are key sites in the construction of collective memory and national identity. The Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming is one such space of memory where the (pre)history of “America” and its native peoples is told. Based on the view of texts as experiential landscapes, it is argued that this museum works to absolve Anglo-visitors of the social guilt regarding Western conquest through a rhetoric of re…
Places of Public Memory
"Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside accident memorials that line America's highways, memory and place have always been deeply interconnected. This book investigates the intersections of memory and place through nine original essays written by leadin…
Affect in Critical Studies
Affect has historically been conceptualized in one of two dominant ways. The first perspective, which has its roots in psychology and neuroscience, tends to view affect as an elemental state. This tradition is reflected in Silvan S. Tomkins’s theory of primary affects and Antonio Damasio’s theory of basic emotions. Recent extensions of this tradition include the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lisa Cartwright, and Teresa Brennan. The second perspe…
(Re)locating pleasure in media studies
ab-stract, (n.) 1. a summary of points (as of a writing) usu. presented in skeletal form. (adj.) 1. difficult to understand: abstruse. (vt.) 1. dissociate, remove, separate. This essay concerns how language is, at once, structured (producing meaning) and infinite (destabilizing meaning). Both functions of language are tied to pleasure. Contemporary critical media studies, it is argued, has attacked the pleasure (plaisir) of language's structuring…
Television as Lover, Part I
Treating television as a semiotic system, this article charts the various pleasure/meaning/identity configurations that are possible when audiences engage televisual texts. Reflecting on the uniquely postmodern character of television as a communication medium, it is argued that traditional hermeneutic and interpretive approaches to television such as artistic or ideological criticism should be accompanied by alternative approaches rooted in erot…
On the aesthetic production of atmospheres
Drawing upon Foucault's notion of biopower and Böhme's theory of atmospheres, we analyze The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (The CELL), a nonprofit institution in Denver, Colorado dedicated to preventing terrorism. Specifically, we argue that The CELL rhetorically induces visitors to submit to and actively participate in continuous surveillance by subjecting them to a strategic succession of atmospheres that affectively and emotively enl…
I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” A Study in Postmodern Identity (Re)Construction
in Postmodern Identity (Re)Construction
Neoliberal Capitalism, Globalization, and Lines of Flight
In this essay we resist claims that neoliberal capitalism is all-encompassing and inescapably flat by attending the materiality of a specific site of globalization: Denver's 16th Street Mall. Taking vector and velocity as critical terms that demand attention to materiality and temporality, we suggest that globalization is rough rather than flat. Using vector and velocity, our critical engagement with The Mall demonstrates complex interplays of gl…
Television as Lover, Part II
This article seeks to demonstrate how to engage with television in an ecstatic mode. Toward that end, it undertakes an auto[erotic]ethnography of the author's television viewing practices. The conclusion reflects on the implications of viewing in this mode for the practice of criticism
Counter-Imagination as Interpretive Practice
This essay concerns the relationship between popular cinematic visions of the future and present day identity politics. We argue that despite its futuristic setting celebrating technological progress and multiculturalism. Luc Besson's 1997 film The Fifth Element constructs sexual and racial difference in a manner that privileges and naturalizes White heterosexual masculinity. The essay offers counter-imagination as an interpretive practice that d…
The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in Postmodernity
This essay inquires into the pedagogical and political dimensions of art in the contemporary moment. Specifically, it seeks to reanimate Fredric Jameson's notion of "cognitive mapping," which he introduced as a response to the postmodern problem of representing the social totality. To that end, the essay begins by explicating the twin impulses of cognitive mapping. It, then, undertakes a sustained rhetorical analysis of Jens Lien's award-winning …
(Re)Writing Mary Sue
This essay undertakes a critical re-assessment of Mary Sue fan fiction—a popular genre of fan writing in which (typically) female authors insert themselves as primary characters into the universe of a beloved media text. Despite being denigrated by scholars and fans alike, this essay contends that Mary Sue fan fiction—as an instance of écriture féminine—challenges the patriarchal economy of writing. It does so by allowing women to write their own…
The Twitter Presidency
DONALD TRUMP IS NOTHING IF NOT PREDICTABLE. No matter how singular the situation or how serious the stakes—from his public response to Russian interference in the 2016 election to his comments on the devastation in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria to his statements about impeachment—President Trump reliably obeys his worst impulses: narcissism, nastiness, and deception. So, even in the context of the COVID-19 global health pandemic, it was f…
