Arts and Humanities Commons^™

What Is "Speedrunning?" Industry, Community, Identity, Riley Scott Kelfer

Senior Scholar Papers

What drives interaction in online contexts? How do “internet communities” form, and how do they generate a sense of interpersonal closeness? I address such questions through a cultural analysis of video game “speedrunning,” an emergent online community that some commentators have noted for its remarkable commitment to compassion and mutual advancement. While several game scholars have explored the narrative and temporal implications of the live-streamed and recorded speedrun, few have directed their attention to the ways in which video game speedrunning, as a community of dedicated practitioners and spectators, is informed by historical precedents and contemporary social processes. I place …

More Than Just Nonsense Verse?: The Language Of Dr. Seuss And Children's Literacy, Nicole Hewes

Senior Scholar Papers

In this Senior Scholars project I wanted to demonstrate that Dr. Seuss books are much more than just nonsense verse. For the first part of my project, I familiarized myself with all of his texts and scrutinized his use of language in a textual analysis. By scrutinizing Geisel’s use of language and wordplay, I hoped to isolate some characteristics that make a Seuss book different from other types of stories and texts. The second part of my project was an empirical study that tested what influence reading a real Seuss text versus a fake Seuss text has on students’ performance …

Interlocking Oppressions Of Sisterhood: (Re) Presenting The Black Woman In Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelsy, Catherine Downing

Senior Scholar Papers

Blackface minstrelsy began as a racially derisive form of early nineteenth century white working class stage entertainment that essentialized blackness into an object of social ridicule. Racial burlesque coupled with gender performance stigmatized. popular representations of black womanhood. Repetition of blackface minstrelsy's negative images solidified the black woman's stereotyped mainstream identity as a subordinate group with equally overlapping social forms of oppression. Within the first fifty years of repetitious blackface performance, the objectifying images of black female inferiority constructed a dominant American racist and sexist ideology. The black woman was either the Mammy or the Jezebel. For blacks, the only …

You Know How I Know You're Gay? : Masculinity And Homophobia In Mainstream Comedy, Lijah Barasz

Senior Scholar Papers

You Know How I Know You're Gay?: Masculinity and Homophobia in Contemporary Mainstream Comedy is a three-part senior scholars project that consists of a critical analysis of homophobic humor in contemporary mainstream comedy, an original feature-length comedy script entitled Don 't Be that Freshman, and a DVD of selected scenes from Don't Be that Freshman. The critical analysis first establishes the existence of homophobic humor in mainstream comedy and then links this homophobia to masculine anxiety, applying the ideas set forth in Michael Kimmel's essay, "Masculinity as Homophobia," to contemporary, mainstream, homosocial comedies. The paper goes on to examine audience …

The Econometric Value Of Silence And Noise As Seen By A Non-Practicing Marxist, Stephen Whelpley

Senior Scholar Papers

A Collection of Poetry and Fiction

Ghetto Feminism: Neo-Black Feminism For The Black Hip-Hop Generation(S), Chyann L. Oliver

Senior Scholar Papers

"Ghetto Feminism: Neo-Black Feminism for the Black Hip-Hop Generation (s)" is a feminism that addresses the simultaneity of race, sex, and class oppressions that subjugate black people of the hip-hop generation who reside in the urban ghetto or ghetto like conditions. It is a feminism that deconstructs the hypersexualized, racialized and classist representations of black people in hip-hop culture. The goal of this feminism or feminist thought is to raise the black hip-hop generationer's critical consciousness in order to encourage resistance to distorted images of themselves. Continuing with the tradition of multivocality or heteroglossia, Ghetto Feminism uses poetry, scholarly essays, …

Politian: A Critical Analysis, Jessica A. Martin

Senior Scholar Papers

Why even look at Politian, an unfinished failure? While it is true that Politian was a failure for its time and surely one of Poe's least successful attempts, it may improve on a stage with a more modern perspective. If not solely for examination of Poe's artistic effort, Politian also warrants a closer read due to its historical relevance by way of Beauchamp and Sharp. Poe, a most fastidious editor of his work, was ultimately required because of financial constraints to lay aside Politian in its unfinished state. As a result, the unedited Politian may provide insight into the writing …

Drawing From Words, Hannah E. Smith

Senior Scholar Papers

The following report is an account of my growth and exploration as a painter. The project that was the springboard for this exploration was to create a series of paintings inspired by the fiction that I had previously written as a creative writing minor. I felt that writing could be used as a stimulus to create great paintings, and that painting and writing were perhaps more connected than I knew. I wished to pursue this connection through painting because I believed that it might be possible to capture many of the elements of a story on canvas. I looked to …

Fata Morgana, Erin Rogers

Senior Scholar Papers

Fora Morgana began as Traveling Light in April, 2000, a Senior Scholars project exploring the performing arts of dance and poetry. I wanted to combine these two an forms into an interdisciplinary research project and, ultimately, a full-length dance work for a production incorporating set design, sound design, costume design, and lighting. During the months following the project's conception, I began to focus the background research on Arthurian literature and legend.

