Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Beyond Gender : The Pursuit Of Power In The Henriad And Coriolanus, James Aaron Beavers

Master's Theses

The feminine in Shakespeare's plays, like the Bakhtinian grotesque, often offers a critical perspective on patriarchal society. Shakespeare creates characters whose feminine perspective enables them to stand outside of the patriarchal paradigm and operate according to alternative modes of behavior. While the dominant system regards power solely as a masculine territory, Shakespeare suggests that true power can only be effectively pursued by those who are not bound to a particular gender identity, but are able to shift their personas in accordance with their ever-changing milieu. In Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, and Coriolanus, Shakespeare depicts …

Learning To Lead And To Serve On Their Own Terms As A Means Of Transforming The Reservation : Female American Indians At Hampton Institute, 1878-1923, Elaine Tzu-Hsing Chou

Master's Theses

Female American Indian students who attended Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute defined their level of empowerment, playing pertinent roles within tribal communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the Institute left an important legacy in the cause for federally-funded American Indian education, student behavior further determined the lasting effects of vocational training and socializing efforts. Organized topically, Chapter One summarizes the Indian Program's philosophy. Chapters Two through Four investigate the academic curriculum and vocational training, while exploring the ways in which the youth experienced and interpreted extracurricular and personal relationships. Chapter Five analyzes activities of Hampton alumnae …

Exploring Memory As A Narrative Strategy For Enabling Black Consciousness In Ezekial Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue And Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood, Christina Leigh Buckland

Master's Theses

Ezekial Mphahlele in Down Second Avenue and Mongane Serote in To Every Birth Its Blood use the function of memory as a narrative strategy to illuminate the evolution of individual black consciousness. Mphahlele's novel is autobiographical, investigating the chronological memory of Zeke as his consciousness evolves. Serote's work is a collection of stories investigating several characters whose individual experiential memories create a collective consciousness. For Zeke in Down Second Avenue and the characters in To Every Birth Its Blood, memory is an active device which can recall apartheid experience in order to heighten black consciousness and analyze the current …

The Battle For Women's Suffrage In The Old Dominion, Amanda Garrett

Master's Theses

In 1909, twenty women launched an eleven-year campaign to win the vote in the Old Dominion. In 1920, the necessary number of states ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. However, Virginia was not among these states; her General Assembly rejected the "Anthony Amendment" by a wide margin. This study attempts to answer the following question: What was the woman's suffrage movement like in Virginia? By exploring the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, its leaders, arguments for and against suffrage, the public's reaction, the reaction of the legislature and the conclusion, the answer(s) to this multi-dimensional question can be discovered. …

Friedrich Nietzsche's Reception As A Marker Of American Intellectual Culture : Crane Brinton And Walter Kaufmann's Interpretations During The World War Ii And Postwar Eras, David Marshall Schilling

Master's Theses

Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy has endured a torrent of both insightful analysis and faulty interpretation in America. This thesis seeks to examine a comer of this intellectual history, specifically some of the connections between political events and American readers' reception of Nietzsche's work. Chapter 1 introduces the study, arguing that an intellectual row created during the World War I era persisted into the Depression and World War II years. Chapter 2 analyzes Crane Brinton's Nietzsche and that historian's attempts to explain Nietzsche in terms of World War II politics, namely fascist thought. Brinton's efforts to establish a link between Nietzsche and …

From Fancy Women To Demimondames : Working Class Women In Peter Taylor's Short Fiction, Frank Sung Cha

Master's Theses

In "The Fancy Woman" and "The Old Forest," Peter Taylor examines the identity of working class women in the southern social structure and the roles they play in revising class and gender perceptions. Josie Carlson, "The Fancy Woman's" protagonist, discovers the stifling nature of class divisions. The gap between the working and upper-middle-classes remains as the social hierarchy and Taylor himself lock Josie in a subordinate position. They prevent her from attaining any sense of liberation. However, the working class 'Demimondames' in "The Old Forest" exhibit a stronger independence spirit, compelling society to reevaluate traditional social perceptions. Although they too …

Didactic Anti-Didacticism : Aesthetics And Contradictions In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Dominic Laron Finney

Master's Theses

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray calls for a reinvention of aestheticism during the Victorian Age. Wilde felt that the Victorians had surrendered any ornamentation in art to the rules of formality in religion and politics. He also believed that art should teach solely through its existence that there is a realm above mankind. Art should not be used for anything else. Dorian curses himself when he uses his portrait to exchange his soul for eternal beauty. Wilde wrote this novel as his work of art. And, the novel is to "civilize" the Victorian public, to return them to …

Katherine Anne Porter's Notorious Virgins : Female Sexuality And Catholicism In "Virgin Violeta", "Flowering Judas", And "Old Mortality", Christine L. Grogan

