Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Manhattan Transference: Reader Itineraries In Modernist New York, Sophia Bamert

Honors Papers

John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925) follows dozens of characters through modern New York City. The novel is organized as a fragmented montage and, in this paper, I argue that transit functions as both a central theme and the structuring principle of the text. I compare Manhattan Transfer to works by Walt Whitman and William Dean Howells and draw upon spatial form theory to examine how experiences of urban transportation influence literary forms. Ultimately, I suggest that Manhattan Transfer's modernist form offers readers itinerant ways of perceiving the complicated networks of which cities are made.

Virtue Of Attunement: Contributions Of Yuasa Yasuo's Embodied Self-Cultivation Practices To Ted Toadvine's Ecophenomenology Of Difference, Pailyn Brown

Honors Papers

I argue that Ted Toadvine’s Ecophenomenology presents a concept of difference that is totalizing and has a concept of the body that is a-historical and universal. By using Yuasa Yasuo’s ideas that the body is culturally constructed and can be reconstituted through repeated bodily practices, I revise Toadvine’s totalizing difference, emphasizing that we can use our bodies to increasingly learn about difference. I call this a Virtue of Attunement.

Dubbin' The Literary Canon: Writin' And Soundin' A Transnational Caribbean Experience, Warren Harding

Honors Papers

In the mid-1970s, a collective of Jamaican poets from Kingston to London began to use reggae as a foundational aesthetic to their poetry. Inspired by the rise of reggae music and the work of the Caribbean Artists Movement based London from 1966 to 1972, these artists took it upon themselves to continue the dialogue on Caribbean cultural production. This research will explore the ways in which dub poetry created an expressive space for Jamaican artists to complicate discussions of migration and colonialism in the transnational Caribbean experience.

In order to do so, this research engages historical, ethnomusicological, and literary theories …

The Performance And Perception Of Social Identities In Country-Rap Music, Rachel Grandstrand

Honors Papers

Within the United States, few genres incite as vehement of a reaction as Country and Hip-Hop music, and both of these genres have faced a history of marginalization by the mainstream media corporations and by the broader population of the US. The reason for this marginalization often stems from the racial and class associations of the communities that produce this music, and the relationship between these genres and the broader population is well documented. What remains under-discussed is the relationship between these two communities. This study explores this relationship through an analysis of Country-Rap music, a sub-genre of Country music …

Una Cárcel De Cultura: Secuelas De La Dictadura Chilena En Un Centro De Arte Comunitario, Sofia Leblanc

Honors Papers

In Chile, wounds from the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973 to 1990 still fester under the surface of its post-transitional society. The regime of terror lives on in economic policies, architecture, the country's grave-pocked landscape, and in the everyday lives of Chileans. My research examines a former prison and torture center that has been converted into a cultural park: a space of culture, art, and community, sanctioned and administered by the state. It serves as a microcosm for Chile, which has chosen to erase its violent past while also perpetuating a system of class stratification and power structures that come directly …

Hybrid Rhythms, Antithetical Echoes, And Autopoiesis: Intersections Between Sound, Self, And Nation In The Poetry Of Yeats, Connor Stratton

Honors Papers

Current critical attention on poetry's aural features and possibilities is scant. My project on W.B. Yeats is a corrective, as his poetry exemplifies how sonic tools and sound structures perform or create meaning. Specifically, I concentrate on the intersection between Yeats's nationalist and postcolonial posturings and his aural forms. By exploring this intersection within the frameworks of 'antithetical nationalism' and 'hybridity', I reveal the rich range of sound's semantic possibilities in poetry.

Translating Chris Ware's Lint Into Russian, Matthew Davis

Honors Papers

Comics translation is rarely practiced with any appreciation of the comics medium – rather, comics usually are translated as prose, ignoring the words relationship to pictures. I chose Chris Ware's work, known for pushing the boundaries of comics language, because translating it mandates formal engagement with the comics medium. My project also involved dealing with the problems of translating into a non-native tongue, cultural translation, and placing Ware's comics in the Russian existentialist tradition.

Posibilidades De La Abstracción: La Obsesión Y La Traducción En Los Cuentos De Julio Cortázar, Caitlin Dougherty

Honors Papers

En los cuentos de Julio Cortázar (Argentina, 1914-84) la materia física es muy breve, pero la relevancia es mucho más grande. Según él, la gran importancia de contar se encuentra más en el cómo que en el qué, y es esta noción única que añade a su estilo de lo fantástico. En Rayuela, el narrador (y en este capítulo es un poco ambiguo quién narra) demuestra esta idea de la literatura en general cuando dice que "Lo que el libro contaba no servía de nada, no era nada,porque estaba mal contado" (Rayuela 567). Se puede ver en los cuentos de …

Renegotiating A Beheading: Literary Opposition To Varna Hierarchy In Shambuka's Story, Thomas Ahlers Nunan

Honors Papers

The Ramayana's Shambuka story is a controversial incident that has served as a site for the renegotiation of social power structures in India for thousands of years. Because the episode is fundamentally about India's system of caste hierarchy, or varna, any retelling will by its very nature engage in a formulation of social relation between different caste identities. Close readings of these retellings reveal the ways in which the adaptations and appropriations of each version create new literary meanings that provide insight into varna hierarchy as a normative body of social control. Despite the Shambuka incident's hegemonic history, transgressive participation …

The School And Society: Secondary School Social Studies Education From 1945-1970, Kevin John Owens

Honors Papers

This thesis explores the ways in which changes to citizenship are tied to changes in the secondary school social studies curriculum from 1945 through 1970. During this time, social and political changes forced alterations to the meaning of citizenship. Schools must inherently educate for the future, and are a good measure of what a society views as the values and skills most necessary for the future. As a central inculcator of common values, the social studies class reflected these changes more so than any other school subject.

The Content Of Thought Experiments And Philosophical Context, Kevin G. Gilfether

Honors Papers

Thought experiments are one common method of trying to make a philosophical point. However, there is the question of how useful thought experiments are in telling us about the world: what does thinking about killing a king tell us about actually killing a king? Timothy Williamson offers an account of thought experiments based upon a general cognitive capacity to consider counterfactuals. Anna-Sara Malmgren is critical of such a capacity. This work assess both accounts in the context of common philosophical thought experiments and finds Williamson's could be sharpened by considerations from philosophical context and facts from cognitive science.

Building The Post-Industrial Community: New Urbanist Development In Pittsburgh, Pa, Steven Alexander Niedbala

Honors Papers

The first part will explain the concept of community in the context of postindustrial theory. I will analyze the narrative of postindustrialism to argue that this concept of community constitutes not a reaction to a unique set of historical circumstances but rather a strategical shift in capitalist development. In the second part, I will describe how the perceived failure of architectural modemism inspired the theorization of the city as a phenomenological entity. I will describe how this conception of the city inspired efforts to systematize urban diversity through the development of a visual linguistics. The urban planning movement known as …

A Poetics Of Complicity: Translating Luis García Montero, Alice Mcadams

Honors Papers

The work of Luis García Montero, one of Spain's most lauded poets of the past three decades, is marked most strongly by a desire to dissolve hierarchies between generations, between artists and ordinary citizens, and, above all, between the self and the other. He frequently realizes this goal through his metaphoric technique, employing personification almost ubiquitously to equalize the emotional power of animals, landscape, and inanimate pieces of technology. Though his poetry is romantic, he takes a significant departure from traditional forms of the genre by assigning little more importance to the lover than he does to the many facets …