Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Valley Lost To Time, Washington C. Pearce

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis delivers a playable and functional module for the 5 th Edition of the World’s Greatest Role-Playing Game. The Critical Introduction uses reader response and performance theory to create a framework for reading role-playing games as literature, explains some of the recent scholarship surrounding role-playing games, and details the creative process and work of the creative thesis.

In A Valley Lost to Time, Adventurers recruited by the Trellin Prime Minister are sent westward, over the Drazlin mountain range, with a mission to discover the fate of a decades-lost failed colony. The route is long and treacherous, passing through a …

Angel Babies Ascending To Heaven A Family Saga Of Death Across Cultures, Heidi Riboldi

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis is a microhistory focused on infant death and burial practices in Spain and Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century. The study uses primary sources from biographical journal pages, vital records, and notarial documents. The biographical journal pages are eleven loose pages written by Pablo Montaña that provide information about his family's births, marriages, and deaths, for four generations. Vital records for birth, marriage, and death events were found in the local parish and municipal archives in Cañizo, Spain, and the Catholic Diocese Archive in Zamora, Spain, Archivo Histórico Diocesano de Zamora. Notarial records like wills …

A New Age Of Film Music: Emotional Responses To Midi Mockups Versus Orchestral Recordings, Amberlee Woodhouse

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Music software is becoming advanced enough to make it difficult for the average person to tell the difference between a MIDI mockup and a recording of an orchestra. This study compares the emotional responses subjects have to electronically created recordings to the emotional responses subjects have to orchestral recordings. Little research has been done on this subject. I hypothesized that the two recordings would communicate the same emotions, but the live recordings would create more emotional intensity. 65 subjects between the ages of 18 and 24 from various musical backgrounds were tested. They listened to both types of recordings of …

"I Don't Believe One-Half Of It Myself": The Role Of Folk Groups In Supernatural Legend Interpretation, Melanie Kimball

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A range of interpretations can characterize supernatural legends as religious or non-religious—or somewhere in between. Religious audiences quickly categorize supernatural religious legends as such, but they hesitate when interpreting supernatural non-religious legends and supply multiple interpretations. Folk group paradigms influence these interpretations, and a variety of factors in turn influence which paradigms are used. The most important of these factors is a hierarchy of folk groups, which each individual has uniquely created and to which they refer when interpreting stories and experiences. When the most important of these folk groups fails to fully interpret a narrative, individuals will use folk …

“I—I Can’T Talk About Things”: The Tragedy Of Post-Wwii Civilian Masculinity In Agatha Christie’S Taken At The Flood, Rebekah Olsen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which Agatha Christie’s Taken at the Flood serves to illustrate the fragility and ultimate destabilization of masculinity immediately following WWII. Christie illustrates this break by comparing two men, David Hunter and Rowley Cloade who represent types of men in Britain’s postwar landscape. Throughout the text, David Hunter is framed as a dangerous and dreadful young man, serving as a representation of post-war fears about demobbed soldiers attacking young women. However, the story really revolves around the civilian trauma that Rowley Cloade has sustained through his wartime role as a farmer, which comes from repression …

Rosal De María By Soror Maria Do Céu: A Pedagogical Edition And Literary Analysis, Bailey Willden

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Soror Maria do Céu’s Rosal de María, second of the five plays published in her work Triunfo do Rosario, is an exemplary work of early modern convent drama because the didactic, allegorical purposes of the play interact with rich symbolism and mastery of the literary conventions of the day. Written to perform as part of the celebrations for the Feast of the Rosary, Rosal de Maria fulfills the same purpose of the Rosary itself, leading worshipers in their contemplation on the life of Christ. She creates a living Rosary on the stage by employing elements like floral imagery, transferred classicism …

“The Only Story I’Ll Be Able To Tell”: An Analysis Of Shame And Queer Identity In Gothic American Campus Novels, Aubrey Dickens

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes shame and queerness in contemporary gothic American campus novels, also known as “dark academia” novels. The thesis looks specifically at the novels The Secret History by Donna Tartt, published in 1992 and considered to be the first dark academia novel, and Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, published in 2020 and a more modern adaptation on the subgenre. The two novels deal explicitly with how shame constitutes identity, specifically in regards to individuals who are depicted as queer or outside of heteronormative expectations of sexuality. Queerness in the context of this paper is defined as any portrayal of …

What Is Literary? Teaching Diverse, Literary Young Adult Novels In The Secondary Classroom, Kathryn Taylor

