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Human-Computer Interface Design For Online Tutoring: Visual Rhetoric, Pedagogy, And Writing Center Websites, Alice J. Myatt Dec 2010

Human-Computer Interface Design For Online Tutoring: Visual Rhetoric, Pedagogy, And Writing Center Websites, Alice J. Myatt

English Dissertations

This dissertation examines the theory and praxis of taking an expanded concept of the human-computer interface (HCI) and working with the resulting concept to design a writing center website that facilitates online tutoring while fostering a conversational approach for online tutoring sessions. In order to foster a conversational approach, I explore the ways in which interactive digital technologies support the collaborative and communicative nature of online tutoring. I posit that my research will yield a deeper understanding of the visual rhetoric of human-designed computer interfaces in general and writing center online tutoring websites in particular, and will, at the same …


A Sacred People: Roman Identity In The Age Of Augustus, Edwin M. Bevens Dec 2010

A Sacred People: Roman Identity In The Age Of Augustus, Edwin M. Bevens

History Theses

The Romans redefined the nature of their collective identity to be centered on religion and the connection between the Roman people and their gods during the Augustan age, spanning Augustus’ dominance of Roman politics from the late 30s BC until AD 14. This sacral identity was presented through a comprehensive reimagining of Roman history, from the age of myth through the founding of the city and up to the present day, explaining the failures and successes of the city in history. According to Augustan writers, the chaos of the late Republic was due to a decline in piety. They connected …


The Fashioning Of Fanny Fern: A Study Of Sara Willis Parton's Early Career, 1851-1854, Amy S. Porche Dec 2010

The Fashioning Of Fanny Fern: A Study Of Sara Willis Parton's Early Career, 1851-1854, Amy S. Porche

English Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to trace how Sara Willis Parton achieved unprecedented literary celebrity status as Fanny Fern during the first three years of her professional career, 1851-1853. While most critics point to her famously lucrative contract with the most popular newspaper of the 1850s, the New York Ledger, in 1854 as the beginning of her fame, I argue that she had already fully achieved that fame and had done so by writing for small Boston newspapers and publishing a highly successful collection of her articles by 1853. Further, Fern was able to achieve such a high level …


Initiation In The Novellas Of Henry James, Collyn E. Milsted Dec 2010

Initiation In The Novellas Of Henry James, Collyn E. Milsted

English Theses

This Master’s Thesis seeks to explain the process of initiation undergone by Henry James’s characters. Characters are chosen for initiation into forbidden knowledge, and, like the Biblical Adam and Eve, are exiled as a result. Though initiation is erotic, it is not sexual, and society falsely perceives a sexually charged relationship between the initiator and the initiate, also called the complementary pair. The initiate faces exile and death because of his forbidden knowledge. He no longer has a place in his society, which leads to his social death and eventually physical death. James’s reader is initiated along with the characters, …


Writing And Wellness, Emotion And Women: Highlighting The Contemporary Uses Of Expressive Writing In The Service Of Students, Cantice G. Greene Dec 2010

Writing And Wellness, Emotion And Women: Highlighting The Contemporary Uses Of Expressive Writing In The Service Of Students, Cantice G. Greene

English Dissertations

In an effort to connect women’s spiritual development to the general call for professors to reconnect significantly with their students, this dissertation argues that expressive writing should remain a staple of the composition curriculum. It suggests that the uses of expressive writing should be expanded and explored by students and professors of composition and that each should become familiar with the link between writing and emotional wellness. In cancer centers, schools of medicine, and pregnancy care centers, writing is being used as a tool of therapy. More than just a technique for helping people cope with the stresses of loss, …


The Southern Gentleman And The Idea Of Masculinity: Figures And Aspects Of The Southern Beau In The Literary Tradition Of The American South, Emmeline Gros Dec 2010

The Southern Gentleman And The Idea Of Masculinity: Figures And Aspects Of The Southern Beau In The Literary Tradition Of The American South, Emmeline Gros

English Dissertations

The American planter has mostly been presented as the epitome of the romantic cavalier legend that could be found in the fiction of John Pendleton Kennedy to Thomas Nelson Page: a man of chivalric manners and good breeding; a man of good social position; a man of wealth and leisure (Concise Oxford Dictionary). A closer scrutiny of the cavalier and genteel ethos of the time, however, reveals the inherent ideological inconsistencies with the idea of the gentleman itself, as the ideal came to be more and more perceived as an illusion and as challenges to traditional gender stereotypes came to …


