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.
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: Podcasting