Super Columbine Massacre RPG
This essay offers a counter-reading of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a controversial video game about the infamous school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 in which players adopt the roles of the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebod. Focusing on the game's unique procedural rhetoric, we argue that SCMRPG! juxtaposes interactive, non-realistic violence-reflected in a campy nineties video game aesthetic-with photographic evidence, extant …
(Re)Imagining the West
In 2009, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (WGWA), located within the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (BBHC) in Cody, Wyoming, was redesigned-its art rehung and its vision of the West reimagined. The newly designed gallery replaced the structuring principles of history, artist, and genre that had governed the previous layout and design of the gallery with a thematic structure that elicits a series of affective dissonances. In this essay, we argue…
Memory and the West
The research collected in this special issue demonstrates that memory is mobilized symbolically and materially, spatially and temporally. It is fully embodied and often works affectively
Unnecessary Roughness
This essay undertakes an analysis of ESPN's coverage of the 'Penn State sex abuse scandal' during the first week following the release of the November 2011 Grand Jury presentment, which indicted former Penn State college football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on 40 counts of criminal sexual abuse. Understanding ESPN's coverage-its particular framing of this story-is important and instructive, for it reveals how the news media shape public …
Memorializing the Holocaust
Half a century old. the Holocaust stili mocks the Idea of civilization and threatens our sense of ourselves as spiritual creatures. Its undiminished Impact on modern memory leaves wide open the unsettled and unsettling question of why this should be so. (1995; p.184) -Lawrence Langer
I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” A Study in Postmodern Identity (Re)Construction
in Postmodern Identity (Re)Construction
(Re)locating pleasure in media studies
ab-stract, (n.) 1. a summary of points (as of a writing) usu. presented in skeletal form. (adj.) 1. difficult to understand: abstruse. (vt.) 1. dissociate, remove, separate. This essay concerns how language is, at once, structured (producing meaning) and infinite (destabilizing meaning). Both functions of language are tied to pleasure. Contemporary critical media studies, it is argued, has attacked the pleasure (plaisir) of language's structuring…
Counter-Imagination as Interpretive Practice
This essay concerns the relationship between popular cinematic visions of the future and present day identity politics. We argue that despite its futuristic setting celebrating technological progress and multiculturalism. Luc Besson's 1997 film The Fifth Element constructs sexual and racial difference in a manner that privileges and naturalizes White heterosexual masculinity. The essay offers counter-imagination as an interpretive practice that d…
Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting
Museums, memorials, and other historic places are key sites in the construction of collective memory and national identity. The Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming is one such space of memory where the (pre)history of “America” and its native peoples is told. Based on the view of texts as experiential landscapes, it is argued that this museum works to absolve Anglo-visitors of the social guilt regarding Western conquest through a rhetoric of re…
The Small Screen
The Small Screen
Television as Lover, Part II
This article seeks to demonstrate how to engage with television in an ecstatic mode. Toward that end, it undertakes an auto[erotic]ethnography of the author's television viewing practices. The conclusion reflects on the implications of viewing in this mode for the practice of criticism
Television as Lover, Part I
Treating television as a semiotic system, this article charts the various pleasure/meaning/identity configurations that are possible when audiences engage televisual texts. Reflecting on the uniquely postmodern character of television as a communication medium, it is argued that traditional hermeneutic and interpretive approaches to television such as artistic or ideological criticism should be accompanied by alternative approaches rooted in erot…
It's Not TV
Places of Public Memory
"Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside accident memorials that line America's highways, memory and place have always been deeply interconnected. This book investigates the intersections of memory and place through nine original essays written by leadin…
(Re)Writing Mary Sue
This essay undertakes a critical re-assessment of Mary Sue fan fiction—a popular genre of fan writing in which (typically) female authors insert themselves as primary characters into the universe of a beloved media text. Despite being denigrated by scholars and fans alike, this essay contends that Mary Sue fan fiction—as an instance of écriture féminine—challenges the patriarchal economy of writing. It does so by allowing women to write their own…
Cinema and Choric Connection
