Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Digital Commons Network

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 23 of 23

Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network

Poetry And Thought's Revealing, Evan Reardon May 2022

Poetry And Thought's Revealing, Evan Reardon

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Thinking has long been a topic of interest in both philosophy and poetry but the experience of it, the phenomenological reality of thinking, has remained understudied. Utilizing Martin Heidegger’s writings on thinking and poetry, as well as various literary scholars, this thesis argues that poetry may be read as revealing the phenomenality of thought, the what-is-it-like of thinking. Through an application of Heidegger’s concept of a thinker’s “fundamental experience” and close readings of the poetry and prose writings of George Oppen, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery, I argue that each poet uses different lenses in his work to reveal different …


The Spirit Of Cancun : Basic Needs And Development During The Cold War, Christian Ruth Jan 2022

The Spirit Of Cancun : Basic Needs And Development During The Cold War, Christian Ruth

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines how international development changed during the second half of the Cold War, using development to highlight transformations in global discourse on needs, rights, and socioeconomic equity. After the late 1960s, nations in the global North, most notably the United States, struggled to reconcile the failure of the modernization schemes they had funded throughout the global South. In response, experts and activists around the world worked together in the 1970s to create a diverse array of alternative theories meant to uplift socioeconomically disadvantaged nations which centered on the concept of basic human needs. Yet the idea of basic …


Plastic Stars, Hilary Wheelan Remley May 2021

Plastic Stars, Hilary Wheelan Remley

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This story collection centers on coming of age and childhood narratives. These stories challenge the use of memory as a framing device for such narratives, refusing larger biographical context. Instead, the stories within this collection focus on the immediate experiences of childhood and adolescence. Additionally, these stories focus on a specific time and place. Each story takes place within the American Southeast during the early 2000s. This specificity of setting, especially as it exists as a period piece, serves to further challenge the effect of memory and historiography of many childhood narratives.


The Agrarian Gentleman: Elkanah Watson And The Birth Of The Agricultural Society In Early National New England, John Ginder May 2020

The Agrarian Gentleman: Elkanah Watson And The Birth Of The Agricultural Society In Early National New England, John Ginder

History Honors Program

Elkanah Watson is an overlooked figure in the early national period of the United States. A direct descendent of the Mayflower Pilgrims, Watson was a well-connected, well-traveled businessman who was receptive to any idea that he thought would benefit the new nation. This paper argues that Watson played an important role in forging a new American definition of progress, one that built on his experience in the American Revolution, borrowed heavily from Europe, and was inextricably tied to the American landscape. During the age of Enlightenment, he believed that one could improve oneself as well as society. That was evident …


“No Popery! No French Laws!”: Anti-Catholicism During The American Revolution, Nicholas Dorthe May 2020

“No Popery! No French Laws!”: Anti-Catholicism During The American Revolution, Nicholas Dorthe

History Honors Program

This paper analyzes how widespread anti-Catholic sentiment unified the colonies against the British Crown during the early stages of the American Revolution. Also, this paper explores how loyalists utilized fear of Catholicism in order to undermine the Revolution, showing that anti-Catholic fearmongering played a vital role to both causes. Overtime, historians have placed varying emphasis on certain reasons behind the American Revolution. Since the Progressive Era, there has been a shift from economic reasons, like class conflict and the Crown’s restrictive trade policies, to a more ideological stance, one that emphasizes philosophical influence and constitutional interpretations. Instead, this essay asserts …


Eyes Shut : Stories, Danielle Epting Jan 2020

Eyes Shut : Stories, Danielle Epting

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This story collection focuses on a range of characters and explores themes/ideas such as loss, self-awareness, and abuse. These ideas are explored through the use of specific literary elements to help heighten the themes. These elements include point of view, characterization, and plot. Other elements, such as speculative or more fantastical aspects, are also used in several stories. These stories and themes hope to highlight the complex dynamics of both human relationships and our own inner struggles that we all must navigate throughout our journey.


The Fiction Of Women In Contemporary American Literature : The Borderlands Of Intersectional Feminism, Postcolonial American Studies, And Creative Writing, Skye Anicca Jan 2019

The Fiction Of Women In Contemporary American Literature : The Borderlands Of Intersectional Feminism, Postcolonial American Studies, And Creative Writing, Skye Anicca

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A collection of nine short stories entitled THE TROUBLE WITH BRIGHT GIRLS is unified by women’s diverse coming-of-age experiences in late twentieth century transnational America. The story collection relies on techniques that highlight dislocation—temporal skips and wide temporal frames, fragmented and recursive narratives, borrowed genres, absurd premise, anti-heroines and anti-epiphanies—which gesture toward collective human experiences while troubling notions of universal knowledge and values and resisting redemption or closure. The critical introduction situates the collection through the theoretical lens of intersectional feminism, informed by Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the borderlands, and in relation to field of multiethnic/transnational literature of the U.S. …