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis defines what makes a novel literary and examines the benefits of introducing Young Adult literature into the English curriculum. The current classical canon that is taught in secondary classrooms consists almost entirely of books written by white, Eurocentric men with a few token novels from women, authors of color, or queer authors. While the books in the classical canon have earned their place there, the rapidly changing demographics in our secondary schools mean that the majority of our students no longer share the same characteristics as these authors. They have largely different life experiences and struggle to connect …

A Social Media Misinformation Label And The Postrhetorical Presidency, Ethan Mcginty

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In May 2020, presidential communication on social media was—for the first time—subject to a misinformation label applied by the social media site on which the communication originated. This development indicates a turning point in social media sites’ relationship with presidential communication and demands adaptation in the scholarly understanding of presidential rhetoric during the present era. Drawing from the theoretical framework of the postrhetorical presidency, I perform dual rhetorical analyses of this landmark artifact. The first round of analysis ignores the label and analyzes the presidential communication alone to understand its function, while the second analysis reveals the rhetorical impact of …

A Moment Of Sanity: Ciceronian Rhetoric In Don Quijote's Arms And Letters Speech, Trevor Mathews

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In chapters 37 and 38 of the Quijote, Don Quijote gives a discourse to his acquaintances at the inn on the superiority of arms to letters. After the speech, his audience at the inn are dumbfounded that someone so insane could give such a convincing speech, and many believed him to be sane for his presentation. This questioning of his insanity is due, in part, to his use of classical forensic structure and Ciceronian style in the speech. Cervantes certainly grants respect to Cicero within the Quijote and frames the arms and letters speech after Cicero’s forensic speeches. The speech’s …

Peculiar Students Of A Peculiar Institution: A Historical Analysis Of Racial Minority Students And Race Relations At Brigham Young University As Presented In The Banyan From 1911-1985, Grace Ann Soelberg

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the yearbook for Brigham Young University which ran from 1911-1985. It analyzes the ways in which white students not only asserted and defended their whiteness, but how they superimposed narratives and identities upon other groups. Black students were largely ignored and their inclusion depended upon the schools need to defend itself against accusations of racism and for white students to remain in racial innocence. White students also exhibited various anti-Black behaviors in an attempt to distance themselves from blackness to attain whiteness. Native American students were homogenized and forced to fit into the white students and administrations …

Musical “Conquest”: The Spanish Use Of Music In The Spiritual Conquest Of The Nahua Peoples Of Sixteenth-Century Mexico, John Richardson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Historians have grown more interested in Spanish Conquest and colonialism in the last century. While earlier historians saw the conquest through a more euro-centric lens, recent historians have tried to take a more nuanced approach to understanding the conquest. Within this research, historians are questioning traditional narratives of the "spiritual conquest," or the conversion of native peoples to Christianity. Scholars have shown that "conquest" is not the best term for this process, as there was much more give and take at play.

My research seeks to strengthen this narrative of religious accommodation through the lens of music. The transmission of …

Tendu To Tango Across The Lifespan: An Argument For Prioritizing Fixed Ballet Instruction As A Contemplative Practice For The Adolescent Mind And Social Dance Instruction For Healthy Aging In The Elderly Population, Jenica Barker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Why dance? This thesis investigates and provides arguments for prioritizing different dance training methods and styles across a person’s lifespan for maximum neurological and mental benefit. Beyond the interpersonal, motivational, and creative skills it delivers, dance training provides significant neural benefits for the developing adolescent brain (ages 10-24). Additionally, there are significant implications for dance’s aid in the prevention or delay of symptoms of healthy aging, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.

According to the synthesis of research provided in this thesis, fixed ballet training is an optimal form of ballet training for adolescents because of its features consistent with …

Censorship And The Satanic Verses: Policing Blasphemy In A Secular World, Alixa Brobbey

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Free speech is currently a hotly debated topic in the world of arts. This thesis traces the history and abolition of blasphemy law in England in light of its relationship with censorship in English literature. I examine the Rushdie Affair and its legacy, particularly in comparison to the Gay News trial. Building on previous scholarship, I examine the arguments that hate speech laws serve as a replacement for blasphemy law. I conclude with the suggestion that hate speech laws be amended to include a clause specifying that works of artistic merit cannot be prosecuted under such laws, mirroring the language …

The Man In The Tree: The Fantastic As A Bridge Between The Ideal And The Real, Weber Griffiths

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the effect of genre on storytelling, specifically the effect of the Fantastic in creating, within narrative, intrinsic meaning. In life and fiction, there exists a gap between what is ideal and what is real, a gap of mortality. Human’s struggle with this gap results in many forms of creation and meaning making. The Fantastic, as defined by literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, seeks to bridge this gap. In this examination, we take Todorov’s literary critique and apply it to four films of modern fantasy, showcasing the language and mechanics of the genre and its effectual way of bridging …

