Digital Commons Network^™

Highway 11, Devon Koren Asdell

Masters Theses

Created in 1926, US Route 11 runs from the Canadian border at Rouses Point, New York, to just shy of New Orleans at an intersection with US-90. In Bristol, Virginia, the highway splits in two -- 11-E and 11-W -- and then reunites in Knoxville, Tennessee. This highway serves as the main thoroughfare for many small towns and cities, and it is known by many names -- Lee Highway, Andrew Johnson Highway, and Kingston Pike, to name a few. As many of the residents of these small towns might attest, it is easy to take a highway for granted when …

"Green In The Mulberry Bush": Quentin, Lancelot, And The Long Shadow Of The Lost Cause, Amy Renee Covington

Masters Theses

The purpose of this project is to examine the immensely popular post-Civil War "Myth of the Lost Cause" which developed in the Southern states after the Confederate defeat. Its primary tenet was the belief in a chivalric antebellum Southern society, complete with genteel plantation owners, faithful slaves, and an Edenic landscape. The myth also exalted the bravery of the Confederate soldier and the quiet heroism of the belles left behind. This carefully crafted fantasy was the product of an organized, sophisticated public relations campaign which originated in the former Confederacy and was quickly adopted by other parts of the country. …

A Peculiar Diversion: The Social Ramifications Of Quarter-Racing In The Eighteenth-Century Tidewater Virginia, Tollie Jean Banker

Masters Theses

Virginia's horse culture combined with the colonists' obsession with immediate gratification created the perfect ingredients for the formation of quarter-racing. Not only did short racing afford the ideal outlet for tidewater Virginians' independence, competitiveness, and materialism but it also functioned as a tool to police social order. Consequently, seventh and eighteenth-century tidewater Virginians embraced their new innovation, transforming it from an ad hoc drag race into a formalized competition complete with specially made race courses, racing covenants that stipulated the how, when, and where of the race, and even public notices announcing upcoming events.

As a result Quarter-racing became one …

"One Major Step Short Of War:” Jimmy Carter, The Soviet Invasion Of Afghanistan, And The Last Chapter Of The Cold War, George Uriah

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter and his Administration in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. The study is based on newly declassified documents from the Jimmy Carter Presidential in Atlanta, Georgia as well as published material by and about Jimmy Carter.

The thesis challenges the popular caricatures of Jimmy Carter, that he was ineffective in matters of foreign policy and that he was largely concerned with establishing a legacy as a peacemaker. The thesis contends that Jimmy Carter was a much more cunning Cold Warrior than …

Zwischen Sprachekstase Und Sprachkrise? – Utopische Sprachreflexionen Bei Novalis Und Hofmannsthal, Adam Gacs

Masters Theses

The following thesis looks at manifestations of reflections about language as a medium for communication in the works of Novalis and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Tracing similar statements that refer to linguistic crisis and linguistic scepticism in the fictional and theoretical works of both authors, I demonstrate that it is impossible to give a clear definition of their relationship towards language. I therefore suggest that their complex relationship to language should be viewed as a shifting concept on an axis somewhere between linguistic innovation and linguistic skepticism. The selected works by Novalis (Monolog and Die Lehrlinge zu Sais) and by Hofmannsthal …

Active Submission: The Subversion Of Gendered Binary Oppositions In Three Post-War Novels Authored By International Women, Rebecca Annette Napier

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to explore a controversial dimension of feminist literature: that dimension concerning female masochism. My study centers on international novels written by women after World War II. The novels are The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, Gordon by Edith Templeton, and The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. This thesis examines three highly individualized tales of control and power that posit female masochism as means for “active submission.” I claim that while the feminist politics of these texts is ambiguous, protagonists of these novels redefine masochism as “active submission,” and as a result, they challenge the …

Social Student Bodies In The Im World: Digital Vernaculars And Self-Reflexive Rhetoric, Stacey Lynn Pigg

Masters Theses

Recent rhetoric, composition, and literacy scholarship has refocused attention on the body’s role in reading and writing, arguing against abstracting literacy practices and texts from material situations, contexts, and the physical bodies who create them. This scholarship challenges descriptions and accounts of emerging media and digital writing situations as “disembodying.” This thesis argues that in the “IM world” in which incoming college students learn to write by participating in online communities, their digital writing can be considered “embodied” as real-world, socially-situated practice. By actively participating in online communities, many incoming college students learn distinct online language practices outside of school; …

