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Whirling Darkness: Witchery's Ascent In The Writings Of Leslie Marmon Silko, Kristin Monahan

Theses & Dissertations

Apocalyptic imagery spirals throughout Leslie Marmon Silko's works. The destruction of individuals, cultures, and eventually the Earth are purported by the grand plan of witchery. Evil has existed among Native American's in the form of witchery since time began. Its forces reside within all things. Yet with the tools provided by the spirits, namely the oral tradition and ceremonies, witchery can be controlled: the stories explain its origin and its power, showing how witchery has been overcome in the past, while the ceremonies provide a means of healing those who have been afflicted. By maintaining connections to the universe, past, …

The Prevalence Of Dual Diagnosis Of Generalized Anxiety Disorder And Alcoholism In The Literature: A Critical Meta-Analytic Review, Joseph B. Stone

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The relationship between alcoholism and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) has been discussed in two research areas: research on the prevalence of GAD in alcoholics, and the prevalence of alcoholism in individuals diagnosed with GAD. Studies indicate that between 6 to 26% of alcoholics have a current diagnosis of GAD, with a lifetime prevalence rate of up 51%. In the general population, 4% would currently receive a diagnosis of GAD, with a lifetime prevalence of 8%.

This meta-analytic review of the empirical literature examines the relationship between GAD and alcoholism. The author used percentages to compare the results of various studies. …

A Meta-Analytical Review Of The Literature On The Efficacy Of The Systematic Training For Effective Parenting (Step) Program, David George Gibson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

An analysis of previous reviews of the parent education literature revealed that few reviewers have incorporated sound methodological practice in their review process. Most reviewers included too few studies and ignored important information about the primary research studies that they reviewed. The Systematic Training for Effective Parenting (STEP) program has received less attention from reviewers than any of the other popular programs and information about its effectiveness is lacking.

Forty primary research studies, addressing the effectiveness of the STEP program, were located and analyzed using the meta-analytic method of review. Research questions for this study addressed the issues of effectiveness …

Effects Of Otitis Media On Language Development In Native Populations: A Review Of The Literature, Monica Malmgren

Undergraduate Honors Capstone Projects

From the time a fetus reaches about 20 weeks gestational age, its auditory system is functioning. Before we are ever born, we are exposed to sounds within our environment. With birth, we begin to interact with, experiment with, and learn to interpret the sounds around us. Before learning to speak, we are bombarded by the sounds of our language. An infant's head is known to perk up at the sound of a voice, a sudden noise, music... all the sounds of the environment, which is evidence that children are aware of the sounds around them before they are ever able …

"As If I Could Do Anything Except Just Sit And Stare": A Gaze Of A Viewer/Reader In Psycho And To The Lighthouse, Stephanie Hunt Hegstad

Honors Papers

At the end of Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, the figure of Norman Bates (or maybe the figure of his mother--at this point, the distinction is fogged) hugs a blanket around him as he sits in his prison cell, staring, perfectly still except for the movements of his eyes, the expressions on his face, the slight movement of his head. He stares directly at the camera, the audience, while the phantom voice of Mother explains her trouble with her son ("he was always--bad"). The camera does not shift angles during this scene to relieve us of this penetrating gaze, but …

The Poetry In-Between: Presence And Absence In Whitman, Rimbaud, And Hopkins., Jonathan Flint Alexander

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

"The Poetry In-Between: Presence and Absence in Whitman, Rimbaud, and Hopkins" analyzes three major nineteenth-century poets and their development of a poetics which has as its chief focus of concern the issue of presencing an eternal and universal "Other" by which to assess self identity. After the Kantian critique and the seeming reduction of human knowledge to phenomenal perceptions, early nineteenth-century poets and theorists feared the entrapment and isolation of the self in subjective awareness. The romantics, such as Friedrich Schlegel, sought ways to overcome such alienating subjectivity and ultimately conceived of the poet as a privileged spokesman and arbiter …

