Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Auden: Body/Mind, Basil Lloyd-Moffett

CMC Senior Theses

On one hand Auden appears the most cerebral of poets. It is said that when he arrived at school, aged eight, he professed himself excited to study the different psychological types, and the cryptic verse that was to emerge over a decade later bears the scars of his reading, psychological or otherwise, as clearly as the relentlessly analytical Dichtung und Wahrheit and other late works.Absorbing and repurposing philosophical, psychological, religious, and scientific works was an essential part of his artistic strategy, and led to credible accusations of plagiarism on a number of occasions.And just as his collaborators and friends mocked …

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Kaboom, Karstin Margaret Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of original poems written between Fall 2018 and Spring 2022.

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Songs Of Eden, Emma Atkinson

Student Research Submissions

Songs of Eden is a collection of short poems that were written during the Spring of 2021 semester as an individual study under the direction of Dr. Teresa Kennedy. The course itself was titled “Songs of the Fall” and fell under the category of ENGL 491. The name of the individual study is a nod to both the fall of man, and the tradition of epic poetry. As such, the project itself centers around the opening chapters of Genesis, focalizing on the persons of Adam and Eve. The work is divided into two main sections, each written from the perspective …

Turning The Tempest For God’S Forgotten: Psalm 42 As Synecdochic Lead Of The Elohistic Psalter, David P. Pettit

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation’s thesis states Ps 42 is the synecdochic lead of the Elohistic Psalter, arguing for a particular type of literary relationship between Ps 42 and this collection (Pss 42-83). As synecdoche, Ps 42 introduces and represents, in microcosm, the themes, imagery, language, and actuational potential of the collection. The lead psalm becomes a lens that affects what aspects and commonalities come to light in the following psalms. This is not merely an intertextual study, however. This study is situated within psalms studies and the long reach of Gerald Wilson’s work and the Shape and Shaping approach to the Psalter. …

Selections From & The Process Of Creating "My Blue Scarf: The Story Of Ruth, A New Play", Abigail Jane Ayulo

Honors Projects

My Blue Scarf: The Story of Ruth, A New Play, provides an adaptation of the Hebrew Book of Ruth that is focused on minority and female voices and experiences. It employs Hebrew poetic verse forms to pay homage to the story’s origins. This style contributes to diversity of voices in English-speaking theatre outside of Western poetics. My Blue Scarf shares a well- known and multicultural story to contribute to the diversity of contemporary American theatre and promote conversation about cross-cultural relationships in a time of division and prejudice. This project consists of eight selected scenes from the larger play and …

Sustaining Lamentation In Traumatic Grief Through The Contemporary Elegy: A Practical Theology Of The Poetics Of Testimony, Patricia Shawn Fawson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project addresses the problem that sustaining lamentation for particular testimonies of bereaved people is not supported culturally or spiritually by current practices of mourning. In a democracy, religious leaders become public theologians who respect and respond to diverse religious, political, historical, and economic interests without losing focus on the individual, family, and corporate systems and the ongoing elements of traumatic grief. In the context of lamentation and memorialization, when spiritual caregiver fail to acknowledge potentials for particular ways of mourning to contribute to empowerment and healing, mourners' grief can be foreclosed.

In North America, the dominant rhetoric of public …

The Greater Torment: Religious And Secular Desire In The Poetry And Criticism Of T.S. Eliot, Katie Buonanno

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Translating Pun And Play - Wordplay And Soundplay In Hosea, Eric Fudge

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

Fudge, Eric, J. Translating Pun and Play: Wordplay and Soundplay in Hosea. Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2018. 312 pp.

Puns and plays of sound are distinguishing features of poetry and proclamation. Poetry uses these phonetic devices to structure passages, create euphony, or evoke emotional responses from audiences. Proclamation, particularly in a live setting, also uses sound to emphasize words or lines that encourage audiences to feel, respond, or memorize. Puns arrive in the form of wordplay, which uses similarity of sounds that create ambiguity. Soundplay also uses similarity of sounds but to establish euphony or aural tagging. These phonetic plays …

House God, Geneva Zane

Senior Projects Spring 2018

A study of faith and its many forms, ranging from the faith a child has in dreams to the God like status of a writer and Their creation.

Guru Nanak: Life, Lessons & Relevancy, Rajdeep Singh Dosanjh

Senior Projects Spring 2017

This senior project is centered on understanding the thought of Nanak the founder of Sikhism. It consist of historiography of Nanak, and understanding the core of Nanak's thought as centered around G-d's Immanence

Seers In Greensand, Michael Lawrence Berger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

My MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on poetry has culminated in a poetry manuscript of 60 pages in length. Many of the poems in this manuscript are inspired by my experiences studying English poetry and literature in this program, with a particular emphasis on devotional and spiritual poetry and poetics. A third of my thesis poem, in fact, came out of my experiences fulfilling the “study abroad” requirement in my MFA. To fulfill that requirement, I embarked on a couple pilgrimage walks through rural parts of the United Kingdom. The longest walk was the one I took from …

T.S. Eliot: A Never-Ending Exploration, Kristina Krupilnitskaya

Honors Thesis

The following thesis explores the work of T.S. Eliot before and after his conversion to the Anglican Church. While the paper explores the stylistic qualities of Eliot's poetry, the main focus of the essay lies in bridging the pre and post conversion works together in order to show that both of the periods were significant in the poet's life. While many critics viewed Eliot's early poetry as a lot more exploratory and challenging, calling his later poetry banal and bland, my essay aims to show that even though the poetry had shifted in its content, its significance, complexity, and experimentality …

The Relief Of The Unreal Life: Poems, Colleen Robertson Abel

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poems takes as its subject desire in its various guises. Religious desire--the human need to find faith and to hope for an afterlife, and the doubt and skepticism in those very needs--is braided together with more earthly desires, as well as with ruminations on artistic ambition. These poems situate themselves within the rich tradition of the postconfessional, transmuting autobiographical elements to form a narrative of marriage, pregnancy, loss and birth that anchors the book. This narrative is juxtaposed with other lyric voices to explore the connections between hunger of all kinds.

