Digital Commons Network^™

Music And Literacy: Current Trends And Common Approaches Of Music Therapists In Early Childhood And School Settings, Julie A. Palmieri

Masters Theses

Reading and writing is the key to all learning, and providing children with effective literacy practices is one of the primary goals of educational systems. The purpose of this study was to identify the current trends and common approaches of professional music therapists who incorporate literacy learning into their practice. A total of 192 participants responded and completed the survey entitled Music and Literacy: Current trends and common approaches of music therapists. The study investigated if music therapists address the specific areas of literacy (vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, phonemic awareness, and phonics) that had been identified through a review of literature. …

A Migration Of Tastes: New York City And American Naturalism, 1890-1925, Tyler James Weseman

Masters Theses

Changes in the literary evaluation/reception of American Naturalism are related to changes in both literary criticism and American publishing. Naturalism responded to vigorous cultural issues of the time, but its chief focus was on the role of biology, class, and environment in the development of the individual. As a result, the response to Naturalism by American criticism was as much a response to these issues as it was to the literature itself, and the tenor of the responses near the turn of the century often reflected the differing values of criticism originating either in New York or Boston. By looking …

Citizens (Or Citoyennes) Of The World: Women’S Citizenship And Exile In The French Revolutionary Years 1789-1793, Lisa Michelle Christian

Masters Theses

This study examines the fluid definitions of citizenship during the French Revolution, especially citizenship’s relationship to exile. I assert that citizenship was always defined by who could not be citizens. Furthermore, this study focuses upon women’s experience of citizenship and exile for their especial vulnerability to exclusion from public and political affairs. In particular, I address the political actions of Parisian common women, and the political actions and writings of the English exiles Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. Essentially, this study has three distinct parts that demonstrate the development of women’s citizenship during the Revolution and the causes of …

Women’S Mysticism In The Late Middle Ages: The Influence Of Affective Love And The Courtly Love Tradition, Allison Jaines Elledge

Masters Theses

This thesis will focus on the devotional accounts of several influential women living in European cloisters or other religious communities during the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries, such as Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mary of Oignies, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg. I will explore how the rhetoric of love, selfknowledge, intention, and the focus on Christ’s humanity influenced the development of theological themes that affected their experiences and featured prominently in their writing. Finally, this thesis will examine the influence of affective mysticism and of courtly love poetry on the genre of medieval religious literature reporting mystical encounters with …

Enshrining, Adapting And Contesting The Latin Apology Of Al-Kindi: Readers' Interactions With An Authoritative Polemic Against Islam, Leah Jenkins Giamalva

Masters Theses

In this study, I have examined the use of the Latin translation of the Arabic Apology of al-Kindi,, regarded as the most influential source of information about Islam for Latin readers in the Middle Ages, by some of its readers from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. My work is divided into three parts, beginning with an analysis of the writings of the man who commissioned the translation, Peter the Venerable, and Peter of Poitiers, the secretary of the first Peter and a member of the translation team. I argue that, for Peter the Venerable, the Latin translation of …

The Impact Of The European Economy On An Indigenous Productive Regime: Coca Production In The Yungas Of La Paz, 1548-1570, Krista Anderson

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of a European system of mercantile production on the indigenous organization of coca production in the yungas of La Paz in the years immediately following the Spanish conquest until the administration of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569-1581 ). European mercantile ambitions in the earliest years of Spanish rule had an enormous, and often adverse, impact on the people of the yungas and their productive capabilities. The transformation of the yungas was introduced largely through the reorientation of coca production toward a market economy. This contact resulted in a marked increase …

Embodied Vision: Sublimity And Mystery In The Fiction Of Flannery O’Connor, Andrew Patrick Hicks

Masters Theses

This thesis serves as a study of representative pieces of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction alongside three particular theories of the sublime, and offers an exploration of the ways in which O’Connor employs and modifies and aesthetics of sublimity throughout her fiction. Three particular theories of the sublime are considered throughout this study: Edmund Burke’s empiricist sublime, Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern sublime, and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt’s theological sublime. Burke’s theory is considered alongside both the early O’Connor story “The Turkey” and the later “Greenleaf,” while the story “Parker’s Back” is read in light of Lyotard’s theory and the novel The Violent Bear It …