Wise Economies: Storytelling, Narrative Authority, And Brevity In The American Short Story, 1819-1980., Kirk Lee Curnutt

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study proposes a new way of measuring brevity in the American short story. Since Edgar Allan Poe's definition of the tale, literary criticism has looked to various structural features within the text to define the elements that distinguish the short story from other prose genres like the novel. I argue that brevity is an essential feature of storytelling and suggest that its perception is molded and shaped by several historical factors. The phrase "wise economy" offers two ways of thinking about the conciseness of the form: it evokes a history of rhetorical economy central to the formation of a …

Windows To Critical Thinking: Perspectives On Pedagogy In Henry James's "The Bostonians", Carson Mccullers's "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter", And Frederick Douglass's "Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave"., James Thomas Mullane

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Many times teachers restrict students to viewing literature through a single "preferred" window or from a rather small set of tiny windows, thus hindering their ability to think critically and make choices for themselves. It is my contention that our pedagogy should facilitate a "school of windows" in which students are offered many different vantage points from which to "see" literature--an environment which, instead of monologically conditioning them to accept content without criticism or question, dialogically allows them their own place and importance in active discourse. This study delineates the power that literature has to enable students to acquire these …

Red Plush And Brass: Prostitution As A Mirror Of Self In The Fiction Of Ernest Hemingway, Claude Caswell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the iconography and psychology of prostitution as a motif in the fiction of Ernest Hemingway. After identifying the prostitutional dynamics that form a recurring pattern throughout Hemingway's work and personal life, the discussion focuses primarily on exploring the implications of those dynamics in Hemingway's three major novels: The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

What this study contends is that the literal and figurative presence of prostitution as a theme in Hemingway's narratives operates on two basic levels. On one level, the prostitution elements represent the pathology …

A Revision Of Frailties: Robertson Davies' "A Mixture Of Frailties" And "The Lyre Of Orpheus" (Novels)., Christine Dorothy. Zieba

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The remarkable similarities between Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties and The Lyre of Orpheus are immediately discernable, even though these novels are separated by thirty years. Both works centre upon the emotional and musical development of lead female characters who are analogous to one another in their backgrounds, naivete, and learning experiences. Davies devotes a substantial portion of his narrative in both novels to examine social classes, religion, education, and the influence of money, thereby displaying any apparent changes his own possible views may have undergone during the passage of such a considerable length of time. While Davies places …

Rewriting The Masculine: The National Subject In Modern American Drama., Francis Granger Babcock

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation traces the development of an American masculinity, using the concept of the national subject (borrowed from Frantz Fanon), through three different stages of the American capitalism: mercantile, or market, monopoly, and corporate, or late-capitalism. It constructs a genealogy of American maleness and then examines how this genealogy was altered and reconstituted during times of economic crisis and technological innovation. It argues that successive technological revolutions in the symbolic apparatus of American culture allowed elite political and economic interests to gain consensus by deploying the national subject using various media. In the early national period Franklin and Crevecoeur used …

The Influence Of Teacher Behavior On The Distribution Of Achievement In The Classroom: An Application Of The Hierarchical Linear Model., Leslie Sanford Arceneaux

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of classroom practices on the distribution of achievement within the classroom as well as on mean levels of achievement through the use of the Hierarchical Linear Model (Raudenbush & Bryk, 1986). The investigation focused on sixty classrooms--thirty from schools labeled as effective and thirty from schools labeled as ineffective. Data on teacher behaviors were gathered through classroom observations during which six dimensions of effective teaching were evaluated. These behaviors were interactive time-on-task, classroom management, strategies for monitoring student progress and providing opportunities to learn, strategies for presentation of content and …

Mimesis And Poiesis In The Novel: William Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" And The Mythopoeic Turn In The American Imagination., Paul Richard Connell

