Digital Commons Network^™

The Real Things: Photographing Scenes Of The 1960s, Nicholas Bromell

English Department Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Population 7 – Lyman Street Art Intervention, Carli Foster, Elizabeth Ann Englebreston, Eric Wojtowicz, Yiwei Huang

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

POPULATION 7 started as an experiment in the fall of 2011 as an Urban Art Laboratory “Art – Place – Tour” with the vision to make a tangible impact to the culture of public art in Springfield. At first sight art seems to be not existent in the public realm. We are searching for an organic, sustainable concept with the potential to grow from inside to outside. Our goal is to invite to a discussion about public art and art in general that is introduced through minimal but diverse, economical eventually temporary, site-responsive interventions. We see our art as personal …

The Role Of Prompts As Focus On Form On Uptake, Brian Bates Boisvert

Open Access Dissertations

Students are human beings; they, like all of us, make mistakes. In the language classroom, these mistakes may be written, spoken, and even thought. How, if, when, under what conditions and to what degree these errors are treated is of current concern in research regarding language acquisition. In their meta-analysis of interactional feedback, Mackey and Goo (2007) report that the utilization of feedback is beneficial and find evidence that feedback within the context of a focus on form environment is also facilitative of acquisition, echoing Norris and Ortega's (2000) positive findings regarding focus on form research. Thus, the role of …

Identity And The Limits Of Possibility, Sam Cowling

Open Access Dissertations

Possibilities divide into two kinds. Non-qualitative possibilities are distinguished by their connection to specific individuals. For example, the possibility that Napoleon is a novelist is non-qualitative, since it is a possibility for a specific individual, Napoleon. In contrast, the possibility that someone---anyone at all---is a novelist is a qualitative possibility, since it does not depend upon any specific individual. Haecceitism is a thesis about the relation between qualitative and non-qualitative possibilities. In one guise, it holds that some maximal possibilities---total ways the world could be---differ non-qualitatively without differing qualitatively. It would, for example, be only a haecceitistic difference that distinguishes …

"Whether Writers Themselves Have Been Changed": A Test Of The Values Driving Writing Center Work, Michelle Deal

Open Access Dissertations

This project questions a core value that writing center workers have long held about tutoring writing: that we change writers. Applying sociocognitive and Bakhtinian lenses, I was able to complicate theory-practice connections. Tutor-tutee negotiations during tutorials, tutees' perceived learning outcomes, and their revisions were compared with their reasons for revising so that I could investigate what tutees potentially learn from their tutors, how, and why. Data indicated if tutors' information/advice became, in Bakhtin's terms, internally persuasive to tutees. When the authoritative discourses tutors represent or endorse converge with students' internally persuasive discourses, they converge in students' revision choices as tutor-tutee …

Writing The Local-Global: An Ethnography Of Friction And Negotiation In An English-Using Indonesian Ph.D. Program, Amber Engelson

Open Access Dissertations

Suresh Canagarajah, John Trimbur, Bruce Horner, and others argue that U.S. scholars must begin imagining their academic institutions as part of larger global English conversations, which would involve expanding Western perceptions of "good writing" to allow for the cultural and ideological differences implied by the term "global." Horner and Trimbur, for instance, urge compositionists to take an "internationalist perspective" to writing instruction, to ask, "whose English and whose interests it serves" in relation to the "dynamics of globalization" (624). To better understand what it means to write internationally in English, I conducted ethnographic research at the Indonesian Consortium for Religious …

Translation In Vietnam And Vietnam In Translation: Language, Culture, And Identity, Loc Quoc Pham

Open Access Dissertations

This project engages a cultural studies approach to translation. I investigate different thematic issues, each of which underscores the underpinning force of cultural translation. Chapter 1 serves as a theoretical background to the entire work, in which I review the development of translation studies in the Anglo-American world and attempt to connect it to subject theory, cultural theory, and social critical theory. The main aim is to show how translation constitutes and mediates subject (re)formation and social justice. From the view of translation as constitutive of political and cultural processes, Chapter 2 tells the history of translation in Vietnam while …

Milton's Visionary Obedience, Timothy Irish Watt

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of the work of John Milton, most especially of his late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. The early poetry, the prose tracts, and Christian Doctrine are considered in their developmental relation to those late poems. The question my study addresses is this: What does Milton mean by obedience? The critical approach used to address the question is as much philosophical-theological as it is literary. My project seeks to understand the shaping role of Milton's theology on his poetry: that is, to attempt to recreate and understand Milton's thinking on …

Autosegmental Spreading In Optimality Theory, John J. Mccarthy

John J. McCarthy

Revised December 2009

This paper is a shorter (and probably better) version of "Harmony in Harmonic Serialism." Like its big brother, it argues that Harmonic Serialism answers the conundrum of how iterative autosegmental spreading is obtained in Optimality Theory.