La Esperanza, Elizabeth Tippet

Senior Scholar Papers

Poems

Celtic Traditions, Lindsay L. Stewart

Senior Scholar Papers

The essence of the project is to approach the legends and myths through the senses, placing them in the memory and into the viewers imagination by means of narrative imagery and fantastical sounds. Despite growing up on the west coast of Scotland I never knew the stories of the Celts, they have only recently become a part of my imagination. They are fresh to my mind, full of life, color and mystery. The world of the Celts is a wonderful place to play in. I do not propose to pass on a dictatorial view of the stories I have found. …

Siamese Connection, Rosecrans Baldwin

Senior Scholar Papers

No abstract provided.

We Are Not Who We Are, Patrick Bishop

Senior Scholar Papers

No abstract provided.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy The Man And The Myth, Scott Shirey

Senior Scholar Papers

The nation saw Lovejoy as representative of republican ideals; virtue. temperance. liberty, and self-sacrifice. Lovejoy had sacrificed his life for the Republic in defense of democratic values. Lovejoy was also a man who feared absolute power. It led him to despise Catholicism (under its Papal authority), fear immigration, and eventually despise the slaveholder. American's saw Lovejoy's stance against the mob as a truly republican act The Reverend Edward Beecher, President of Illinois College and close friend of Lovejoy, immediately recognized the significance of Lovejoy's death.

Painting Meditation On The Human Form, Hillary Ellen Kane

Senior Scholar Papers

The arching limb of a tree defined a periphery of space from which the gentle curve of a sleeping figure arose in my mind, barely emerging from the surrounding atmosphere (fig. 1). This painting, painted in the fall of 1995, marked my initial interest in the human figure as a subject of formidable intrigue, challenge and inspiration. The human form, by its immediate relationship to a human audience, posed a source of emotive expression and psychological introspection that I felt could strike a resonant cord -in the sensitivity of the viewers. Admiringly poring over the works of Kathe Kollowitz, Gustav …

Medical Treatment And Care Of Hospitalized Maine Women, 1874-1882, Jenny Higgins

Senior Scholar Papers

The construction of the ideal Victorian woman as an invalid, weak, delicate, and perpetually prone to illness could not have been maintained without the support of the medical profession. Late nineteenth-century medical ideas embodied and incorporated, explicitly or implicitly, social ideas about women-their nature, role, abilities, and limitations. The medical profession was persuasive and powerful in shaping women's roles, and this influence took on a wide variety of forms. This paper examines one of these forms-the treatment of women in a hospital setting, and how this treatment both reflected and perpetuated existing social understandings of Victorian femininity and gender roles. …

The Portrayal Of Enemies In Propaganda During The Russian And French Revolutions, Carole Reid

Senior Scholar Papers

This study investigates propaganda aimed at depicting "the enemy" during the Terror period of the French Revolution (1792-1794) and during the Revolutionary and Civil War periods in Russia (1917-1920). The two periods under consideration are congruous for several reasons. First, during each period the regime in control solidified its power and became more repressive in an effort to further its revolutionary agenda. Both the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks were minority groups who gained control of countries in transition, and each government believed that unity among the people was essential in order to lead their country forward. When the Jacobins gained …

Beyond The Threshold: Life In The New Russia, Amanda Sprang

Senior Scholar Papers

Amanda Sprang spent nine months, from September of 1995 to May of 1996, studying at Colby College's program in St. Petersburg, Russia. Through contacts made during previous trips to Russia in middle and high school, Amanda was able to quickly rekindle her old friendships and make new ones with many young Russians from different backgrounds. The following work is a collection of twelve essays about life in the New Russia. The essays are framed by a foreword and an epilogue that help place the entire work in a historical context. Although the theme of each essay emerges from a particular …

Dead Town Dreaming -- A Novella And Selected Poems, Caleb Dolan

Senior Scholar Papers

No abstract provided.