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

In the course of its development as a genre, the novel shifted in the mid-twentieth century from a mimetic model grounded in imitation and colored with pessimism, to a poietic one based on discovery and novelty and foregrounded in hope. Precipitated by a crisis in representation after Joyce, the novel found in its own history, through the recuperation of older literary forms, new possibilities of representation, and shifted away from assumptions based on fact and history, to one grounded in miracle and myth. This shift was anticipated by the theories of the German Romantics Schlegel and Novalis and is adumbrated …

Autobiography As Repetition In The Works Of Walker Percy., Edward Joseph Dupuy

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

While many critics have explored some connections between Walker Percy's work and the philosophies of Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, none has examined that link in terms of autobiography and autobiographical theory. This study looks at both Percy's fiction and nonfiction in light of the category of repetition and its relation to autobiography. Following largely the work of William Spanos, the first chapter establishes a reading of autobiography as repetition--understood as inter esse, "being between" and concerned in time. It then discloses a link between such a view of autobiography and Percy's diagnostic use of the novel. The remainder of …

Woven Words: A Semiology Of Clothing In Medieval Texts., Fernando Luis Figueroa

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Much criticism in medieval studies has focused on Chrisitan allegory and its dissemination through Middle English poetry. Using recent insights into the nature of allegory in its medieval context, this study offers a new means of understanding allegory as it appears in the work of Chaucer and the Pearl-poet. Which ideas of figurality actually informed the works of these poets? The investigation into the influence of medieval "textuality" on Chaucer and the Pearl-poet has overlooked the image of the "veil" in the Middle Ages. This study asserts that instead of being a "flat" image, the veil provides us with a …

Discourses Of Maternity And The Postmodern Narrative: A Study Of Lessing, Walker, And Atwood., Janet J. Montelaro

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale are narrated by women whose social identities are partially constructed through activities traditionally associated with mothering. In each text, maternity signifies a biological event as well as the social, sexual, and material relations involved with pregnancy, childbirth, and the nurturing and rearing of children, activities which become grounds for investigating the politics of the body, of sexuality, and consequently, of gender relations. Maternity becomes politicized within the cultural contexts of each novel as maternal experience functions to produce both feminist and postmodernist critiques. In …

Organizations Of The Future: An Analysis Of Current Literature And A New Model, Barbara E. Gilliss Edd

Dissertations

This study confronts the following problem: Western society and its organizations are experiencing the stresses of turbulent times about which there is little clear understanding. The study addresses the need for organizations, their leaders, and their members to understand these times and to determine how to engage themselves in moving toward more enlightened futures. The study questions whether current literature provides a basis for comprehending today's turmoil and its effect on organizations and whether the literature provides a theoretical basis for constructing a model of organizations of the future with which to help them proceed through a transition period. The …

The Effect Of Reading And Discussing Literature With Strong Women Characters On Sixth Grade Students’ Sex Stereotype And Occupational Attitudes, Leslie Caspi Edd

Dissertations

There is considerable evidence that children develop stereotyped attitudes early in life and that these attitudes affect their futures. Many researchers agree that children's attitudes can be influenced by what they read and some studies have shown that attitudes can be changed by exposure to selected literature. This study focused on a group of sixth grade children reading selected short stories and novels with female main characters. Literature discussion groups and written journals were used to facilitate response. The clays was racially and socioeconomically mixed as a result of busing through the Voluntary Ethnic Enrollment and Magnet Programs. The class …

Radical Possibilities: Literature In The English Revolution, 1640-1660, Brian Leonard Patton

Digitized Theses

This dissertation explores the circulation of radical social and political ideas in the literature of the 1640-1660 Revolution, when England's most fundamental institutions, from the monarchy to the patriarchal family, appeared in danger of annihilation. For students of literature, the period is so rich that its relative neglect seems remarkable. A lapse in government control over the nation's printing presses resulted in a veritable explosion of books, pamphlets and broadsides, and a literature that offers an unprecedented diversity of views and voices. Surveying a wide range of texts, from the familiar to the lesser-known, my study draws upon insights gleaned …