Theo-Poetics: Figure And Metaphysics In The Thought Of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Anne Carpenter

Dissertations (1934 -)

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) was a Swiss-Catholic theologian of great importance in the twentieth century. His formal education included a doctorate in literature, which resulted in a massive, three-volume work on the state of German literature and philosophy entitled Der Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (The Apocalypse of the German Soul) - and licentiates in both theology and philosophy. Throughout his life, von Balthasar continued to display a thoroughgoing interest in art and theology. With a background particularly attuned to this link, von Balthasar set out to "recover" the transcendental of beauty in theology, which he argued had been a …

Book Of Rooms, Miranda Arocha Smith

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This book of poems is a meandering journey through various rooms, temporary residences. Lyric poems alternate with prose-poems. In sections such as "Body Orbit" and "Exits and Edges," the poet probes artifacts of memory and culture, investigates her relationship to a variety of places (a monastery, a used bookstore, Taco Bell, a website), and explores silence and the sacred. Of central concern is impermanence and the nature of awareness itself. Grounded in autobiography, the poems reflect time spent in a Buddhist monastery and the city of El Paso, TX.

Reckoning, Wendy Elaine Buffington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work is a collection of lyric poems with a narrative arc.

I Will Sing Unto The Lord A Rhetorical-Narrative Analysis Of The Poem In Exodus 15:1-21, Robert Shreckhise

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

The Song by the Sea (Exodus 15:1-21) has been studied frequently in modem scholarship. A natural and expected question is why study it once again? Despite frequent treatments within the academy, some key aspects of its relationship to the surrounding narrative and its function within that narrative have been neglected. The study advanced here considers the narrative and poem in relationship to one another in their basic bipartite structure, their character portrayals, their plot resolution, and their rhetoric. The resulting analysis presents an understanding of the poem as a hinge between the two main plots of Exodus that is important …

Bayard Taylor's The Prophet: Mormonism As Literary Taboo; Calaveras County Comes Of Age; The Erosion Of Belief In The Poetry Of Clinton F. Larson, Thomas D. Schwartz

Theses and Dissertations

The three papers included in this thesis reflect my development as a graduate student during the course of my master's program at Brigham Young Universtiy. I came to Brigham Young University interested in creative writing and developed a love for research and criticism. My work in nineteenth century American literature led to the first two papers. Both deal with literary history, the first narrow in scope, devoted to a study of the significance of a single play, the second broad in scope, devoted to a study of the unifying thread of anti-sentimentalism in the writings of the major American realists. …

Suggested Criteria For Determining The Antiquity Of The Ancient Poems In The Old Testament, John Miller

Master of Sacred Theology Thesis

Within the Old Testament there is a group of poems which a majority of scholars believe is quite old. In most of the books and articles which have been written on these poems, the songs are designated "ancient" or "archaic" in a rather arbitrary manner. It is the contention of this thesis that the archaic poetry is different from later poetic writing with respect to style, form, and language, and that it is possible to isolate the distinguishing characteristics of ancient poetry and, using them, to form criteria and establish a balance of probability as to the antiquity of a …

Martin Luther's Hymn Texts, With Special Reference To Their Use In Some Hymnals, Luther Engelbrecht

Master of Sacred Theology Thesis

'The purpose of this thesis is to make a general study of the hymn texts of Martin Luther and then, having set the stage, to make ~ a specific study of their use in English-language hymnals today, with a view toward determining the status and possible influence of this small but very important segment of ·the work of the great Reformer. In doing this, I shall attempt to show Luther’s close relationship with and heavy dependence on the past and his great contribution to his own day and.to the future

The Concept Of God In The Poetry Of The American Negro, Mary H. Jones Sr.

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

Many authors have written much about the Negro and religion. Those who know the black man in American readily concede that he is by nature a lover of God, and that this great innate belief manifests itself in his daily life. Books of deep and light reading- some written in prose, others in verse- have been produced by American Negro men and women. Many of their works have mirrored forth the concept of God in the mind of the Afro-American; but this concept has not remained the same- this great faith is at present suffering decay.

The Musical Rendition Of The Psalms In The First Temple, Lawson Fackler Knight

Bachelor of Divinity

The song of the congregation is a devotional form of musical art. The singing, to be sure, is not that of mechanical perfection; there is not to be found the delicate nuances of the artist; but when the entire congregation lifts its heart and voice in the praise and adoration of almighty God, the loving Father, there is a spiritual quality in the music that makes the hymns a magnificent setting for the preaching of God's word. The hymns build up to the climax of the sermon; they frame the sermon in beauty. The singing of hymns is an important …

The Catholic Spirit In Modern Poetry, Anna Lacaze

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation

No abstract provided.