Autosegmental Spreading In Optimality Theory, John J. Mccarthy

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

Revised December 2009

This paper is a shorter (and probably better) version of "Harmony in Harmonic Serialism." Like its big brother, it argues that Harmonic Serialism answers the conundrum of how iterative autosegmental spreading is obtained in Optimality Theory.

Brueckner And Fischer On The Evil Of Death, Fred Feldman

Fred Feldman

According to the Deprivation Approach, the evil of death is to be explained by the fact that death deprives us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had lived longer. But the Deprivation Approach confronts a problem first discussed by Lucretius. Late birth seems to deprive us of the goods we would have enjoyed if we had been born earlier. Yet no one is troubled by late birth. So it’s hard to see why we should be troubled by its temporal mirror image, early death. In a 1986 paper, Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer appealed to a …

The Transparent Mask: American Women's Satire 1900-1933, Julia Boissoneau Hans

Open Access Dissertations

An interdisciplinary study of women satirists of the Progressive and Jazz eras, the dissertation investigates the ways in which early modernist writers use the satiric mode either as an elitist mask or as a site of resistance, confronts the theoretical limitations that have marginalized women satirists in the academic arena, and points to the destabilizing, democratic potential inherent in satiric discourse. In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of signifying caricature, an exaggerated characterization that carries with it broad social, political, and cultural critique. Edith Wharton uses a signifying caricature in The Custom of the Country where the popular …

Practicas Escriturales Femeninas: Espacialidad E Identidad En Epistolas En La Colonia (Rio De La Plata, Siglos Xvi-Xvii), Yamile Silva

Open Access Dissertations

The importance of the letter as a means for social, personal and intellectual expression for humanists has been highlighted in various studies. For those studies, its value resides in its effectiveness in responding more directly to the presence of a new pool of readers giving rise to a new cultural type, transforming it into the emblematic genre of the humanists. I am interested in considering the influence of epistolary models in the New World, because, as these models were transferred to a new context, they acquired new forms that responded to the needs of communication, representation, symbolization and, finally, a …

The Hearst Museum Of Anthropology, The New Deal, And A Reassessment Of The ‘‘Dark Age’’ Of The Museum In The United States, Samuel Redman

Samuel Redman

This article examines the claim that the period between the dawn of the Great Depression and conclusion of the Second World War was a “dark age” for the discipline of anthropology in museums. It argues that while museums in the United States encountered numerous common challenges due to the economic downturn and outbreak of war, the period also presented a number of opportunities, especially through the arrival of labor through New Deal work-relief agencies. This article focuses on what is now known as the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The narrative of the …

Heritage Interpretation And Human Rights: Documenting Diversity, Expressing Identity, Or Establishing Universal Principles?, Neil A. Silberman

Neil A. Silberman

No abstract provided.

Proposed Greenway Of Hatfield, Massachusetts - La497c - Senior Studio, Matthew G. Bent, Henry A. Hess, Andre E. Belperron

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

This is one of five reports submitted for the LA497C Spring 2011 Senior Studio project.

This proposed greenway plan will be assessing the features of Hatfield such as, History, natural features, and open space within the town. After a thorough assessment of the towns features the report will cover the extensive proposed greenway plan, focusing mostly on the town center of Hatfield. The town center is the hub of the town where the major community buildings are such as the elementary and high schools, town hall, the town library, and most of the public recreation fields. Once the overall greenway …

Proposed Greenway Of Hatfield, Massachusetts - La497c - Senior Studio, Michael A. Brescia, Rachel L. Grigorian, Zachary M. Kingston, Carl M. Mccrae, James A. Rebello

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

This is one of five reports submitted for the LA497C Spring 2011 Senior Studio project.

The purpose of this report is to show the results of a partnership between the Town of Hatfield Massachusetts, and the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Massachusetts.

The Town of Hatfield initially approached the University for assistance in understanding the options available for Greenway development in Hatfield, while maintaining the charm and character the town is proud of.

In his ground-breaking book, Greenways for America, Author Charles Little (1990) provides a simple definition of a Greenway:

“A …

Pyrrhonian And Naturalistic Themes In The Final Writings Of Wittgenstein, Indrani Bhattacharjee

Open Access Dissertations

The following inquiry pursues two interlinked aims. The first is to understand Wittgenstein's idea of non-foundational certainty in the context of a reading of On Certainty that emphasizes its Pyrrhonian elements. The second is to read Wittgenstein's remarks on idealism/radical skepticism in On Certainty in parallel with the discussion of rule-following in Philosophical Investigations in order to demonstrate an underlying similarity of philosophical concerns and methods. I argue that for the later Wittgenstein, what is held certain in a given context of inquiry or action is a locally transcendental condition of the inquiry or action in question. In On Certainty, …

