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The Good Italian, The Bad German, And The Survivor: Narratives And Counter-Narratives Of The Shoah In Italy, John Barruzza

Dissertations - ALL

The study herein explores the history and memory of the Shoah in Italy through the eyes, primarily, of survivors themselves. Pairing witness testimonies (memoirs and oral interviews) with government records, I show how Italy’s Jewish survivors, for many decades after World War II and the Shoah, continued to invoke the national myths of the ‘good Italian’ and the ‘bad German’ in their recollections, despite their frequent persecution at Italian hands. This tendency, I argue, stems from their past experiences of acceptance and integration in Italy after national unification and emancipation, experiences which extended to foreign Jews residing in Italy, as …

A Genealogy Of Victimhood: Empathy And Memory In Recent German Fiction, Catherine E. Mcnally

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses literary representations of empathy and altruism in Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen, Ging, Gegangen and Bodo Kirchhoff’s 2016 novel Widerfahrnis. These novels demonstrate continuities and discontinuities between German literature of the postwar, reunification and contemporary contexts.Analyzing expressions of empathy by Erpenbeck and Kirchhoff’s protagonists, I locate them in historical and literary contexts, the roots of which can be traced to the first generation of postwar German literature (1945-1968), particularly Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. In both Grass and Böll’s early postwar fiction, German experiences of the war and its aftermath are foregrounded, and focus is placed …

Music Therapy: Revitalizing Alzheimer's Disease Patients, Natalie Villalobos

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper explains the different benefits that music therapy has on patients with Alzheimer's disease. It will briefly explain what Alzheimer’s disease is: the causes, some of the symptoms, and the effects it may have. Also, the paper will explore the impact music has on the brain in regards to affecting a specific area, its connection to memory, and to emotions. Although Alzheimer’s does not have a cure, research has shown that music therapy does decrease the rate at which it grows. By looking at results from different research studies, a better understanding of what treatment or a specific session …

This Is What Makes Us Girls: Recovering The Feminine Voice In Nabokov's Lolita, Amanda Wulforst

English Theses

Sigmund Freud established psychoanalysis as an attempt to uncover the inner mechanics of the human mind and treat mental neuroses. With this theory, Freud asserts that intrapsychic tensions between the conscious and unconscious can produce psychological issues. For instance, Freud addresses two types of emotional responses to loss in “Mourning and Melancholia.” In this essay, Freud states that mourning is a normal, conscious reaction to the libido’s forced detachment from a loved object. Conversely, Freud classifies melancholia as the extreme anguish over a lost ideal deeply buried in the unconscious; without an object-cathexis, the newly freed libido forms an identification …

Still, Unfolding, Ramolen Mencero Laruan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Together with my Master of Fine Art thesis exhibition, still, unfolding, at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto, Ontario), this dossier constitutes the following accompanying components: a comprehensive artist statement, documented artwork, an interview with artist Erika DeFreitas, and a curriculum vitae. These components contextualize my subject-position, and outline theoretical research, motivations, and reflections that drive my work. I expand on the diasporic experience, politics of knowledge, and the autobiographical genre as they are linked methodologies in the retrieval of immigrant histories. The fusion of autobiography and fiction becomes a hopeful approach in challenging forgotten or omitted history and confronts the expectations …

Memory And Stereotypes For Lesbian/Gay Characters, Amber Rose Williams

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Stereotype-consistency bias refers to the idea that people tend to remember stereotypical information about others better than non-stereotypical information (Fyock & Stangor, 1994). Limited research has examined how people may use stereotype-consistency bias when recalling information about LGBT characters in narratives (Bellezza & Bower, 1981; Clark & Woll, 1981; McGann & Goodwin, 2007; Snyder & Uranowitz, 1978). This line of research suggests that, instead of genuinely remembering stereotypical information better, participants tended to guess stereotypical answers to questions they do not know. In contrast to those studies, the experiment I conducted for this thesis suggests that heterosexual young adults tend …