Dwelling In Possibility: Aestheticizing Identity In African American Women's Fiction, Whitney Glockner

Senior Scholar Papers

African American women writers define aesthetics through their negotiation of identity in the politicized loci of space, place and voice. In the balkanization of such issues of voice and space, we can see the ways that the emergent selfis embodied and aestheticized in literature. To do so creates a more tactile and "artfull" representation of the self rather than a representation of identity as a mere abstract concept. To use written language to express the self is to carry processes of selfdefinition for black women into the realm of creative production. For women, especially black women, who are a politically …

Modersohn-Becker Und Rilke: Künstlerische Affinitäten, Maylene Cummings

Senior Scholar Papers

No abstract provided.

Power Outage, And Other Poems, Wendy Oram-Smith

Senior Scholar Papers

Contents -

At the Starry Night Cafe

AIbino Buffalo

Monteverdi In The Rain

Lust

Litter

Poem After The Chinese

Cleere's Pub

Treasure Island

Nipple

Periwinkle

Talkeetna

Beached Whale

Spending Christmas in the land of Enchantment

Easter

Poem For Emily Dickinson

Second Hand Gifts

The Power Outage

October

In The Observation Car

Westerly

Realistic Abstractions, Kenneth Bailey

Senior Scholar Papers

This Senior Scholar project has been an attempt to develop an abstract style of representation. My title, "Realistic Abstraction", seems to be a contradiction, but I am using this terminology to refer to the degree of abstraction that I attempted to reach in my work, where the nonobjective elements are equally as important as the representational elements. I used my prior studies in realistic rendering as a starting point in a quest for a higher degree of abstraction than I had been previously using in my art. I wished to maintain an equal sense of reality and abstraction because I …

The American Indian : The Creation Of A National Native American Heritage, 1880-1920, Brian A. Schwegler

Senior Scholar Papers

In this project I examine several of the ideological forces acting upon Native American cultures from 188Q..1920. During this period, Native Americans were subject to extraordinary pressure to assimilate, constituting a virtually bloodless war against traditional Native American identities. As a result the ideology of the majority society infiltrated Native American tribal groups and helped to break down the traditional borders of tribal identity. I focus on three major forces leading to the shift from traditional bounded identity to nebulous Pan-Indian identity. The first is the influence of the federal government and its policies, especially concerning Native American education. The …

Slack Tide, Allison Alsip

Senior Scholar Papers

No abstract provided.

Sculptural Inquiry Into Geometric And Organic Forms, Gregory Christopher

Senior Scholar Papers

In my Senior Scholar project I manipulated simple geometric shapes in an attempt to construct organic forms using transparent planes, created areas, and implied volumes. The sculpture, which was influenced by my interest in the Renaissance, Russian Constructivism, and the Minimalists, can best be divided into five series; each series is identified by a physical and a conceptual change of ideas. The first series focused on the conceptual ideas of each piece and expressed a lack of concern for the physical properties of the objects. The work progressed during the project; the focus of other series shifted from a purely …

Intent And Method: A Study Of Female Characters In Aeschylean And Euripidean Drama, Elizabeth H. Strafaci

Senior Scholar Papers

Aeschylus and Euripides used tragic female characters to help fulfill the purpose of religious celebration and to achieve the motivation of public reaction. The playwrights, revising myths about tragic woman and redefining the Greek definition of appropriate femininity, supported or questioned the very customs which they changed. Originally composed as part of a religious festival for Dionysus, the god of wine, revelry and fertility, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides were evaluated by Aristotle. He favored Aeschylus over Euripides, but it appears as if his stipulations for tragic characterization do not apply to Aeschylean and Euripidean women. Modem critics question …

Gravity: A New Play By Greg Belanger, Greg Belanger

Senior Scholar Papers

Gravity was first performed at Strider Theatre, Colby College in Waterville, Maine. It was directed by the author with the following cast: STEVEN: Harold Withee PAMELA: Sue Larsen JEREMY: Jason Reifler IXXTOR: Amanda Starr MOTHER: Catherine C. Coyne BREIT: Scott W. Cole TONI: Laura Smishkiss

Softly Spoken, Sarah Inman

Senior Scholar Papers

No abstract provided.

Dust, Kristin J. Winkler

Senior Scholar Papers

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. UNDER THE CARPET

Running Away

Call Me Sinner

Behind the Wheel

How It Is

Graffiti

The Father

On My Street

II. WINDSTORM

The Match

The Thunderstorm

Cedaredge Locker Plant

It's All Life

Something In Beige

A Wish

Peeling

Praying