Skin And Other Stories, Brenna Croker Jan 2019

Skin And Other Stories, Brenna Croker

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The horror genre is a broad umbrella under which a number of subgenres and subcategories fall. Skin and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction stories which take on the horror genre. These stories serve to explore, test, and defy the conventions of the horror genre, making use of its tropes and traditions in some instances, abandoning and rejecting them in others. The stories in this collection connect to a number of horror subgenres, including body horror and environmental horror, in an attempt to define and exemplify these categorizations. Furthermore, these stories make use of the horror genre as …


Unbecoming : A Collection Of Short Fiction, Angélica Luisa Valentín Schubert Jan 2019

Unbecoming : A Collection Of Short Fiction, Angélica Luisa Valentín Schubert

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This collection contains nine short stories addressing various concepts and issues relating to contemporary femininity in the United States.


"True Principles Of Liberty And Natural Right" : The Vermont State Constitution And The American Revolution, Kevin R. Ingraham Jan 2018

"True Principles Of Liberty And Natural Right" : The Vermont State Constitution And The American Revolution, Kevin R. Ingraham

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Vermont state constitution was the most revolutionary and democratic plan of government established in America during the late eighteenth century. It abolished adult slavery, eliminated property qualifications for holding office, and established universal male suffrage. It invested broad power in a unicameral legislature, through which citizens might directly express their will through their elected representatives. It created a weak executive with limited power to veto legislation. It mandated annual elections for all state offices, by which the people might frequently accept, or reject, their leaders. It thus established a participatory democracy in which ordinary citizens enjoyed broad access to …


Aiding Repression? : The Effects Of U.S. Military Aid On Conflict Intensity And Civilian Targeting, Amira Jadoon Jan 2017

Aiding Repression? : The Effects Of U.S. Military Aid On Conflict Intensity And Civilian Targeting, Amira Jadoon

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This three-essay dissertation contributes to a nuanced theoretical and empirical understanding of the links between international security, foreign aid and political violence. It examines how U.S military aid interacts with domestic conflict processes to affect the nature and magnitude of violence within recipient countries. As such, it assesses the usefulness of foreign aid to promote international security, by investigating its implications on conflict intensity and civilian targeting by state and non-state actors.


The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom Jan 2016

The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Enlightenment has been thought of as the Age of Reason: the birth of the individual, the rise of print culture, the beginning of the middle class, and an exponential growth in the sciences. The Enlightenment shaped the world into the form that it is today, but it also marks the start of colonization and the slave trade. The following thesis seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Enlightenment to both colonization and the slave trade; that without it neither of these practices would have had the reach that they achieved over time. Using the works of Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques …


Making Thought Matter : Postmodern Models For Material Thinking, James Kenneth Belflower Jan 2015

Making Thought Matter : Postmodern Models For Material Thinking, James Kenneth Belflower

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Making Thought Matter: Postmodern Models for Material Thinking, crosses disciplines to trace the aesthetic contexts of Postmodern American artists whose work employs the senses to make legible creative and critical modes of synthesis. I contend that in practicing a material thinking—the artistic mobilization of the intimate and affective qualities of conceptual and physical surfaces—these artists reinsert perceptual knowledge and bodily agency into Postmodernism’s “emptied” surfaces. Consequently, their work opposes late theorists of Postmodernity who characterized contemporary artistic forms as immaterial, abstract, and emotionally deficient. To assess contemporary syntheses I develop Philip Johnson’s late International Style Glass House into an analogy …


Threads Of Truth : Aesthetics Of A Sacrificed Self In The Nineteenth-Century American Romance Of Susanna Rowson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James And Kate Chopin, Anne S. Jung Jan 2015

Threads Of Truth : Aesthetics Of A Sacrificed Self In The Nineteenth-Century American Romance Of Susanna Rowson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James And Kate Chopin, Anne S. Jung

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract


Ten Klicks South Of Whiskey : A Play In Three Acts, Ryan Jeffrey Smithson Jan 2015

Ten Klicks South Of Whiskey : A Play In Three Acts, Ryan Jeffrey Smithson

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Ten Klicks South of Whiskey is a stage performance in three acts, consisting mostly of monologues from soldiers of various backgrounds. It follows the trials of 4th platoon, Delta Troop, 463rd Cavalry Squadron, a fictional unit that achieves a near-mythic reputation of heroism and invulnerability in Iraq. As the monologues begin to reveal, however, not every tale about the 463rd can be substantiated. The audience is first challenged to search for truth and then to understand that truth is not the ultimate--or even the desired--goal of war stories.