The Confederate Triumvirate: Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, And The Making Of The Lost Cause, 1863-1940, Aaron Lewis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While numerous historians have studied and written about the lives and deeds of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis, fewer have conducted analyses of these three individuals’ popular memories. This study considers how the memory of these three Confederate leaders formed the foundation of the Lost Cause. From 1863 through the 1940s, white southerners held each of these three men in high esteem, proclaiming them as heroes to the dead Confederate ideology. Orators and writers who built the Lost Cause in South consistently utilized their memories to argue in favor of the righteousness of the Confederate cause and …

Recurring Scream: Trauma In Wes Craven's Slasher, Ben Muntananuchat

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates trauma representation in the horror film trilogy Scream, by director Wes Craven and based on the story and characters by screenwriter Kevin Williamson. The franchise is a satirical body of work that uproots the formulaic narrative aspects of the slasher film subgenre, of which it belongs to. Craven and Williamson’s method of critiquing the subgenre employs the usage of its cinematic tropes, though elevating them to a level of postmodern parody. I analyze traumatic representation within the franchise’s layers of mediation and postmodern narrative elements, which are often highlighted in academic discussion. The trauma observed revolves around …

Blood On The Floor: Public Memory, Myth, And Material Culture In American Historic House Museums, Alyssa B. Caltabiano

Theses and Dissertations

This research examines the historic narratives of the Hancock House Historic Site, The Jennie Wade House Museum, and the Shriver House Museum, analyzing the historical accuracy of each. Each site has used historic human bloodstains and other elements of material culture, authentic and fabricated, to facilitate and support their historic narratives. The traditional Hancock House narrative, as well as the current Jennie Wade House narrative, are each sensationalized and riddled with myth and legend. The Shriver House represents a well-researched and interpreted narrative, that tastefully uses historic human bloodstains as an element of their interpretation. The evolution of each site …

Crossing The "Great Gulf": Narration, Nostalgia, And "Contraband Memory" In Edith Nesbit's The Story Of The Treasure Seekers, Lauren Poet Brown

Theses and Dissertations

During the nineteenth-century “Golden Age” of children’s literature, many British writers conceptualized childhood through the lens of restorative nostalgia, writing books that attempted to re-create an idealized version of childhood that never actually existed. This has led critics of children’s literature from this era to characterize many Victorian authors’ depictions of childhood as a fictionalized adult product that serves to colonize child readers, interpellating them into adult narratives and ideologies. Edith Nesbit was well aware of this tendency, and in The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), she attempts to subvert it with her child narrator, Oswald Bastable. With Oswald, …

Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, Jane Sullivan’s Storytime: Growing up with Books, and Margaret Mackey’s One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography to investigate how memoirists recall events and reread stories from childhood. I argue that memoirs of childhood reading or bibliomemoirs temporarily fuse childhood and adulthood through the act of rereading, which produces emotional responses, and writing a memoir. By rereading childhood stories, memoirists identify with their child self and express feelings comparable to those they felt upon first reading. In bibliomemoirs, passive and active reading create what I describe as a …

, Nevertheless,, Ji Yoon Chung

Masters Theses

Derived from transitions, my artistic practice is an act of condolence for the transient presence that takes time and indulges every process as an acceptance of loss.

Over the years, I have moved between distinctive regions and cultures, only to be disoriented by mementos that are residues of a seemingly in- accessible past. What remains is to witness the vanished moments that evoke associated memories. I tend to solidify the volatile condition of transition by carving a temporary fragment on a permanent surface to make the ephemeral, eternal. The attempt to preserve a transitory phenomenon through archives by utilizing digital …

Finding Identity In Memories, Hyejun Youn

Masters Theses

What are the ways in which we form and build our identities and habits in both physical and digital spaces? How can our different uses of the digital expression which evolved from analog forms reveal traits and memories that we have forgotten or overlooked?

The way I define my identity through the analog media I collect correlates with the quality of the memories within my current schema, knowledge structures that represent typical instances of categories.

We interact with an infinity of objects from birth to death. Our collection of objects resonates more and more with memory and nostalgia as the …

Bundles And Blanks And Binds And Bends, Steven Kaplan-Pistiner

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how objects we make offer us a chance at maintaining what makes us human.