Max Liebermann’S Jewish Heritage, Romana Rouskova

Masters Theses

This thesis asks to what degree Max Liebermann (1847-1935) may be looked on as a Jewish artist. It examines the relationship as it is seen in his Jewish family background, in traditions rooted in Sittlichkeit and Bildung, such as diligence, and it also finds Jewish themes in a limited number of his art works. The first chapter examines Liebermann’s family history and his career as a painter influenced by Dutch and French artists. The second chapter looks at the ways critics have tried to assess this relationship. The opinions of art historian critics from Liebermann’s own time, such as Karl …

Ich-Sicht Und Sprachverlust: Werthers Liebestod, David Kaspar Schulz

Masters Theses

This thesis discusses how Werther’s death in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther should be understood. The central question is how Goethe portrays the correlation between Werther’s love and his death. Love is presented in the novel as a process eventually leading to the loss of the ability to live; Werther’s end is seen as a necessary consequence of the process. Werther himself describes the paradox that is to be explained by this thesis: „Mu[ss] denn das so sein, daß das, was des Menschen Glückseligkeit macht, wieder die Quelle seines Elendes würde?" (51) In this passage Goethe points to a …

Love And Privacy: Three Stories, Alexandra Staunton Zinke

Masters Theses

This thesis is compiled of stories written and revised while the author was a Master‟s candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Accompanying these stories is a brief introduction in which the author considers elements of craft in fiction.

Peer Versus Self Corrections And The Pursuit Of Grammatical Accuracy In Fl Writing: Student Perceptions And Realities, Mary Elizabeth Schonagen

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate peer and self corrections in the context of foreign language writing and, more specifically, any potential correlations between correction type and the ability to correct for grammatical accuracy. Correlations were also sought between correction type and student awareness of error tendencies. The present study also explored students’ perceptions of teacher, peer, and self corrections in writing, including preferences, validities, and the emotional (affective) responses. Ninety-six university students in their second year of German as a foreign language wrote a narrative essay. During the next class meeting, students either corrected their own essays …

A Paradox Of Self-Image: William Shakespeare’S The Merchant Of Venice And King Richard Ii In Hitler’S Germany, Bradley Michael Blair

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the connection between the cultural authorities of the Third Reich and the works of William Shakespeare. Nazi cultural authorities utilized theater as a milieu of representation wherein the Third Reich showcased its underlying ideological principles. However, Shakespeare's works, because of his humanist concern for the problems of the individual, create numerous difficulties that arise with any effort to align his works as a whole with a single set of ideological principles. The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's most famously Jewish play, appears on the surface to present the Nazi cultural authorities with a prime opportunity to showcase anti-Semitic …

American Daoism: A New Religious Movement In Global Contexts, Steven San-Hu Chan

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the phenomenon of American Daoism. It assumes that American Daoism is a New Religious Movement, and argues that it has roots in counterhegemonic religious movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will explore these roots and describe how they are counter-hegemonic. Furthermore, I will build upon Elijiah Siegler’s doctoral dissertation, “The Dao of America: The History and Practice of American Daoism,” by using post-modern theories of identity to discuss how American Daoist identity is formed. This thesis argues that American Daoist identity is a combination of Chinese and American cultural objects that form a hybrid religious …

Pulling The Moon Card, Gabrielle Lea Kindell

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis was to creatively explore emotionally intense and transformative moments in the author’s life through the use of poetry. The intention was to create poetry that served as a means for creative expression. The poetry here functions both to document the author’s life, to express the author’s feelings and thoughts of her life, and as art that should provide readers with the feeling that they have suddenly entered the mind, heart and experience of another person.

While much of the poetry is specific to the author’s life, some of the poems, especially those in the “Justice …

Methodism And Moral Character: The Function Of Methodist Satire In Henry Fielding’S Novels, Caitlin Lee Kelly

Masters Theses

This thesis explores Henry Fielding’s satiric representations of Methodism and Methodists in his novels Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia. By examining these Methodist representations and by using them to chart a progression across Fielding’s career as a novelist, Methodism emerges as a point of intersection with his larger concern about the effects of moral character on the stability of society. Fielding reveals the problem surrounding moral character through the villainy of hypocrites, which requires a shrewd observer to overcome. In an effort to provide a solution to this problem, Fielding asserts in “An Essay on the Knowledge …

Abject Horror And The Renaissance Imagination: Plotting The Intersection Of Human And Monster In Book I Of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Melissa Joy Rack