Constituting A Revolution: Gouverneur Morris, John Quincy Adams, And The French Revolution’S Imprint On American Identity, Tyler Norton May 2014

Constituting A Revolution: Gouverneur Morris, John Quincy Adams, And The French Revolution’S Imprint On American Identity, Tyler Norton

History Honors Program

Much of the traditional scholarship of the Early American Republic agrees that the national identity of the United States was solidified in 1789. A government and nation emerged from the Constitutional Convention, they argue. While the framers produced a governing document and a system of institutions in Philadelphia that summer, notions of American identity remained fluid. In fact, contemporary events that occurred beyond the United States’ borders left a lasting imprinting on conceptualizations of self and identity. In particular, the French Revolution (1789 – 1794) played a defining role. This paper argues that the development of national identity in the …


Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo Jan 2014

Critique Is Not Enough : The Empirical Imperatives Of Innovative American Poetry, Christopher Rizzo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Critique is Not Enough: The Empirical Imperatives of Innovative American Poetryproposes that innovative modern and early contemporary American poetries redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience. This study demonstrates how the radically different poetic projects of Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson not only equally insist upon empirically investigative poetics, but also endeavor, each to each, to individualize their poetic methodologies, which thus challenges the generalized Enlightenment myth of rationality. In that each of these writers undertakes to redefine the relation of knowledge, consciousness, and poetic performance to lived experience, they also …


Examining The Risk And Protective Factors That Influence Falls Among Native American Older Adults, Kelly Winjum Jan 2014

Examining The Risk And Protective Factors That Influence Falls Among Native American Older Adults, Kelly Winjum

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The risk factors for falls and the adverse outcomes of falls have been well documented among the general older adult population. However, fall frequency, fall risk factors, and fall outcomes have rarely been studied among minority groups specifically. Furthermore, to date there are no known studies that exclusively examine falls among Native American older adults. The purpose of this study is to examine falls among Native American older adults, in order to understand the risk and protective factors for falling among this population, and to develop recommendations for intervention. The theoretical framework of the Disablement Process guides this study. The …


Political Criticism And The Power Of Satire : The Transformation Of "Late-Night" Comedy On Television In The United States, 1980-2008, Nickie Michaud Wild Jan 2014

Political Criticism And The Power Of Satire : The Transformation Of "Late-Night" Comedy On Television In The United States, 1980-2008, Nickie Michaud Wild

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

How has political comedy on television in the United States changed over time? Earlier examples of political comedy on television were shows like Saturday Night Live and various late night talk shows, which focused primarily on political or personal scandals or personal characteristics, rather than policies or substantive issues. In other arenas of television and the public sphere in general, there was serious criticism of scandals, but not in political comedy. Shows that attempted to criticize politicians or serious public issues using satire, irony, or invective such as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, were routinely censored by network executives. With …


Exploring U.S. Imperialist Influences On Bicultural Koreans' Identity Negotiation : A Critical Theory Study, Minsun Lee Jan 2013

Exploring U.S. Imperialist Influences On Bicultural Koreans' Identity Negotiation : A Critical Theory Study, Minsun Lee

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Bicultural identity has traditionally been studied in a contextual vacuum, with little attention to how asymmetrical power dynamics between two cultures influence the negotiation of a bicultural identity. This critical theory study used a focus group and follow-up individual interviews to illuminate how five adult bicultural Koreans residing in the U.S. negotiate their sociocultural identities within the context of U.S. imperialist influences. Interpretive phenomenological analysis (Smith & Osborn, 2008) and methods drawn from feminist research (Anderson & Jack, 1991) were employed to analyze the data.


Sylvia Plath At Yaddo : A Poet Finds Her Voice, Sarah Elizabeth Morse Jan 2012

Sylvia Plath At Yaddo : A Poet Finds Her Voice, Sarah Elizabeth Morse

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Since Sylvia Plath's death in 1963 critics have not stopped trying to piece together her life and work. Most of their focus lies on her last collection, Ariel, widely considered her best work. This thesis looks at a lesser-known time, before Plath had even published her first book of poetry named "The Colossus." In 1959 Plath spends eleven weeks at a writer's residence in Saratoga Springs, New York called Yaddo. While there she produces some of her most mature work to date, dealing with difficult topics for the first time such as suicide and issues with her deceased father and …


An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser’S Fight Against Intellectual Censorship And Early Hollywood, Brittany Jolles May 2010

An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser’S Fight Against Intellectual Censorship And Early Hollywood, Brittany Jolles

History

No abstract provided.


A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik Jan 2009

A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers drew on European natural science and philosophy - specifically in terms of concepts of form, perception, and experience - to open new possibilities for thinking the relationship between the mind and the physical world. In each of the moments of American intellectual history here considered - the natural theology of Calvinism, the idealistic natural history of Transcendentalism, and the movement towards an evolutionary process-philosophy of Pragmatism - "place" becomes not only geographical location, but a dynamic field of interactions of natural historical, literary, theological, and philosophical knowledge. I trace this through …