This Side Of The Air, Madeline Peckenpaugh

Masters Theses

In my thesis, I have chosen to present a collection of stories throughout my life that continue to impact my practice, along with journal entries, gathered notes, and small to large conversations I've had with my peers, parents, visiting artists, and professors. These collection of stories take place in Wisconsin, Philadelphia, and Nepal, ranging in small moments to a span of seven years. I've been writing down words and clues that could lead me to find the thesis-worthy definition of my work and practice. As if someone or something else other than myself holds the knowledge I'm incapable of locating. …

Make Yourself At Home, Han Seok You

Masters Theses

“Make Yourself at Home” is a personal journey of self-documentation to discover a definition of “home” and family, and to reenact the missing scenes from my youth. As a child who grew up in many different places far away from home, I missed out on many family moments and a sense of belonging. As a South Korean passport holder who has lived mostly in North America, my identity is unresolved. I find myself in the balance between Korean and American. With the progression of this project, I try to reconcile my past in order to gain an understanding of my …

Slice Of Life : Theater Of The Dinner Table, Kate Pincus-Whitney

Masters Theses

Through re-imagining the radical emotional, psychological, political, poetic, and story telling power of food, I use the theater of life to set the stage of the table. Conjuring discussion with Chronos and Kairos, the meal is placed within the liminal; where all bodies are simultaneously present and absent. The painting is as much about life as they are about death. Investigating contemporary life and myth making, I explore the mapping of culture through the objects we consume. I view the tablescape as a place of narrative portraiture. Sometimes the table acts as a shrine, other times a commons or a …

Ancient Hyper Present, Sophie Loloi

Masters Theses

My practice, especially this virtual garden, is a collage made of media, images, and virtual space across different eras and time signatures. Graphic design can exist in a gallery, on the screen, inside headsets or in the streets. Like a lucid dream, it can be disorienting as it opens up to a more-than physical ground of experience; within the virtual, within shared memory. This reflective practice arises as a form of “anachronism.” Before I could arrive at my transdisciplinary practice that considers experiences of exile and diaspora, I had to grapple with a singular question: what does it mean to …

Father Figures, Chris Regner

Masters Theses

I work serially, using autobiography as a jumping-off point for satire, humiliation, and explorations of the grotesque. My paintings tackle a variety of topics, including religious and cultish indoctrination, the use of technology and its effect on societal discourse, and stereotypical notions of masculinity that find their way into every subject I explore. Using my personal experiences as a foundation, my paintings have questioned archetypes found within these themes, all the while challenging my own values and beliefs. I position myself as an anti-proselytizer, complicating the easy answer and presenting morally questionable individuals with the intent of causing contradictory interpretations …

Wrung From Grave Architectures, Megan Solis

Masters Theses

Found or imagined findings... notes, diary entries, texts, prayers and poems

Disasters are avenues to gain intimacy glory is the constant

What is the skeleton made of, if not to be filled with meat to be piled and molded to bring back life.

pain and memory to be grave architectures, the stuctures that fall,

a plea for humanity: “Am I just a phantom waiting to be ripped from shady ground?”

desperate melancholy we realize that she is

I am

you are

tragic.

guilt to perform, to retraumatize is a punishment and is masochistic. to violently reenact, like haunted ghosts, to …

Film And The Culture Of Memory In Argentina, Theresa Jo Thomas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project examines the culture of memory in modern-day Argentina in the context of the last civic-military dictatorship that took place between 1976 and 1983. Argentina is a country with a long history of filmmaking, a tradition that was suddenly interrupted during the long and dark seven years of military rule. Since the arrival of democracy in 1983, however, filmmakers have explored the trauma created by this period and have created a significant record of films that deal with loss, memory, and trauma. This thesis analyzes several films produced between the return of democratic rule and present-day Argentina in order …

An American Ambulance Driver In France During The Great War: The Lasting Memory And Relationship Between Harry N. Deyo, The Men Of Section 591, And French Civilians, Melanie S. Gaumond

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the experiences of Harry N. Deyo, a graduate of the University of Michigan, who volunteered to serve in the United States Army Ambulance Service in France during the Great War. The friendship between Deyo and the drivers of Section 591 lasted throughout his lifetime. These friendships were important to his life; they were a way to share common bonds and to remember the war in the context of camaraderie and affection between themselves and the French civilians who cared for them. The role of rural French civilians and the relationships formed with the American ambulance drivers is …