Liminal Bodies, Leslye Stewart Ford

Masters Theses

This collection of thirty-three mostly free-verse poems explores the liminal, or threshold, modes of being encountered by bodies, especially in conjunction with other bodies, with places, and with the spirit or the divine. The sections of the manuscript progress from exploring the interstices and large gaps between women and girls, mothers and daughters, to the merging and colliding of lovers, friends, even rapists, to place and its ability to root the body to shadows of the past and present, to the merging of the divine with the human. As a collection, each section seeks to explore the body as a …

Baseball And Boosterism: Henry W. Grady, The Atlanta Constitution, And The Inaugural Season Of The Southern League, David A. Martin

Masters Theses

This study will examine the ways in which southern civic boosters fused the inaugural season of the Southern League of Professional Baseball with the promotion of their respective cities in 1885. Evidence for this work comes primarily from the Atlanta Constitution, the Chattanooga Daily Times, and the Nashville Banner. Articles from these newspapers are put into context with Paul Gaston’s The New South Creed (1970). Henry Grady is the primary focus, as he was the archetypical New South booster.

Ethics In Times Of Plague: Home Care, Obligations To Treat, End Of Life, And Public Policies, Michael Woods Nash

Masters Theses

Almost exclusively, clinical bioethicists pose and answer questions in the context of day-to-day, medical practice in the West. This setting abounds with therapeutic procedures, drugs, and other resources to restore comfort and health to persons who suffer. In making moral judgments, we focus on patients, attend at times to their families, and—most rarely—consider the well-being of the rest of society as it is affected by particular treatment decisions.

Although this approach has resulted in a measure of moral progress with respect to our standard, clinical setting, it all but neglects the unique and compelling questions that arise in the context …

A Study Of The Thaïs Legend With Focus On The Novel By Anatole France, Sidney Douglas Engle

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to research the various versions of the Thaïs legend, to review the previous criticism concerning the tale, and to apply a method heretofore unused in its interpretation, with a particular focus on the nineteenth-century novel by Anatole France. This was not done with the intent to disparage any previous methods or critiques, but rather to add something new to the considerable body of work that existed.

The primary research tools used were the MLA online bibliography and the WorldCat database. Books and articles were borrowed or provided through the main library as well as …

From Death, Life: An Economic And Demographic History Of Civil War Era Knoxville And East Tennessee, Steven Bradley Davis

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to understand the economic/demographic impact of the American Civil War on Knoxville, Tennessee and the greater East Tennessee region. It is the contention of this work that the Civil War served as an economic/demographic catalyst, accelerating (although certainly not completing) the process by which both city and region were transformed from a rural, pre-modem economy based predominantly on subsistence agriculture to a more modem, industrializing economy based on manufacturing, resource extraction, and limited commercial farming.

Dismantling The Master’S Schoolhouse: The Rhetoric Of Education In African American Autobiography And Fiction, Miya G. Abbot

Masters Theses

This thesis examines rhetorical understandings of education for African Americans in literature of three important time periods of American history. From the post-Reconstruction South, to Northern cities in the 1950s, and finally to 1990s Los Angeles, this is an examination of how African American authors of fiction and autobiography have presented the relationship between literacy acquisition and identity. Underlying the historical and rhetorical examination is the argument that, for African American students, the virtue of the educational space is dubious. It is at once the gateway to the "American dream" of prosperity, and the venue for the reinforcement of systemic …

Making The Margins Legitimate: Travel, Family, And National Identity In Eighteenth-Century British Fiction, Teresa R. Moore

Masters Theses

This study examines the first novels of Frances Burney and Tobias Smollett in order to analyze the effects of inner, familial forces and outer, worldly forces on the narrators’ national identity. Written thirty years apart, the novels follow a remarkably similar plot structure to arrive at different configurations of national identity. I argue that success creating a fictional character who fully enters British society is ultimately dependent upon the author’s own sense of marginalization. Indeed, Burney and Smollett configure their sense of Britishness around their own social positions as a woman and Scot respectively. Finally, these findings maintain that the …

Premiering Pierrot Lunaire, From Berlin To New York: Reception, Criticism, And Modernism, Clara S. Schauman

Masters Theses

The relationship between a composer, his critics, and the public, presents a series of interactions through which to study the historical and artistic culture of a given society and its citizens. This study examines the Berlin (1912) and the New York (1923) premieres of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in order to demonstrate the importance of cultural context in forming critical reaction. I find that the cultural modernism and the relevance of the commedia dell’arte in Berlin led to an overall positive audience reaction despite Schoenberg’s unfamiliar compositional idiom. In contrast, the different cultural emphases in New York and the influence …

From Triumph To Tragedy: African American Soldiers Fight For Citizenship And Manhood In The Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War, Le'trice Danyell Donaldson

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to provide a re-examination of the black soldier in the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War. Specifically, by adding a gender analysis, this study will demonstrate that black soldiers fought in the war for two principle reasons: first, it was a means of exercising their citizenship; and secondly, it was a means of demonstrating that they were real men. Reflecting on an era when proving one's manhood was a national obsession--this thesis provides a critical window through which we can reconstruct their motivations for fighting in America's first overseas war.