Justifying The Margins: Marginal Culture, Hybridity And The Polish Challenge In Fontane's Effi Briest, Zorana Gluscevic

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the interpretive framework from which Fontane's Effi Briest is commonly approached limits discussion to metropolitan core culture and fails to address Fontane's path-breaking accomplishment. After outlining limitations of some prominent approaches to Effi Briest in chapter one, my next four chapters explore alternative reading strategies that instead situate the novel in the imperial context of the new German state inflected by transnational relations and problematize the tendency to see Germany as a space territorially and culturally homogenized and stable. Chapter two reads the novel through Foucault's notion of heterotopia to demonstrate Fontane's heterotopic strategies as a …

The Writer And The Sentence: A Critical Grammar Pedagogy Valuing The Micro, Sarah Elizabeth Stanley

Open Access Dissertations

Lisa Delpit points out that when process pedagogues ignore grammar in their teaching of writing, they further the achievement gap between students of a variety of backgrounds. She then argues for a grammar/skills based pedagogy rather than process pedagogy in order to bridge the language differences students bring to the classroom. On the other hand, progressive-minded educators deeply question if skills pedagogy could ever transform unjust social conditions and relationships. Grammar pedagogy may potentially empower an individual's chance at social mobility, but what about the need for social change and respecting language diversity? Both sides of this important debate assume …

Con-Scripting The Masses: False Documents And Historical Revisionism In The Americas, Frans Weiser

Open Access Dissertations

Dominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less viable. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. These literary texts, or what I label "con-script," are not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematize their own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a …

James W. C. Pennington And Transatlantic Abolitionism, Manisha Sinha

Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

M.F.A. Thesis Quest, Or, I Went Into The Wilderness And I Found Alec Baldwin, Steven Snell

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

I went into the wilderness and I found Alec Baldwin. This is not a lie. It is also a title for a video installation and this thesis. In it, I investigate three separate adventure-performances, providing a theoretical context for their existence, meaning, and relationship as a form of artistic practice. I call this practice ‘adventure-art’, using the term to describe a performance-based action in which the artist publically explores his or her reality through some type of physical adventure, search, quest, or challenge. It is an attempt to engage oneself and others at both at the physical and mediated levels, …

Reptile House, Rosalyn H. Mclean

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

1900s-Carlsbad Caverns-Southwest- Fiction 2.Korean War, 1950’s-General Enlisted-Fiction 3. Skin disease-Insanity- Science Fiction.

Letters To Anyone, Michelle L. Dickson

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Letters to Anyone is written as a parallel text to the body of work I’ve created during my time in graduate school, culminating in the installation almost‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐release.

This thesis deals with my personal narrative as a way to understand the ideas and concepts that my work is derived from. Specific topics include memory, the body, time, process, space, and change.

The Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: A Lighting Artist's Approach, Jonathan D. Hicks

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

A reflection of the lighting artist’s approach for the lighting design of The Twenty-fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Department of Theater’s Fall 2010 production used as a research ground for the experimentation of lighting design through the cueing process.

Community Restoration: Reconciling The Legacy Of Contaminated Sites Within Our Communities, Kristofer H. Kennedy

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Separation, removal, and relocation are the initial steps in the “clean-up” of a contaminated site. While crucial to safeguarding the public health of adjacent communities and the surrounding environment, conventional remediation is subtractive from the community leaving many psychological wounds untreated. Architecture has the greatest potential to address the social concerns which contribute to the complexities of redeveloping a contaminated site.

Focusing on the 52 acre former General Electric Brownfield site in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, I have explored through design alternative approaches for the redevelopment of contaminated sites. My design research focuses on the ways in which architecture can be used …

Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography, Hari Stephen Kumar

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural …

Eugenothenics: The Literary Connection Between Domesticity And Eugenics, Caleb J. True

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This is an analysis of the connection between the domestic science and eugenics. While it is made clear by historians such as Megan Elias and Kathy Cooke that there is ample connection between eugenics and euthenics, there has not been as comprehensive an analysis of the direct connections between domestic science and eugenics. Close examination of literature from the domestic science movement reveals the shared goals of domestic science and eugenics. The domestic science movement was also a necessary precursor to the euthenics movement, not simply a “re-envisioning” of home economics by Ellen Richards. When Richards died, her euthenic ideals …

A Process Of Design: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Dennis R. Berfield Mr.

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

A collaborative process, when implemented for a theatrical production, not only reinforces a design team's ability to tell a story, it supports a artistically unified design that can be communicated easily to all members of a production team regardless of their production role. The information within this thesis is documentation of a collaborative process between the Scenic Designer and the production team for the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater's production of The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee by Rachel Sheinkin with music and lyrics by William Finn. Preliminary design images, model photographs, Autodesk AutoCAD design plates, …