Early Medieval Rhetoric: Epideictic Underpinnings In Old English Homilies, Jennifer M. Randall Dec 2010

Early Medieval Rhetoric: Epideictic Underpinnings In Old English Homilies, Jennifer M. Randall

English Dissertations

Medieval rhetoric, as a field and as a subject, has largely been under-developed and under-emphasized within medieval and rhetorical studies for several reasons: the disconnect between Germanic, Anglo-Saxon society and the Greco-Roman tradition that defined rhetoric as an art; the problems associated with translating the Old and Middle English vernacular in light of rhetorical and, thereby, Greco-Latin precepts; and the complexities of the medieval period itself with the lack of surviving manuscripts, often indistinct and inconsistent political and legal structure, and widespread interspersion and interpolation of Christian doctrine. However, it was Christianity and its governance of medieval culture that preserved …


Paradise Found? Black Gay Men In Atlanta: An Exploration Of Community, Tobias L. Spears Dec 2010

Paradise Found? Black Gay Men In Atlanta: An Exploration Of Community, Tobias L. Spears

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This study examines the ways in which Black gay men in Atlanta create and experience community and culture every day, notwithstanding those discursive sources that situate life for Black gay men as particularly troubled. Drawing on ethnographic methods, including participant observation and interviewing, I attempt to show the complexity of Black gay men by exploring their world in Atlanta, Georgia, a city that has increasingly become known as a Black Gay Mecca. Qualitative research examining the ways Black gay men create and experience community has the potential to broaden academic discourses that have increasingly medicalized the Black gay male experience, …


Liminal Resistances: Local Subjections In My Story, Vidheyan, And The God Of Small Things, Priya Menon Dec 2010

Liminal Resistances: Local Subjections In My Story, Vidheyan, And The God Of Small Things, Priya Menon

English Dissertations

This project investigates various ways in which resistance is explored by Kamala Das, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Arundhati Roy in My Story, Vidheyan, and The God of Small Things respec-tively. “Liminal Resistances: Local Subjections in My Story, Vidheyan, and The God of Small Things” aims to examine the workings and creative subversions of hegemonic discourses of caste, class, gender and color within the local milieu of Kerala, India. By exploring the theoreti-cal apparatuses employed in three diverse texts set in Kerala, this project identifies: firstly, Das’s subversion of Nair Kerala’s sense of gendered and casted normativity in My Story; secondly, Adoor’s …


Special Problems For Democratic Government In Leveraging Cognitive Bias: Ethical, Political, And Policy Considerations For Implementing Libertarian Paternalism, J. Aaron Brown Dec 2010

Special Problems For Democratic Government In Leveraging Cognitive Bias: Ethical, Political, And Policy Considerations For Implementing Libertarian Paternalism, J. Aaron Brown

Philosophy Theses

Humans have now amassed a sizable knowledge of widespread, nonconscious cognitive biases which affect our behavior, especially in social and economic contexts. I contend that a democratic government is uniquely justified in using knowledge of cognitive biases to promote pro-democratic behavior, conditionally justified in using it to accomplish ends traditionally within the scope of government authority, and unjustified in using it for any other purpose. I also contend that the government ought to redesign institutional infrastructure to avoid triggering cognitive biases where it is not permitted intentionally to manipulate such biases and to optimize the effects of such biases where …


Turning Back Time: Duration, Simultaneity, And The Timeless In Fitzgerald And Fincher's Benjamin Button, Nathan Wagner Dec 2010

Turning Back Time: Duration, Simultaneity, And The Timeless In Fitzgerald And Fincher's Benjamin Button, Nathan Wagner

English Theses

This MA thesis seeks to apply Henri Bergson’s theory of time to a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” and David Fincher’s film adaptation of the text, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. By applying Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity, timeless moments will be seen to emerge in the text and the film. I place Fitzgerald’s text in context with other seminal modernist works in order to provide a study of the importance of the story within its time period. Through Deleuze’s application of Bergson to cinema, I analyze the evolution of the time-image …


Memory, Ancestors, And Activism/Resistance In Charles Chesnutt’S Uncle Julius, Elizabeth J. West Oct 2010

Memory, Ancestors, And Activism/Resistance In Charles Chesnutt’S Uncle Julius, Elizabeth J. West

English Faculty Publications

Presents literary criticism of the book "The Conjure Woman," a collection of short stories by Charles Chesnutt, in which the author examines the figure of Uncle Julius as a depiction of a revered African American folk hero and trickster. The author comments on the role of collective memory and ancestors in African cosmology, the black folk life of pre- and post-Civil War, and the short story "The Goophered Grapevine" in the book.