Liberalism, Communitarianism, And The Search For Utopia, Jennifer Marie Vanden Heuval

Masters Theses

This thesis traces the development of utopian literature through the lens of the liberal-communitarian debate. As Jürgen Habermas asserts, utopian thought plays a vital role in the positive development of society. Habermas also observes that utopian energies are failing in modern society and that this limits our ability to achieve an affirmative community. I agree with Habermas’s assessment and therefore here I examine literary representations of utopia with the hope that utopian energies can be revived. As I argue here, literary utopias can inspire and guide us towards positive societal change. In chapter one, I examine the utopias of the …

The Politics Of Abstraction: Race, Gender, And Slavery In The Poetry Of William Blake, Edgar Cuthbert Gentle

Masters Theses

This study examines the relationship between the poetry of William Blake and the abolitionist movement gaining force in England from 1789-1793. The poems The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) and "The Little Black Boy" (1789) express sympathy with this movement, depicting racial prejudice and oppression in unsparing ways. However, other aspects of the poems threaten to undercut this message, such as the equation of corruption with black imagery and purity with white imagery. This is a sign of Blake's limited scientific and theological understanding of race, which leads to an inadequate portrayal of enslaved Africans. Because his interests …

Computerized Music Theory Placement Exams And Correlations Between Placement Levels And Demographics, Sarah Catherine Bailey

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to determine if there are relationships between theory placement level and major, major instrument, gender, ethnicity, and the location of the student’s high school of entering freshmen music students. The hypothesis was that there would be a relationship between instruments and scores on sections of the test, and that there would be no significant relationship between gender or ethnicity and score. It was also hypothesized there would be a relationship between major and/or location of the student’s high school and score.

Sixty students at least 18 years old auditioning for the University of Tennessee’s …

A Proposal For An Open Source System Of Development And Research For Music Cai, Daniel E. Clouse

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the historical use of music Computer Assisted lnstruction (CAl) software to show that research on music CAl has decreased and to propose using a new method of coding and distribution (open source) that might increase research opportunities using music CAl. The reduction in research is due in part to limitations in existing software, as well as the practices of the music community. An open source CAl program called Mobius is described as an example of how open source programming can offer new opportunities for music researchers.

CAl software has played a prominent …

Politics Of Representations: Snow Man And Bait By David Albahari, Damjana Mraovic

Masters Theses

The thesis analyzes stereotypes about the Balkans in two novels, Snow Man (1995) and Bait (1996), by contemporary Serbian writer David Albahari (b. 1948), and how these assumptions, mostly imposed by the West and its tradition of reading the East/the Balkans, are internalized or problematized in these works. This thesis also includes a new, original interview with Albahari conducted by the thesis author. The thesis addresses a change in Albahari’s poetics from metafiction typical for the 1970s and 1980s, to epic forms, which encapsulate the totality of historical experience, in the 1990s. Ultimately, the thesis points out a paradox in …

Angelo Soliman Then And Now: A Historical And Psychoanalytical Interpretation Of Soliman Depictions In Modern German Literature, Erin Elizabeth Read

Masters Theses

This paper explores the general historical context and one particular theoretical context of modern depictions of Angelo Soliman, a court moor who lived in Vienna from 1755 to 1796. The historical context encompasses what we know of Soliman’s biography, his biographers and their research processes. The theoretical context encompasses Frantz Fanon’s application of psychoanalysis to the black man in his book Black Skin, White Masks (1952). These contexts inform an analysis of two modern theatrical depictions of Soliman: Ludwig Fels’ play Soliman (1991) and Andreas Pflüger and Lukas Holliger’s comic opera Der schwarze Mozart (2005). The changes these two authors …

