2026-09-20T01:05:40Zhttps://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/oai/requestoai:ecommons.cornell.edu:1813/1159262026-05-15T19:44:56Zcom_1813_35col_1813_47
Harlan-Gran, Kathryn
McCullough, Mary
Brady, Mary
Levine, Caroline
2024-11-05T19:46:27Z
2024-05
ProQuest Submission ID: 14261
ProQuest Publication ID: 31242122
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/115926
https://doi.org/10.7298/1dss-rn41
16575594
258 pages
“Pop Potentiality” was born out of a passion for the multitudinous and ever-increasing ways that I get to enjoy stories in my everyday life. My dissertation turns a critical eye to various popular media forms and speculative genres to examine how new and rapidly evolving narrative modes circulate concepts about power and relationality in the American cultural consciousness. The creators I include in "Pop Potentiality" leverage their position in the cultural zeitgeist, exploring the affordances of emerging forms and taking advantage of genre tropes to critique oppressive power structures rooted in white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. I argue that these works offer alternate networks of relation, such as queer sociality, fictive kinship, and collaborative imagining, which are central to denaturalizing and refiguring such oppressive structures. I have chosen to emphasize speculative fiction, in particular, because of the genre’s thematic and material investments in possibilities, alternatives, and transformation. Such investments are especially evident in the work of writers from marginalized backgrounds, as they imaginatively invest in their own cultural legacies to construct futures that might otherwise seem foreclosed upon. My work includes narrative and formal analysis of novels, short stories, film, collaboratively-authored digital fiction, tabletop roleplaying games, and video games. In the course of these analyses, my writing interfaces with various fields of scholarship, including genre studies, film and media studies, affect theory, critical race theory, gender studies, and queer theory.
2026-06-17
en
American Literature
Critical Race Theory
Film and Media Studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Popular Culture
Speculative Fiction
Pop Potentiality: Renegotiating Networks of Power and Relation Through Contemporary Speculative Fiction
dissertation or thesis
https://newcatalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/16575594
application/pdf
English Language and Literature
Cornell University
Doctor of Philosophy
Ph. D., English Language and Literature
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/59810.2
Publication
Cornell Theses and Dissertations
Harlan-Gran, Kathryn
5893a6ea-7af3-41d7-abc6-04bcd26ab5df
embargo
embargo
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