Fish From Deep Water, Monica R. Burchfield Aug 2010

Fish From Deep Water, Monica R. Burchfield

English Theses

These poems are lyrical narratives dealing primarily with the joys and sufferings of familial relationships in present and past generations, and how one is influenced and haunted by these interactions. There is a particular emphasis placed on the relationship between parent and child. Other poems deal with passion, both in the tangible and spiritual realms. The poems aim to use vivid figurative language to explore complex and sometimes distressing situations and emotions.


Opening The Window To Edward Whittemore: Systems That Govern Human Experience, Joseph L. Winland Jr. Aug 2010

Opening The Window To Edward Whittemore: Systems That Govern Human Experience, Joseph L. Winland Jr.

English Theses

Edward Whittemore (1933-1995) is a now almost unknown American writer. This project seeks to bring Edward Whittemore to light. Though he has a simple voice and a subtle but vast knowledge of history, he writes with a fantastic imagination and dramatizes a timely but tragic message. In “Part One” of Sinai Tapestry, Whittemore explores the complex relationship between Chaos and Order through the extravagant lives of his major characters, Plantagenet Strongbow and Skanderbeg Wallenstein. Through a biography of Whittemore’s life and a close analysis of Strongbow’s and Wallenstein’s relationship, I will highlight Whittemore’s depth as an author and thinker, make …


The Visual Rhetoric Of Craftsmanship, Amalia K. Gonzales Aug 2010

The Visual Rhetoric Of Craftsmanship, Amalia K. Gonzales

English Theses

Within the existing research about communicative devices within visual rhetoric, most published research exists regarding two-dimensional design such as documents and media graphics. In this paper, I discuss the rhetorical value of handmade items and specifically speak to the ethos that three-dimensional, tangible handmade products inherently possess based upon their visual aesthetic.


Moral Injury And The Puzzle Of Immunity-Violation, Jesse Gero Aug 2010

Moral Injury And The Puzzle Of Immunity-Violation, Jesse Gero

Philosophy Theses

The First Amendment gives U.S. citizens a Hohfeldian legal immunity that disables Congress from removing citizens’ legal liberty to criticize the government. Any attempt by Congress to remove this liberty would fail, but such an attempt would still wrong citizens. The familiar concept of claim-violation does not fully account for this wrong. Claims name actions that ought not be performed and are violated when those actions are performed. Immunities names actions that cannot be performed. Congress would wrong citizens not by doing something it ought not do but by attempting and failing to do something it cannot do. Using elements …


Catholicism And Community: American Political Culture And The Conservative Catholic Social Justice Tradition, 1890-1960, Jayna C. Hoffacker Aug 2010

Catholicism And Community: American Political Culture And The Conservative Catholic Social Justice Tradition, 1890-1960, Jayna C. Hoffacker

History Theses

The prevailing trend in the historiography of American Catholicism has been an implicit acceptance of the traditional liberal narrative as formulated by scholars like Louis Hartz. American Catholic historians like Jay Dolan and John McGreevy have incorporated this narrative into their studies and argue that America was inherently liberal and that the conservative Catholics who rejected liberalism were thus fundamentally anti-American. This has simplified nuanced and complex relationships into a story of simple opposition. Further, the social justice doctrine of the Catholic Church, although based on undeniably illiberal foundations, led conservatives to come to the same conclusions about social and …


"How Silence Best Can Speak": The Distrust Of Speech In George Meredith's Modern Love, Ellen J. Murray Aug 2010

"How Silence Best Can Speak": The Distrust Of Speech In George Meredith's Modern Love, Ellen J. Murray

English Theses

The scarcity of speech in George Meredith’s Modern Love creates a deeply psychological narrative, reflecting a distrust of speech and the effectiveness of language in general. The narrator of the poem exists in a space of ambiguity, both blaming and yearning for speech; in his confusion, he remains largely silent. His silence does not only emphasize the distance between husband and wife but also between language and meaning. Furthermore, the narrator’s distrust of language ultimately exposes a breakdown in his certainty of self and truth.