The Transformation Of The King's Mountain Victors, Michael Lynch

Masters Theses

Hank Messick’s 1976 book on the backwoods militia’s victory over a large Tory force at King’s Mountain is not what most historians would consider to be a full-scale, academic treatment. Lightly documented but vibrantly written, King’s Moutain: The Epic of the Blue Ridge “Mountain Men” in the American Revolution falls squarely in the category of popular narrative. But Messick’s account is as firmly situated in a particular body of interpretation as the most rigorous historiographical work. The most interesting portion of King’s Mountain is the introduction, in which Messick explains his motives in devoting an entire volume to the Whig …

The Propoganda Of Endurance: Identity, Survival, And British Trench Newspapers In The First World War, Neal Alexander Davidson

Masters Theses

This study explores the newspapers produced by British officers and men on the Western Front during the First World War. Although subject to censorship, significant scope was granted to the writers and editors of trench journals to express a seemingly strange combination of piety, humor, anger, and sadness concerning the course of the war. Trench newspapers therefore functioned as a cultural space in which the privations and competing desires of military life could be mediated. Through the juxtaposition of varying tones and views of the war, trench newspapers ultimately served to reinforce the hegemonic culture and values of the British …

The Practicality Of The Abhidhammattha-Sangaha, Jeffrey Wayne Bass

Masters Theses

This study centers on a close analysis of the Abhidhammattha-Sangaha-- a compendium of Abhidhamma philosophy written by a Sri Lankan monk named Acariya Anuruddha Mahathera sometime between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Through a detailed comparison of the Abhidhammattha-Sangaha to its sources, I am able to demonstrate that the text represents an important innovation in the Abhidhamma tradition. First of all, in the Sangaha, the building blocks of its primary source are rearranged by degrees of meditative attainment. We will see that the Sangaha's author systematized the prior material into a clearly stratified map of meditative states. Also, in his …

Living With Curious Pain, Casie Janelle Fedukovich

Masters Theses

"Living with Curious Pain" is a collection of poems written between August 2004 and March 2006. This collection largely focuses on the broad mining history of Southern West Virginia, and some of the pieces closely examine the lineage of the Vances, a mining family still living in the area. "Living with Curious Pain" is divided into two parts, which delineate the poems by their content. "Breathing Lessons" concerns itself with unearthing the hidden histories of mining families, kept silent by cultural constructions. "Body Lessons" shifts the focus away from history and looks deeply at the effects of such history on …

Hitlerian Jurisprudence: American Periodical Media Responses To The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1945-1948, Mcmillan Houston Johnson

Masters Theses

Since its conclusion, jurists, legal scholars, and historians have heralded the Nuremberg Trial as a landmark in international jurisprudence. Scholars have highlighted Nuremberg’s prosecution of those responsible for the Holocaust, and applauded the trials’ conviction of war criminals. These precedents have continued to inform discussions of war crimes and international law for the last sixty years. More recently, commentators have invoked Nuremberg’s positive legacy in support of the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic and attempts to create an international criminal court.

This paper examines popular periodical responses to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial between 1945 and 1948. It describes the nature …

What Is Left, Andrew Michael Najberg

Masters Theses

The purpose of this project was to create a collection of poetry that examines the self as a muted element in foreign environments. When placed in a foreign culture, our roles as observers are enhanced due to our limited inclusion within the perceptual frame of references of the cultures and people we observe. Ultimately, the foreigner becomes a parallel sub-system of the dominant foreign culture until such time that he or she makes a direct intrusion into that culture. This level of mutability allows the observer access to cultural elements and interactions inaccessible from within the cultural identity.

The principle …

Reviving Germany: The Political Discourse Of The German Fatherland Party, 1917-1918, Troy Christopher Dempster

Masters Theses

This study will inspect the propaganda of the German Fatherland Party found in rightist newspapers published in Berlin, the capital of the German Empire. This propaganda explained the goals of the party, which included a desire to win a Siegfrieden (Victory Peace), to increase the Siegeswillen (Will for Victory) within the German population, to annex vast territory in the East and West, and to create a unified block of citizens within Germany by reviving the ancient myth of Deutschtum or an essential "Germanness." In response to this new nationalistic party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (S P D) organized …

Zen And The Samurai: Rethinking Ties Between Zen And The Warrior, James Earl Hataway Jr.

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine the supposed ties between the samurai warrior of Japan and the Zen school of Buddhism. It has been suggested by numerous authors that Zen served as the foundation of warrior training methods and ethical codes. This study suggests that the relationship between warrior and Zen has been overstated, and the image of the Zen warrior was largely a product of intense nationalism that dominated Japanese political and religious institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.