Masters Theses

The 16^th century marked an explosion of interest in “true” accounts of monsters and monstrous births in early modern England. The fascination with grotesqueries and objects of wonder was a curious preoccupation of the learned elite of the Elizabethan court. The influence of early modern medical texts that anatomized such creatures, and historical chronicles that attempted to explain the “unnatural” aspects of the natural world, can be traced in Book I of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. This thesis is concerned with the way Spenser revises the characteristic tropes of these early modern texts to present monstrosity in his …

The Meaning Of The Logos In John 1:1-18, Seokil Yoon

Masters Theses

The term λ ό γ ο ς in the New Testament is a very important word in the Bible, because it indicates the Messiah, Jesus Christ, who was predicted in the Old Testament (OT). Nevertheless, many people still do not know the meaning of the term λ ό γ ο ς . One cannot successfully study ancient philosophy or literature without understanding the term λ ό γ ο ς . The term has been used with various meanings by ancient philosophers since 500BC.1 Thus, this study will start with an examination of the meaning the term λ ό γ ο …

Examining The Primary Influence On Karl Barth's Epistle To The Romans, Sean Turchin

Masters Theses

Given the obscurity which envelops the question of intellectual influences on Karl Barth's Epistle to the Romans, it is the purpose of this work to examine the thesis provided by Bruce McCormack and to consider the themes and concepts of Romans II in order to account to what extent Barth employed Kierkegaard's own thought within this primary work.

The Other Half Of California, Jesse W. Goolsby

Masters Theses

In The Other Half of California, a Creative Writing Graduate Thesis for the University of Tennessee, Jesse W. Goolsby has collected a series of short stories that examines how different modes of power influence relationships. He has chosen Northern California as his setting, and the geography of the region plays a key role as the characters endeavor to find their way in, out, and through the landscape, often colliding with each other along the way.

Waves Of Light For Chamber Orchestra, Bruce H. Johnson

Masters Theses

Waves of Light is a symphonic poem written for chamber orchestra. The piece was written to fulfill a portion of the requirements for a Master of Music Composition degree from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Inspiration was taken from the healing powers of the ocean. The composition was completed in late March of 2007, but editorial revisions have occurred through March 2008. This paper presents an analysis of Waves of Light. Along with this analysis, there is a reflection upon particular compositions of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century that have influenced the conception of this work. There …

The Back Road To Murfreesboro, Ashley Scott Moser

Masters Theses

This project was conceived as a multi-form, multi-media piece in which each work of fiction, poetry, or photography is fully intended to both stand on its own and contribute to an overall feeling for the entire collection. It is in the juxtaposition of these various works that the audience can gain a greater appreciation for the entire collection as well as for each individual piece contained within.

This collection explores the dissatisfaction and alienation of contemporary life, and depicts characters, objects, and settings that are all in some way disconnected or empty. The overall stance is negative, of frustrated desire, …

The Dial And The Transcendentalist Theory Of Reading, Emily A. Cope

Masters Theses

The two major anthologies of Transcendentalism, Perry Miller’s The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1950) and Joel Myerson’s Transcendentalism: A Reader (2000), illustrate the scholarly divide over whether the movement was primarily religious or social and political in nature. Where Miller’s volume prioritizes the Transcendentalists’ theological radicalism, Myerson’s emphasizes their interest in social and political reform. This paper presents a third alternative: that the Transcendentalists be understood primarily as a community of readers invested in reimagining how and why antebellum Americans read, a concern we can see clearly in the pages of the Dial. Margaret Fuller’s article “A Short Essay on …

Zen Buddhism And American Religious Culture: A Case Study Of Daistez Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966), Christopher Robert Pinder

Masters Theses

This work explores the life, works, and role of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966) in the reception of Zen Buddhism in the United States. Particular attention is paid to the major themes that informed Suzuki’s presentation of Zen to American audiences: Western mystical-universalist traditions, intellectualism, psychology and Japanese nationalism. These themes, as Suzuki used them, are not part of traditional Zen in Japan; instead they are responses to Western modernity, colonialism, and Orientalist discourses. Suzuki and many of his contemporaries rephrased Zen in order to assert Japanese cultural and religious superiority.