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

Unraveling Memory Through Childhood Relics, Franchesca Rousseas

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

The formation of memory is a universal experience that occurs at an individual level. Memory is intangible and abstract, but it can be tied to physical objects such as photographs. These objects may remain the same throughout the course of our lives, but our memories are subject to change. Information is inevitably lost or altered over time, as our minds are more pliable than they are rigid. These alterations result in the desire to reconstruct and reinterpret past events given the information that is still accessible. Focusing on objects of domesticity that trigger childhood memories, I reveal how the act …

Interaction Design For Retention., Susan H. Pallmann

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

UI/UX design, or interaction design, is still relatively new as a discipline and has not been well-studied. Interaction design is typically geared towards facilitating ease of use of technology for the person using it, also called the user. However, interaction design and digital media in general have great potential to impact emotion, action, and retention of information. This creative thesis develops several design principles that govern a resulting conceptual website and the design process behind it. The website brings the user interactively through a narrative and aims to make an otherwise unremarkable story more memorable. Although empirical data was not …

Public History As Social Justice: How Japanese Americans Won Redress With The Help Of History Packaged For The Public., Sara N. Ulanoski

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

In 1942, the United States government imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese Americans—most of them citizens—in concentration camps for the duration of World War II. After the camps disbanded in 1946, many Japanese Americans struggled to put their lives back together. Still suffering from their Internment trauma, they chose not to speak about their experiences. The American public memory preserved a version of Internment history that encouraged racist stereotypes and neglected the Japanese American perspective. Through the use of public history—in the form of campaigns, pilgrimages, and exhibits—Japanese Americans changed the way Americans remembered the history of Internment and earned Redress for …

I Hear You Now, I See You Then, Quinn Hunter

Art + Design Masters Theses

In the research driven project I Hear You Now, I See You Then, I refer to the contemporary and historical erasure of the labor of African American women using research gathered from the southern plantation economy to create an art installation. The objects in this installation are primarily made with artificial hair integrations and utilizing labor intensive methods that are similar to those used to install the hair on the Black body. The objects I make reference the luxury items in the domestic spaces of historic plantation sites that have been re-branded to be used in the wedding /tourism industry. …

The Atomic Bomb And The Birth Of Manga: Collective Memory In Post-Wwii Japan, Bethany Harris

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In the ashes of post-World War II Japan and among the widespread poverty and devastation, cheap entertainment in the form of manga flourished on an unprecedented level. Manga was used not only to reenact and process war trauma, but also as a tool that helped usher in a new era of pro-American democracy and science. Manga in support of Japan’s new image quickly became popularized and embraced by the public, such as Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, but this was only one lens that captured Japanese memory of WWII. Keiji Nakazawa published the first documentary form of manga in his …

Remembering New Mexico's War: Service, Sacrifice, Suffering, And The Surrender Of Bataan In Wartime New Mexico, 1941-1946, Elena Marie Friot

History ETDs

New Mexicans positioned defeat, surrender, and captivity at the center of their narrative of World War II and incorporated the surrender of Bataan into New Mexico’s long history of service, sacrifice, and suffering as part of the United States. During and after the war, they created rituals, spaces, and texts that made the surrender a permanent and defining feature of the state’s social, cultural, and political landscape, which challenges the prevailing victory narrative that tends to dominate public commemorations of the war. Importantly, this dissertation shifts our gaze to investigate how defeat and surrender, and the corresponding experiences of surrendered …

Reconsidering Essence, Christopher T. Althoff

Theses and Dissertations

The rhetorical core of adaptation studies is a comparison between two texts, and the type of comparison that has sparked the most reactions, whether in its use or in speaking out against it, is fidelity criticism. As David Johnson and Simone Murray point out, fidelity criticism has long been rejected as an unscholarly mode of interpretative analysis because it is caught up in subjective value judgments and imprecise conjectures of a text’s “essence.” I contend, however, that the understanding of essences is critical to understanding both fidelity and the adaptation experience because something like essence is fixed in the human …