Connected: A Return To Ecological Awareness In Traditional And Modern Media, Jacob Reese

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis responds to the claim that traditional literary forms and narrative structures have contributed to the global climate crisis by perpetuating anthropocentric viewpoints and reinforcing the modern fixation on progress in industrial cultures. Ecocritics argue that by creating an unrealistic separation between humans and their environment in their narratives, artists are allowing the ecologies and spaces which create a cohesive world to become a mere setting for the social or psychological human drama rather than serving as an integral part of the narrative. With these criticisms in mind, this thesis provides an analysis of three pieces of traditional and …

A Look At Coco Chanel, Fashion, And History: An Introduction To And Translation Of La Construcción De La Marca Personal De Coco Chanel A Través De Sus Fotografías, Rilee Andros

Undergraduate Honors Theses

La construcción de la marca personal de Coco Chanel a través de sus fotografías was originally written in Spanish by Inmaculada Urrea Gómez as her PhD dissertation in 2015. This thesis includes a translation of the prologue, introduction to section 1, and section 1.1 of Urrea’s dissertation, preceded by a translator’s introduction. The introduction discusses the content of the translated text, provides insight into the translation process, and defines important terms for the reader. The introduction also explores the ideas of translation theorists Hans Vermeer, Lawrence Venuti, and Anthony Pym, comparing and contrasting their ideas in order to explain why …

The Fatale Monstrum And The Nasty Woman: Gendered Political Representations Of Cleopatra Vii And Hillary Rodham Clinton, Emma Baker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the use of gender expectations in representations of two historically significant and politically powerful women: Cleopatra VII and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Though their situations were in some ways quite different, each of these women crafted her public image carefully, using both masculine and feminine gender expectations to represent herself as a powerful, capable leader and as a strong, caring mother. Their political enemies similarly drew on both masculine and feminine gender norms in order to represent these women both as dangerous, emasculating, monstrous figures who had to be conquered and as weak and incapable of leadership. The …

Journey Into The Self: Essays On Biculturalism, Heidi Moe Graviet

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines what it means to exist as a bicultural being and how one approaches creating and negotiating a multicultural identity in terms of names, war, religion, belonging, and loss. In Narrow Road to the Interior, Matsuo Bashō embarks upon a journey of transcendence and self-discovery into the interior regions of Japan. In doing so, he establishes a Japanese writing tradition that centers around introspective journey-taking and writing oneself into truth and being. This thesis examines, participates in, and expands upon this writing tradition as it follows one Japanese American woman’s attempts to selfhood. Ultimately, it proposes the idea …

Karl G. Maeser: The Mormon Pestalozzian, Renae Myers

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Karl G. Maeser, the founder of Brigham Young Academy (now Brigham Young University), was able to bring progressive education to a pioneer society largely due to his educational and spiritual preparation. He was trained in the pedagogical methods of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi who believed that children learned best inductively, mainly through observation. Pestalozzi also believed that children were worthy of love and respect. Maeser was able to emulate Pestalozzi’s methods in an unprecedented way not only because the doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ aligned so well with Pestalozzi’s methods, but because Maeser strove to have the Spirit of …

From Mercy Seat To Judgment Seat: A Source-Critical Examination Of Priestly Adjudication In The Pentateuch, Tyler Harris

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes evidentiary passages in the Pentateuch through a source-critical lens to better understand the varied adjudicative ideologies they reflect and the role of priests in them. By selecting important pericopes for this analysis through keywords and narrative details, and then by categorizing them according to the pentateuchal source attributions as represented by Richard Elliott Friedman in his The Bible with Sources Revealed, I use a given source’s data to sketch the judicial outlook of said source, including if and to what degree priests operated as judges. Through such a method, this thesis concludes that the Yahwist and …

The Face Of God: Imaginary Space In Pickle Green, Taylor Flickinger

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A foundational premise of adaptation theory is that novels, films, theater, and any other storytelling medium can tell the same story but must do so differently. That is, each medium has its own distinct “language” with varying strengths and weaknesses inherent to its form. However, adaptation theorists have recently started pushing back on the idea that a film “can’t” do the same things as a novel, for example, arguing instead that the language of film and literature is more a result of “habits that are grounded in the history of fashion, taste, and analysis rather than in any specific technical …

The Legacy Of Jazz Poetry In Contemporary Rap: Langston Hughes, Gil Scott-Heron, And Kendrick Lamar, Madison Brasher