The rise of the new information technologies, and corresponding proliferation of signs, images, and information, has contributed to a growing sense of alienation and dislocation. For many, the contemporary moment is an unending and disorienting sea of sensory-symbolic excesses. Lost in Translation is a film addressed to these anxieties. Engaging the film as a sensual experience, we argue that Lost in Translation equips viewers to confront the fee…
Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns
Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is "the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world."Footnote 1 The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesth…
Unnecessary Roughness
This essay undertakes an analysis of ESPN's coverage of the 'Penn State sex abuse scandal' during the first week following the release of the November 2011 Grand Jury presentment, which indicted former Penn State college football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on 40 counts of criminal sexual abuse. Understanding ESPN's coverage-its particular framing of this story-is important and instructive, for it reveals how the news media shape public …
The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in Postmodernity
This essay inquires into the pedagogical and political dimensions of art in the contemporary moment. Specifically, it seeks to reanimate Fredric Jameson's notion of "cognitive mapping," which he introduced as a response to the postmodern problem of representing the social totality. To that end, the essay begins by explicating the twin impulses of cognitive mapping. It, then, undertakes a sustained rhetorical analysis of Jens Lien's award-winning …
Neoliberal Capitalism, Globalization, and Lines of Flight
In this essay we resist claims that neoliberal capitalism is all-encompassing and inescapably flat by attending the materiality of a specific site of globalization: Denver's 16th Street Mall. Taking vector and velocity as critical terms that demand attention to materiality and temporality, we suggest that globalization is rough rather than flat. Using vector and velocity, our critical engagement with The Mall demonstrates complex interplays of gl…
(Re)Imagining the West
In 2009, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (WGWA), located within the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (BBHC) in Cody, Wyoming, was redesigned-its art rehung and its vision of the West reimagined. The newly designed gallery replaced the structuring principles of history, artist, and genre that had governed the previous layout and design of the gallery with a thematic structure that elicits a series of affective dissonances. In this essay, we argue…
Memory and the West
The research collected in this special issue demonstrates that memory is mobilized symbolically and materially, spatially and temporally. It is fully embodied and often works affectively
Videoland
B arthes, R oland
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was among the most important French intellectuals of the postwar era. Through his scholarship on myth, semiology, the Text, and pleasure, he made significant contributions to the fields of literature, philosophy, communication, media studies, and cultural studies. Barthes's work was unified by a concern with writing ( écriture ), a concept whose suppleness he demonstrated both in theory and practice.
On the aesthetic production of atmospheres
Drawing upon Foucault's notion of biopower and Böhme's theory of atmospheres, we analyze The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (The CELL), a nonprofit institution in Denver, Colorado dedicated to preventing terrorism. Specifically, we argue that The CELL rhetorically induces visitors to submit to and actively participate in continuous surveillance by subjecting them to a strategic succession of atmospheres that affectively and emotively enl…
The age of Twitter
This essay explores the changing character of public discourse in the Age of Twitter. Adopting the perspective of media ecology, the essay highlights how Twitter privileges discourse that is simple, impulsive, and uncivil. This effect is demonstrated through a case study of Donald J. Trump's Twitter feed. The essay concludes with a brief reflection on the end times: a post-truth, post-news, President Trump, Twitter-world.
Affect in Critical Studies
Affect has historically been conceptualized in one of two dominant ways. The first perspective, which has its roots in psychology and neuroscience, tends to view affect as an elemental state. This tradition is reflected in Silvan S. Tomkins’s theory of primary affects and Antonio Damasio’s theory of basic emotions. Recent extensions of this tradition include the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lisa Cartwright, and Teresa Brennan. The second perspe…
Super Columbine Massacre RPG
This essay offers a counter-reading of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a controversial video game about the infamous school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 in which players adopt the roles of the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebod. Focusing on the game's unique procedural rhetoric, we argue that SCMRPG! juxtaposes interactive, non-realistic violence-reflected in a campy nineties video game aesthetic-with photographic evidence, extant …
Sociology (19 obras) · Art (17 obras) · Political science (15 obras) · Literature (13 obras) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (13 obras) · Aesthetics (12 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras) · Media studies (11 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Law (9 obras)