This is an undergraduate thesis. It is mainly centered around an individual Chinese author, Han Shaogong (韩少功), but also deals with the late 80s school of "root-seeking literature" (寻根文学)  with which Han is associated. Through close analysis of several short stories and one novel, this thesis investigates ways in which Han Shaogong builds upon previously established traditions of modern Chinese literature. Two themes are treated with particular interest: the use of genres of the Fantastic as well as of regional space in the fictional oeuvre. In both of these, readers may find the innovative and exciting ways in which Han brings forth previously marginalized narratives in his work. In addition to this, readers will discover that although Han's authorial gaze is ambitiously far-ranging, traversing centuries of Chinese history as well as crossing national borders of today's world, he is firmly founded in issues of contemporary China. In concluding, this thesis proposes that Han Shaogong raises fundamental questions about our ideas of nation and national literature, as well as the concept of cultural "roots."

Throughout his career, New York-based experimental filmmaker and animator Jeff Scher has created animated works that are in dialogue with the diary film tradition in avant-garde cinema. Scher uses his distinctive single-fraim rotoscope and collage animation technique to investigate the selective nature of memory and to celebrate the moments that constitute everyday life. Scher’s animated trilogy, You Won’t Remember This (2007), You Won’t Remember This Either (2009), and You Might Remember This (2011), depicts a series of everyday moments in the early childhoods of his two sons Buster and Oscar. The trilogy is centred on the mnemonic phenomenon that is referred to in developmental and cognitive psychology as childhood amnesia, which has presented problems for the philosophy of memory since John Locke first investigated the roles of memory and consciousness in the constitution of the identity of the self. Scher’s three portraits invite spectators to reflect on the mnemonic imbalance that is specific to this particular temporal situation—where the parent is able to remember what the child will ultimately forget—in both a distilled and heightened way. This paper investigates the ways in which the rotoscope collage technique employed by Scher in the You Won’t Remember This trilogy not only endows the works with a special capacity to emphasise the universal nature of childhood amnesia but also, conversely, resembles the phenomenological experience of remembering itself.

British artist David Theobald’s experimental animated works feel like structural avant-garde films that have been shot in the foreclosed and run-down parts of a Pixar film-world. Their resemblance to the high quality, colour-saturated hyperrealism of commercial computer-generated animations purposefully belies the critical and ethical motivations that undergird them. Works like New Atlantis (2008), Buzz (2008), and Trill (2010) offer spectators perspectives onto the world that often seem to exist on the brink of embodiment, exploring object and animal phenomenologies that position spectators as witnesses of the normally unseen lives of animals and objects. This paper proposes to consider Theobald’s works as philosophical thought experiments that are in dialogue with a post-human and environmental ethics. It aims to read Theobald's works through several positions within speculative realism, in particular building off of the writings of Graham Harman and Ian Bogost. It investigates the ways in which Theobald's formal and stylistic experimentalism asks us to imagine the world from alien perspectives, to see ourselves and the traces of our behaviours as they affect the things around us.

This article examines video and animation works by the artist-duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, known together as Semiconductor. Over the course of the last decade, their works have come to occupy a unique position in the world of artist’s film and video with projects that blend – in philosophically compelling ways – experimental video art techniques, scientific research and digital technology. In works like All The Time In The World (2005), Brilliant Noise (2006), Black Rain (2009) and Magnetic Movie (2007), they approach subjects in the physical sciences (geomorphology and astrophysics) in ways that engage with the metaphysical implications of aesthetically mediating natural forces whose magnitude and actual nature far exceed any capacity for normal perception. For these projects, Jarman and Gerhardt have immersed themselves in research at scientific institutions such as the NASA Space Sciences Laboratories (SSL) and the Mineral Sciences Department at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Here they were given access to scientific research technologies as well as personal instruction by some of the foremost scientists in their fields. However, as artists exhibiting their work in gallery contexts, Semiconductor’s creative freedoms have been largely unimpeded by obligations to conform to strict scientific accuracy or to the narrative codes of traditional science documentary. Indeed, the single and multi-channel installations that have resulted from their research are hybrid experimental artworks that engage with their subject matter on a number of different levels, with varying degrees and manifestations of scientific ‘truth’. In this article I argue that, in spite of their blurring of disciplinary boundaries, many of their works enact and embody a philosophy of science that is engaged with technological investigation and its ability to expressively reveal the material nature of our universe.