Foucauldian Genealogy As Situated Critique Or Why Is Sexuality So Dangerous?, Ian Douglas Dunkle Aug 2010

Foucauldian Genealogy As Situated Critique Or Why Is Sexuality So Dangerous?, Ian Douglas Dunkle

Philosophy Theses

This thesis argues for a new understanding of criticism in Foucauldian genealogy based on the role played by the values of Michel Foucault’s audience in motivating suspicion. Secondary literature on Foucault has been concerned with understanding how Foucault’s works can be critical of cultural practices in the contemporary West when his accounts take the form of descriptive history. Commentaries offered heretofore have been insufficient for explaining the basis of Foucault’s criticism of cultural practices because they have failed to articulate the relation of the genealogist to her present normative context—the social and political values and goals that, in part, define …


"Sugarman Done Fly Away": Kindred Threads Of Female Madness And Male Flight In The Novels Of Toni Morrison And Classical Greek Myth, Ebony O. Mcneal Aug 2010

"Sugarman Done Fly Away": Kindred Threads Of Female Madness And Male Flight In The Novels Of Toni Morrison And Classical Greek Myth, Ebony O. Mcneal

English Theses

Madness in women exists as a trope within the literature from the earliest of civilizations. This theme is evident and appears to possess a link with male dysfunction in several of Toni Morrison’s texts. Lack of maternal accountability has long served as a symptom of female mental instability as imposed by patriarchal thought. Mothers who have neglected or harmed their young across cultures and time periods have been forcibly branded with the mark of madness. Female characters in five of Morrison’s novels bear a striking resemblance to the female archetypes of ancient Greece. This paper will demonstrate the kindred strands …


William Shakespeare's Parable Of "Is" And "Seems": Ironies Of God's Providence In Hamlet And Measure For Measure, Joseph L. Kelly Aug 2010

William Shakespeare's Parable Of "Is" And "Seems": Ironies Of God's Providence In Hamlet And Measure For Measure, Joseph L. Kelly

English Theses

This thesis examines Hamlet and Measure for Measure as related “problem plays.” In these plays, Shakespeare uniquely combines the genre of parable and the literary device of irony as a means to involve his audience in the experience of ordeal and deliverance that both reorients the protagonists’ personal, political, and ultimately theological assumptions and prompts spiritual insight in the spectator. As in a parable, a spiritual dimension opens subtly alongside each story to inform the play’s action and engage the spectator in the underlying theological discourse. Irony invites the audience to see the disparity between pretended or mistaken reality and …


Mindreading, Language And Simulation, Ryan C. Dechant Aug 2010

Mindreading, Language And Simulation, Ryan C. Dechant

Philosophy Theses

Mindreading is the capacity to attribute psychological states to others and to use those attributions to explain, predict, and understand others’ behaviors. In the past thirty years, mindreading has become the topic of substantial interdisciplinary research and theorizing, with philosophers, psychologists and, more recently, neuroscientists, all contributing to the debate about the nature of the neuropsychological mechanisms that constitute the capacity for mindreading. In this thesis I push this debate forward by using recent results from developmental psychology as the basis for critiques of two prominent views of mindreading. First, I argue that the developmental studies provide evidence of infant …


Un-Fairytales: Realism And Black Feminist Rhetoric In The Works Of Jessie Fauset, Danielle L. Tillman Aug 2010

Un-Fairytales: Realism And Black Feminist Rhetoric In The Works Of Jessie Fauset, Danielle L. Tillman

English Theses

I am baffled each time someone asks me, “Who is Jessie Fauset?” As I delved into critical work written on Fauset, I found her critics dismissed her work because they read them as bad fairytales that showcase the lives of middle-class Blacks. I respectfully disagree. It is true that her novels concentrate on the Black middle-class; they also focus on the realities of Black women, at a time when they were branching out of their homes and starting careers, not out of financial necessity but arising from their desire for working. They establish the start of what Patricia Hill Collins …


Where My Girls At?: The Interpellation Of Women In Gangsta Hip-Hop, Chanel R. Craft Aug 2010

Where My Girls At?: The Interpellation Of Women In Gangsta Hip-Hop, Chanel R. Craft

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

This thesis interrogates gangsta hip-hop for the unique attention it plays to the drug trade. I read theories of hypervisibility/invisibility and Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation alongside hip-hop feminist theory to examine the Black female criminal subjectivity that operates within hip-hop. Using methods of discourse analysis, I question the constructions of gangster femininity in rap lyrics as well as the absences of girlhood on Season 4 of HBO’s television drama The Wire. In doing so, I argue that the discursive construction of Black female subjectivity within gangsta hip-hop provides a hypervisibility that portrays Black women as violent while simultaneously erasing …


The Scuola Dei Mercanti: Social Networking And Marital Mobility In Sixteenth-Century Venice, Rachel D. Erwin Aug 2010