Suzuki was a prolific writer and his books became the …

Telling War Stories, Michael Ernest Warren

Masters Theses

Telling war stories reveal the truth of soldiering from the eyes of soldiers. This thesis is a project that aims to make that statement a reality for the soldier of today who has endured a different sort of war. This project consists primarily of a proposal addressed to the writing committee and English Department faculty of the United States Military Academy which seeks to establish a new curriculum allowing cadets to correspond with deployed Soldiers or veterans of the Global War on Terror, and assist them in the writing of their telling war stories. The sections which follow the proposal …

Bridging The Popular Divide: Forging German Identity In The Agrarian League, 1893-1918, Mccall P. Simon

Masters Theses

This work examines the nature of the community of the German Agrarian League (Bund der Landwirte). In particular, it focuses on the interactions of the elite, Junker membership and the peasant membership. An examination of previous work reveals a theme of Junker domination of the League. This work challenges that theme by examining one possible avenue for agency within the League: the associated newspapers. Using Benedict Anderson's theory of printcapitalism and Marshall Sahlins' definitions of community interactions and space definition, it becomes possible to reveal a non-coerced peasant voice within the League by searching for rhetorical shifts in the …

The Missa L’Homme Arme Of Johannes Regis And Franco-Flemish Perceptions Of St. Michael The Archangel, Kenneth Dale Lee Disney

Masters Theses

St. Michael the Archangel performed three key roles in medieval western Christendom, as outlined by religious historian Richard Johnson: guardian, warrior, and psychopomp. The roles of intercessor and military leader derive from scriptural references to St. Michael, while the psychopomp role derives from the Jewish and Christian apocryphal tales that compose the Saint’s vita. Beginning with Charlemagne, liturgies dedicated to Michael were nationally sanctioned in the Carolingian Empire. The Frankish region would remain devoted to the Archangel well into the fifteenth century. Mont-Saint-Michel in particular would develop its own foundation myth, leading the surrounding area in angelic patronage during the …

A New Approach To The Devīmāhātmya: The Greatness Of The Goddess In Its Purāṇic Context, Elizabeth A. Cecil

Masters Theses

Although the text of the Devīmāhātmya is itself a section of the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, recent scholarship has taken a primarily extrinsic approach to the text and its use by emphasizing the life of the Devīmāhātmya (henceforth DM) well apart from the textual tradition of the purāṇas. A reading of the DM in the context of the MārkP is instructive, because it reveals some interesting thematic connections that are indicative of larger thematic trends within the purāṇa, which prior extrinsic studies have not explored. Broadly speaking, these themes glorify women and Goddesses as positive manifestations of some fundamental female …

Negotiating A Feminist Consciousness: Textual Interactions In The Women’S Penny Paper, Emily M. Disher

Masters Theses

This thesis examines both the heteroglossia and intertextuality of three important sections of the Victorian Women’s Penny Paper—the correspondence columns, “Out and About” advice column, and advertising pages. A study of each section in conversation with the others reveals the ways in which the paper built upon the shared interests of its readers to create a community that fostered a feminist consciousness. Ultimately, the intersection of consumer culture and feminist ideals both echoed and shaped by the pages of the WPP highlights the ways late nineteenth-century feminists negotiated their feminist identities amidst complex and conflicting influences.

Experiencing The Modern American City And Addressing The Slum In The United States And Brazil: 1890-1933, Nathaniel Z. Heggins Bryant

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the treatment of slum spaces in the US and Brazil spanning the period 1890-1933, seeking to understand better the ethics of representation regarding the slum as well as the varying aesthetic agendas and political engagements of four novelists. The works under consideration are A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) by William Dean Howells, The Slum (1890) by Aluísio Azevedo, Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos, and Industrial Park (1933), by Patrícia Galvão. I chart the varying methods of representation associated with each novel, from Howell’s critical realism to Azevedo’s unique version of naturalism to the fragmented …

Neuroticism, Marital Violence, And The Moderating Role Of Stress And Behavioral Skills, Julianne C. Hellmuth

Masters Theses

Do high levels of neuroticism predict intimate partner violence (IPV)? Although neuroticism may predispose partners to increased risks of IPV perpetration, the extent to which it predicts such perpetration is likely to depend on the broader context of the relationship. Consistent with this prediction, the current longitudinal study of 169 community couples revealed that the effects of neuroticism on IPV perpetration over the first four years of marriage were moderated by observations of problem-solving behavior and objective ratings of chronic stress. Specifically, although husbands and wives who scored higher on a measure of neuroticism at the outset of marriage engaged …