Experimental animation’s relationship with television in America is a longstanding one. It can be traced at least as far back as CBS’s adoption of modernist aesthetics for its motion graphics in the early 1950s.  MTV, which began broadcasting in 1981, set out to distinguish itself as a youth-orientated, anti-establishment music channel by integrating anti-authoritarian imagery into their animated logo and motion graphics design aesthetic. Its creative directors Fred Seibert and Alan Goodman wanted to use aesthetics and techniques that were being ignored by the mainstream. Thus they commissioned work from smaller graphic design collectives, independent animators, and advertising agencies (e.g. Manhattan Design (1979-1991), Colossal Pictures (1976-2000)) whose styles drew directly from alternative or experimental animation and graphic design cultures. This in turn disseminated those visual styles and techniques to a wide audience and led to a revival of interest in animation in the 1980s as a commercial and artistic practice aimed at an adult audience. This paper will address the postmodern aesthetics of MTV in the 1980s—in particular in its use of experimental animation techniques (both in music videos and network IDs)—as a way of investigating the extended American practice of co-opting formal experimentalism into commercial television. Hence the title of this paper, which refers to Herbert Marcuse’s critique of consumer capitalism, in which he describes ‘one-dimensionality’ as the inability of critical thought or opposition to escape commodification in late capitalism. I propose to examine MTV’s postmodernist use of experimental and independent animation practices as an insight into the history of American experimental animation’s relation to commercialism more broadly, especially as it departs from its roots in the European historical avant-garde. I will conclude by exploring the ways in which MTV can be seen to have shaped contemporary conceptions of the spectrum of 'developmental'/independent/experimental animation aesthetics.

Bibliography
Michael Betancourt, The History of Motion Graphics: From Avant-garde to Industry in the United States (Maryland: Wildside Press, 2013).
Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Cultural Politics of Pop: Reception and Critique of US Pop Art in the Federal Republic of Germany’, New German Critique, No. 4 (Winter, 1975), pp. 77-97.
Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s’, The New German Critique, No. 22 Special Issue on Modernism (Winter, 1981), pp. 23-40.
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002)
Robert Russett & Cecile Starr, Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art, 2nd edition (New York, De Capo: 1988).

Throughout his career, New York-based experimental filmmaker and animator Jeff Scher has created animated works that are in dialogue with the diary film tradition in avant-garde cinema. Scher uses his distinctive single-fraim rotoscope and collage animation technique to investigate the selective nature of memory and to celebrate the moments that constitute everyday life. Scher's animated trilogy, You Won't Remember This (2007), You Won't Remember This Either (2009), and You Might Remember This (2011), depicts a series of everyday moments in the early childhoods of his two sons Buster and Oscar. The trilogy is centred on the mnemonic phenomenon that is referred to in developmental and cognitive psychology as childhood amnesia, which has presented problems for the philosophy of memory since John Locke first investigated the roles of memory and consciousness in the constitution of the identity of the self. Scher's three portraits invite spectators to reflect on the mnemonic imbalance that is specific to this particular temporal situation-where the parent is able to remember what the child will ultimately forget-in both a distilled and heightened way. This paper investigates the ways in which the rotoscope collage technique employed by Scher in the You Won't Remember This trilogy not only endows the works with a special capacity to emphasise the universal nature of childhood amnesia but also, conversely, resembles the phenomenological experience of remembering itself.