The Scuola Dei Mercanti: Social Networking And Marital Mobility In Sixteenth-Century Venice, Rachel D. Erwin

Art and Design Theses

Renaissance marriage is a much-studied subject, yet little attention has been given to the influence of marital practice on the civic affairs of confraternities. By considering the decisions of the Venetian Scuola dei Mercanti confraternity through the lens of Venetian marriage practice, I demonstrate how the Mercanti employed a multi-alignment advancement strategy in a manner similar to that employed by marriage partners seeking upward social mobility. Specifically, I argue that the Mercanti’s maneuvers were carried out for the purpose of transforming itself from a scuola piccolo to a scuola grande. Viewed from this perspective, the Mercanti’s artistic and architectural commissions …


William Apess And Sherman Alexie: Imagining Indianness In (Non)Fiction, Gabriel M. Andrews Jul 2010

William Apess And Sherman Alexie: Imagining Indianness In (Non)Fiction, Gabriel M. Andrews

English Theses

This paper proposes the notion that early Native American autobiographical writings from such authors as William Apess provide rich sources for understanding syncretic authors and their engagement with dominant Anglo-Christian culture. Authors like William Apess construct an understanding of what constitutes Indianness in similar and different ways to the master narratives produced for Native peoples. By studying this nonfiction, critics can gain a broader understanding of contemporary Indian fiction like that of Sherman Alexie. The similarities and differences between the strategies of these two authors reveal entrenched stereotypes lasting centuries as well as instances of bold re-signification, a re-definition of …


Guyon's Sensitive Appetite, Matthew J. Davis Jul 2010

Guyon's Sensitive Appetite, Matthew J. Davis

English Theses

This Master’s Thesis seeks to explain the internal conflicts faced by Guyon, the titular hero of Book II of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Starting with Thomas Aquinas’ designations of the sensitive versus the intellectual appetite, I show that Guyon struggles to maintain the dominance of his intellectual appetite as he puts his vaunted temperance to a series of tests. The hero manages to appease his sensitive appetite through the vice of curiositas, yet the power of his sensitive appetite demands dramatic and violent acts of repression to quash it in Mammon’s Cave and in the Bower of Bliss. Guyon’s intellectual …


The Shia Migration From Southwestern Iran To Kuwait: Push-Pull Factors During The Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Mohammad E. Alhabib Jul 2010

The Shia Migration From Southwestern Iran To Kuwait: Push-Pull Factors During The Late Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Mohammad E. Alhabib

History Theses

This study explores the “push-pull” dynamics of Shia migration from southwestern Iran (Fars, Khuzestan and the Persian Gulf coast) to Kuwait during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although nowadays Shias constitute thirty five percent of the Kuwaiti population and their historical role in building the state of Kuwait have been substantial, no individual study has delved into the causes of Shia migration from Iran to Kuwait. By analyzing the internal political, economic, and social conditions of both regions in the context of the Gulf sheikhdoms, the British and Ottoman empires, and other great powers interested in dominating the …


From Rivers To Gardens: The Ambivalent Role Of Nature In My ?Ntonia, O Pioneers!, And Death Comes To The Archbishop, Graham Kirkland May 2010

From Rivers To Gardens: The Ambivalent Role Of Nature In My ?Ntonia, O Pioneers!, And Death Comes To The Archbishop, Graham Kirkland

English Theses

Though her early writing owes much to nineteenth-century American Realism, Willa Cather experiments with male and female literary traditions while finding her own modern literary voice. In the process Cather gives nature an ambivalent role in My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and Death Comes to the Archbishop. She produces a tension between rivers and gardens, places where nature and culture converge. Like Mary Austin and Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather confronts the boundaries between humans and nature.


Dworkinian Liberalism & Gay Rights: A Defense Of Same-Sex Relations, Ngoc Quang H. Bui Apr 2010

Dworkinian Liberalism & Gay Rights: A Defense Of Same-Sex Relations, Ngoc Quang H. Bui

Philosophy Theses

Recent changes in the politics of gay rights have led to a gay rights demand for liberal governments: i) decriminalization of sodomy and ii) full governmental recognition of civil, same-sex marriages. Challengers to liberalism argue that a neutral liberalism cannot satisfy the gay rights demand. I argue that the liberal political framework put forth by Ronald Dworkin can adequately fulfill the gay rights demand. Dworkinian liberalism, which is neutral with respect to the ethical life, need not be neutral with respect to moral and non-ethical values. I argue for the more modest claim that Dworkinian liberalism has the conceptual tools …