Hugh Manon
Associate Professor, Visual and Performing Arts
Department Chair, Visual and Performing Arts
Scholarly Interests
Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory; Film Noir; Gothic Horror; Glitch Art; George Romero, Tod Browning and Edgar G. Ulmer
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Professor Hugh Manon is a film scholar and cultural theorist whose work focuses on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. His research extends concepts such as anxiety, disavowal, and jouissance into the study of analog, digital, and hybrid forms of media. Manon's theorization of Glitch Art (co-authored with Daniel Temkin), which understands glitching as "a program's failure to fully fail upon encountering bad data," is among the most widely-cited articles on the subject. Similarly, Manon's concept of "rude aesthetics" works to reframe the disruptive semiotics of 1970s-80s punk music and subculture—a subject he has taught in several advanced courses. Punk media, he argues, deploys a characteristically postmodern form of "double deception" that defeats skepticism by bluntly admitting an ugly, real truth.
The film-historical center of Professor Manon's research is the classical phase of film noir, which he has explored in a long series of articles. Manon's work connects film noir to paracinematic media forms such as 1940s-50s "fact detective" magazines and radio programs of the era, as well as early television. His work situates noir culture in the context of other related genres—such as the gothic romance, the classical detective whodunit, the gangster film, and the police procedural—as a means of understanding the ideological fantasies about conspiratorial deception that pervade mid-century America.
Manon's publications and teaching have also examined the images and sounds of locality in cinema, most notably in his close reading of George Romero's seminal 1968 zombie film Night of the Living Dead, whose low-budget DIY approach ontologically links it to the Pittsburgh-area landscape in which it was filmed. In addition to his study of Romero, Manon has published a series of theory-informed analyses of films by cult auteurs such as Tod Browning, William Castle, Joseph H. Lewis, Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Altman, and David Lynch.
Professor Manon received a B.Sc. in Telecommunications from the Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University; an M.A. in English from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Ph.D. in Critical and Cultural Studies with Film Studies concentration from the University of Pittsburgh. He has been at Clark since 2010 and is a core faculty member in Media, Culture and the Arts, an interdisciplinary program that he co-founded with Professor Matt Malsky.
Manon currently serves as the Chair of the Department of Visual & Performing Arts. He enjoys co-hosting the RFU: Recommended For You podcast with Screen Studies professors Rox Samer and Soren Sorensen.
Courses Offered:
SCRN 101: Foundations of Screen Studies
SCRN 108: Intro to Screenwriting
SCRN 131: Film Noir and its Contexts
SCRN 140: Film Authors and Authorship
SCRN 222: Synth Cinema
SCRN 291: Capstone -- Punk Media: Power, Petulance and the Impossible
MCA 101: Introduction to the Theory, History & Analysis of Media
MCA 180: PodcastingDegrees
- Ph.D. in Cultural and Critical Studies, Film Studies emphasis, University of Pittsburgh, 2002
- M.A. in English, University of Pittsburgh, 1994
- B.S. in Telecommunications, Ohio University, 1990
Affiliated Department(s)
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Scholarly and Creative Works
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Elevation and Gaze
LACK Conference
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University of Vermont
April
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2023
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The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
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New Orleans, LA
April - May
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2022
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Vol. N/A
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Issue #N/A
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The Films of William Castle
Chapter: When Strangers Marry: Film Noir as Mediated GothicPublished by University of Edinburgh Press
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2018
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Lacan and the Nonhuman
Chapter: ASMR Mania, Trigger Chasing, and the Anxiety of Digital RepletionPublished by Palgrave
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2018
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A Field Guide to Imaginary Idiocy
Published in Intertexts
spring-fall
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2017
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Vol. 21
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Issue #1-2
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Published by University of Edinburgh Press
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2017
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Shadow, Blur, Glitch: The Gothic Route to Contemporary Digital Expressionism
American Comparative Literature Association
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Harvard University
March
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2016
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Cinematic Cuts: Theorizing Film Endings
Chapter: Resolution, Truncation, GlitchPublished by SUNY Press
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2016
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Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader
Chapter: Beyond the Beyond: CGI and the Anxiety of OverperfectionPublished by Palgrave
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2014
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Paranormal Activity and the Revenge of the Mulveyan Male Gaze
Published in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
April
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2013
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Vol. 18
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Issue #1
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The Films of Joseph H. Lewis
Chapter: Partition and Desire in the Films of Joseph H. LewisPublished by Wayne State University Press
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2012
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Notes on Glitch (co-authored with Daniel Temkin)
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2011
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Issue #6
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Published by University of Minnesota Press
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2011
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On Michael Haneke
Chapter: Comment ça rien?: Screening the Gaze in CachéPublished by Wayne State University Press
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2010
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Heading Off Satisfaction in Tough Guys Don't Dance
Published in The Mailer Review
October
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2009
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Vol. 3
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Issue #1
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The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer
Chapter: Fantasy and Failure in Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange IllusionPublished by Scarecrow Press
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2009
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Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row
Chapter: The Parametric Films Noirs of Edgar G. UlmerPublished by Lexington Books
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2008
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2008
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Issue #1
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X-Ray Visions: Radiography, Chiaroscuro, and the Fantasy of Unsuspicion in Film Noir
Published in Film Criticism
January
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2008
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Vol. 32
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Issue #2
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Published by McFarland
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2007
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Qui Perd Gagne: Failure and Cinematic Seduction
Published in International Journal of Žižek Studies
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2007
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Vol. 1
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Issue #3
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Published in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media
spring
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2006
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Vol. 47
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Issue #1
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Some Like it Cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity
Published in Cinema Journal
summer
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2005
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Vol. 44
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Issue #4
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Henry Hathaway’s Rawhide and the Hermetic Frontiers of Film Noir
Published in Film and History
fall
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2003
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Vol. 33
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Issue #2
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RFU: Recommended for You Podcast
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Awards & Grants
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Harrison Major Grant
Harrison Endowment Fund
Jan. 29, 2013 - Apr. 4, 2013
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Higgins Major Grant
Higgins School of Humanities
Nov. 30, 2011 - Feb. 7, 2012
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