Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Social Construction Of Authorship: An Investigation Of Subjectivity And Rhetorical Authority In The College Writing Classroom, Johannah Rodgers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although we use the term author on a daily basis to refer to certain individuals, bodies of work, and systems of ideas, as Michel Foucault and other critics have pointed out, attempting to answer the question “What is an Author?” is by no means a simple proposition. And, starting from the position that there is no single, or definitive answer to this complex question, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the genealogy of authorship by investigating the ways in which conceptions of the author have informed models of the writing subject in the field of rhetoric …

Edward Durell Stone: Perception And Criticism, Mary Anne Hunting

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The work of the New York City-based architect Edward Durell Stone (1902-1978) has been subject to ongoing critical controversy. Stone achieved phenomenal success, beginning in the 1950s as an architect in the period of the Cold War, with buildings on four continents, in thirteen foreign countries, and in thirty-two states. But an examination of his stylistic progression reveals that Stone increasingly fell out of critical favor as he shifted modernism from the International Style to a more "romantic" modern aesthetic that incorporated decoration along with aspects of monumentality, regionalism, historicism, and fantasy—a progression that can be traced in six of …

The Paradoxes Of Intimacy In Early Modern Drama, Brenda Marina Henry-Offor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the early modern period intimacy was neither well-defined nor discussed in the drama in the way that we do today. My dissertation is an examination of the paradoxical nature of intimacy in Renaissance drama and the impact of space on this intimacy. I am looking at the behavior of married couples and same-sex couples within the home during the early modern period. To elucidate my theory of intimacy I have chosen the plays: Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness, William Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and John Webster's …

The Qualitative Character Of Spatial Perception, Douglas Meehan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ordinary perceiving relies heavily on our sensing the spatial properties of objects, e.g., their shapes, sizes, and locations. Such spatial perception is central in everyday life. We safely cross a street by seeing and hearing the locations of oncoming vehicles. And we often identify objects by seeing and feeling their distinctive shapes.

To understand how we perceive spatial properties, we must explain the nature of the mental states figuring in spatial perception. The experience one has when seeing a cube, e.g., differs from the experiences one has when seeing other shapes, e.g., spheres and pyramids. We must explain how such …

Engaging The Eighties: Ethics, Objects, Periods, Kevin L. Ferguson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a recent decade in American history whose unique notion of self-periodization generated important questions of ethical engagement and withdrawal. Situated during a time of an increasingly complex relationship between literature and theory, thinkers in the 80s self-consciously shifted towards making claims about their present moment which were based on the logic of rupture, and which thus created an either-or logic of pessimism or optimism in response to this rupture. These kinds of self-periodizing notions generally are collected under the rubric "postmodernism" and the first chapter deals with a transatlantic movement between theorists such as Fredric Jameson and …

Eliminative Materialism And The Distinction Between Common Sense And Science, Nada Gligorov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is one of the premises of eliminative materialism that commonsense psychology constitutes a theory. There is agreement that mental states can be construed as posited entities for the explanation and prediction of behavior, and that the nature of those states is dependent on the theory that features them. Disputes arise when it comes to the range of the commonsense theory of mental states. In chapter one, I review major arguments concerning the span and nature of folk psychology. In chapter two, relying on arguments by Quine and Sellars, I argue that the precise scope of commonsense psychology cannot be …