Meggie Macdonald

• British Association of American Studies conference - paper proposal accepted for presentation, unable to attend.

PROPOSAL:  Extreme violence in American culture has been international news for several years now and, among the media blamed for tragedies like Columbine, film figures prominently.  And yet, despite the propensity of cliched and stereotypical ‘crash and burn’ films from the 1980s and 1990s, the darkest kinds of violent American films have emerged since 9/11 and Columbine.  Vigilante protagonists in American cinematic heroes have found a new level of macabre, swaying closer and closer into the new genre of ‘torture porn’, exemplified by the Saw francise.  The anti-hero, however, is neither a new development in American film nor in any other American literary tradition.  At the same time, the recent evolution from the dissociated or disenfranchised anti-hero to the destructive and pyschopathic vigilante is a unique change. 

I will examine three films that demonstrate this new vigilante-ism:  The Brave One starring Jodie Foster; Eastern Promises starring Viggo Mortensen; and the Bourne trilogy starring Matt Damon.  My objective is to identify several disturbing elements within these films that encourage the debate on media-induced violence, but also to reconcile the objectives of these films with American culture in the twenty-first century.  Film as a medium for social discourse is forever mutable and dependent only upon what the filmmaker and the artists believe to be possible within it.  Violence as a cinematic device demands recognition and interpretation as objectively as possible to establish trends, styles, and cultural icons that will influence Americana internationally throughout the century.

• Project on Ancient Cultural Engagement – publication of bibliographical sketches for website, Steve Mason, Director – three sketches on the interpretation of Polybius and his Histories of the Second Punic War

This was included as an element of graduate work, to be able to complete short but highly effective summary abstracts of dense academic material for a professional website devoted to research on the Judaean-Roman War of 65-73 BC/CE and the primary source material available for the ancient world, namely the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and the Greek statesman Polybius.

• The Noble Gladiator – paper presented at the 2007 University of Toronto graduate conference “After the Fall:  Sex, Gender, and Power”

This paper examined the stereotype that gladiators were nothing but brutish monsters, intent on maximizing violence for a Roman audience.  Instead, it was argued that the gladiator provided a more sublime socio-cultural experience for the Roman audience, portraying virtus – the Roman ideal of masculine virtue – without being restricted by their social position in Rome.  The gladiator acted as a cultural tool for Roman society to reexamine its beliefs and ideals of virtue in an intangible way.

• The Amphitheatre Sublime – major research paper for 2008 Master of Arts degree from York University

A summary of our tutor’s major research project for her Master of Arts degree, outlining the argument that gladiatorial representation in Roman domestic space acted as a visual artistic discussion on the nature of Roman virtus.  The major elements discussed were the Nennig floor mosaics, the gladiator mosaics in modern Libya, the bath mosaics on Kos in Greece, and the mosaics at the Bignor villa in Britain.