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Langston Hughes wrote in “Jazz as Communication that: “Jazz is a great big sea. It washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.” In this paper I assert that the rap music of Kendrick Lamar contains the steady off-beat of jazz and carries out the rhetorical legacy of Hughes’ jazz poetry. By marking the key elements of jazz poetry and tracing their presence in rap music, I will show how these elements create a powerful aesthetic experience for audiences that primes them for the rhetorical messages of the artist. …

Seeking The Feminine Divine: Mormon Women's Religious Authority, Power, And Presence In Rachel Hunt Steenblik's Mother's Milk, Kaitlin Hoelzer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Literary theorists like Hélène Cixous and other French feminists have written about l’écriture feminine, a deconstructive force which allows female writers more freedom from male-dominated areas. Because Christianity has been historically male-dominated, Christian women have long used this idea to great effect, using their writing as a space in which they are free to assert power and authority. Mormonism, which arose in the 1830s during the Second Great Awakening, has grown to reinforce a patriarchal model for both family and church leadership, making Cixous’ separate space of writing necessary for Mormon women of the twenty-first century. The Mormon poet …

A New Oral Poetry: Improvisation And Performance In Robert Lowell's Poetry Readings, Madelyn Taylor

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines elements of improvisation and performance in the poetry readings of Robert Lowell from 1955 to 1977 by analyzing audio recordings of Lowell’s readings and comparing them to his early drafts and published work. As a poet known for incessantly editing his poetry, Robert Lowell uses poetry readings as a venue for experimenting with his poetry before publication, for catering his work to specific audiences, and for memorializing his life in prose. The time period this thesis is concerned with correlates with a rise in New Oral Poetry in the U.S., which created popular new venues for poetry …

Power Struggles: Sovereignty And The Nonhuman In South Africa, Taelin Wilford

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis uses the theoretical backbone of Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign to look at the theme of the nonhuman in connection with sovereignty in three novels representing three major time periods in South Africa. Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness uses the nonhuman in the form of the supernatural to reveal the limits of sovereignty in Colonial South Africa. J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace makes use of the nonhuman in the form of animals to talk about the transient nature of sovereignty in post-Apartheid South Africa. Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City is set in an alternate future South Africa and …

Impartiality: A Comparison Of Legal Processes In The United States And Italy, Robert Borden

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the constitutional guarantees of impartiality granted in both the United States and Italian constitutions. Aided by the presentation of these two constitutional legal systems, this paper will attempt to break apart the elements of each system and point out key differences. By pointing out the differences in these systems including variations in their founding documents, the structure of the courts, the role of the judges, the role of the advocates, and the role of other key players, this paper will show that while individual cases in both countries are exposed to multiple biases throughout the legal process, …

Examining Vergil's Understanding Of Homer Through Nausicaa And Dido, Rebekah Pimentel

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Beyond demonstrating that Latin could achieve lilterary monumentality, the Aeneid filled the Augustan regime with echoes of Homer's ancient heroes. An inseparable component of Homer's tales is also found in the manner which Vergil integrates women and goddesses into Aeneas's odyssey towards founding Rome. I am examining gendered interactions in the Odyssey and Aeneid because I want to understand the differences between Vergil's hero and Homer's so that my reader can appreciate particular nuances in the reception of classical literary models in Augustan Rome. When we examine how Homer shows women helping or hindering Odysseus, we find templates that Vergil …

Symposium Of Laughter: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity And Sociability In George Knapton's Portraits Of The Society Of Dilettanti, Meredith Hanna

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Ideal masculine conduct for aristocratic and bourgeois circles of the British 18^th century entailed polite restraint, and much of the scholarly discussion on 18^th century British masculinity treats politeness and how it was taught and modeled. The Society of Dilettanti, a British antiquarian society whose early members met on the Grand Tour, seemed to flout polite ideals in their portraits by George Knapton, executed from 1740-1749. With consideration to expanding dialogue on the nature of ideal masculine conduct in the 18^th century, this paper asserts that the portraits create, through depictions of alcoholic ritual and interaction with …

“Women Thus Educated”: Transnational Influences On Women’S Arguments For Female Education In Seventeenth-Century England, Miranda Jessop

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores the intellectual history of proto-feminist thought in early modern England and seeks to better understand the transnational elements of and influences on proto-feminist theorists’ arguments in favor of women’s education in the late seventeenth century. A close reading of Bathsua Makin and Anna Maria Van Schurman’s essays in relation to one another, and within their social and historical context, reveals the importance of ideas of religion and social order, especially class, in understanding and justifying women’s education. The metaphysical foundation of Makin’s arguments in favor of women’s education is that the true nature of women, including their …