Commercial Relations In French Farce, 1450-1550, Sharon Lynn Collingwood

Digitized Theses

Although the Farce is filled with marketplace scenes which present merchants and craftspeople engaged in everyday activities, little work has been done on the commercial elements of this bourgeois genre. This thesis studies the language and customs of the marketplace, in order to gain a better understanding of the frequent commercial humour seen in the Farce.;Chapter 1 discusses the thematic importance of money and monetary systems for the Farce, and provides a basis for an understanding of commercial activity in the following chapters. Chapter 2 examines the English manuals of French conversation, which are a rich source for the study …

Meaning And Matricide: Reading Woolf Via Kristeva, Miglena I. Nikolchina

Digitized Theses

The thesis examines the psychoanalytic myth of matricide in its relevance for a feminist understanding of literary history. The first half of the dissertation explores the problem of matricide in the terms offered by Kristeva's theory. My study emphasizes the larger context of Kristeva's work which is not confined to Freud and Lacan only; the effects of its cultural substratum involving such diverse traits as Byzantine iconograpy, East Orthodox dogma, and Bulgarian language and folklore; and the implications of its form as a "polylogue"--i.e. a transmutation of Bakhtin's polyphonic novel into a theory conscious of its fictional and semiotic dimensions.;In …

The Dialogical Keats: Studies In A Bakhtinian Approach To Keats' Narrative Poems, Michael J. Sider

Digitized Theses

A tradition of criticism in Keats studies has constructed a view of the poet as a writer who is entirely disengaged from history and of his poems as completely finished products, self-contained and ahistorical. This view of the poet and his poems dominates our present understanding of Keats. This dissertation, "The dialogical Keats: Studies in a Bakhtinian approach to Keats' narrative poems," is an attempt to develop a reading of Keats' poetry which uncovers those qualities in the poems that have been denied by the tradition of Keats criticism. Bakhtin's view of language as shared social territory provides a tool …

"His Body Well Be Red": The Politics Of Representing The Body In "The Faerie Queene", David Sean Kinahan

Digitized Theses

This study explores the representations of the body in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and several other early modern texts. It takes as its premise the Foucauldian notion that the body, born into culture, is never entirely present in itself, but that it is actively produced in discourse; the body is not simply the object on which power operates but the result of a negotiation of its fashionings. The apparent naturalness of bodily presence is used in discursive practice for its authority, and constructions of the body lend formative force to ideological and political ideas and organizations. The regulation of …

Lyric Trials Lyric And Rhetoric In Contemporary Poetry: Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, A R Ammons, John Ashbery, Kevin Vincent Mcguirk

Digitized Theses

Lyric Trials is a comparative study of four contemporary lyric poets: Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery. Lyric is important in postmodern criticism because it serves as a point of self-definition for both its defenders and its opponents. Yet lyric has itself received little critical attention. This study aims, then, to revise and complicate our received notions about lyric--as expressing pure subjectivity, as autotelic poem--by examining the work of four quite different poets, all of whom have engaged in dialogue with post-Romantic assumptions. My study concerns itself with relations between image and discourse, lyric and the …

The Divided Text: Intertextual Ambivalence In Timothy Findley's Novels, Anne Elizabeth Bailey

Digitized Theses

This thesis examines the ambiguous function of intertexts within Timothy Findley's novels. His fiction is in constant dialogue with other literary texts and conventions as well as numerous social, economic, and political discourses. This intertextual dialogue politicizes Findley's work because the re-presentation of intertexts often subverts and challenges ideological biases, revealing sexist, racist, and totalitarian features. However, the repetition of intertexts not only implies difference but also similarity, a paradox which creates ambiguity within Findley's novels. I propose that this ambivalence is evident in both the form and content of Findley's work, arguing that the relationship between his own texts …