Master's Theses

The intersection of Roman Catholic ideology and female sexuality remains at the heart of Katherine Anne Porter's short stories, "Virgin Violeta" (1924), "Flowering Judas" (1930), and "Old Mortality" (1937). In these works, Porter implicitly suggests that the Catholic ideology of the early twentieth century has been reduced to a matter of sexuality, particularly female sexual purity. Through her portraits of the young virgin Violeta in "Virgin Violeta" and the frigid adult Laura in "Flowering Judas," Porter challenges the Roman Catholic emphasis on female chastity. In tracing the development of Miranda in "Old Mortality," Porter subverts Roman Catholic ideology by presenting …

The Politics Of Theater And The Theater Of Law: The Legal And Cultural Implications In Langston Hughes And John Wexley's Dramatizations Of The Scottsboro Trials, Mosby Garland Perrow Iv

Master's Theses

Collectively, the charges and convictions of nine black youths in Scottsboro in 1931 became a symbol of corruption and oppression for those interested in reshaping America's political and legal landscapes. Scottsboro instigated a decade of trials and retrials, two landmark United States Supreme Court opinions, countless dramatic interpretations, and various artistic responses. In particular, Scottsboro, Limited by Langston Hughes and They Shall Not Die by John Wexley were cultural revisions of the trials in 1931 and 1933, respectively. While both works supported the defendants, they were distinguished by their form, production and ultimate statement about the meaning of Scottsboro. These …

The Social And Legal Aspects Of Colonial Witchcraft : A Comparison Of Virginia And Bermuda, Leigh Anne Collier

Honors Theses

This is a study of the social and legal aspects of witchcraft in the British colonies of Virginia and Bermuda. It involves an analysis of the community and institutional structure of each of these settlements, as well as an investigation of the cultural understanding of the concept of witchcraft. The intensity with which witches in Bermuda were prosecuted, as compared with Virginia is due to several factors, including the higher level of community cohesiveness, the discord among religious groups and the rationale of the political leaders.

The Robert W. Ryerss Museum And Library : A Case Study In Upper Class Philanthropy In Late Victorian Philadelphia, Laura L. Keefe

Honors Theses

"The Robert W. Ryerss Museum and Library: A Case Study in Upper Class Philanthropy in Late Victorian Philadelphia" looks at the philanthropy of the Robert W. Ryerss family in Gilded Age Philadelphia. It places the Ryerss family within the spectrum of philanthropic spirit and activity that swept upper class Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century and analyzes the unique act of creating a public library and museum out of a private home within the context of the larger trend of scientific giving and museum foundation that characterized this era. Historical scholarship is extremely limited about this particular class of donor …

Forging The Anvil Of Victory : The British Combined Operations Command At The Start Of The Second World War (1940-42), Timothy Michael Gilhool

Master's Theses

The story of British combined operations is one too often overlooked in the study of World War II. For the Allies, success, perhaps survival, could only be achieved by developing and perfecting the techniques and equipment required for amphibious landings. In British parlance, the marrying of the ground, naval, and air components of such a landing was called combined operations. The organization built to accomplish this task was the Directorate for Combined Operations (DCO). Created in a time of great desperation (July 1940), the DCO represented the first and only ground offensive tool in the British arsenal, employing the legendary …

Technology And The 'Self', Ryan Rinn

Honors Theses

This project examines the relationship between technology and the self. Based largely on Gergen's (1991, 2000) descriptions of technological immersion and the saturated self, I discuss the ways that modem technologies have come to be a part of self-construction. Survey and focus group data from 63 university students are used to examine types of technological use, talk about technological experience, and self-construction. This paper describes the contradictory ways participants talk about technology, and defines nine themes of self emergence in participant discussion: 1) connection, 2) over-connection, 3) ease/laziness, 4) multitasking, 5) profile stalking, 6) loss of physical presence, 7) empowerment, …

A Case Study Of Events And Examples : History In Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things, Michell C. Smith

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

"Their Shoes Yet New" : The Immigrant Image In The Baltimore Riots Of 1812 And The Disagreement Over Nationality, John K. Dunn Jr

Honors Theses

This paper examines the ways in which immigrants were characterized in Baltimore immediately following that city's Riots in 1812. It finds that the "native" majority used the immigrant image in an attempt to determine the criteria of nationality. That image was not settled, however, and rather constituted a discussion between interested groups about the relative importance of ethnicity in the years before Jacksonian democracy. It also concludes that the peculiar conditions and social divisions of Baltimore directly contributed to the Baltimore Riots and that the riots provided an opportunity for prevalent stereotypes to surface.

Narrating The Middle Ground : B The Examination Of Objects In The Modern Genre Of Immigrant Fiction, Meagna A. Patinella

Honors Theses

Dislocated objects tell stories about the places they come from, their migration, and their new surroundings. More importantly, they disclose the narratives of people that possess or interact with them. In this paper I examine objects present in novels ofimmigration and transnational movement, for objects in such fictions are most noticeably dislodged from their original or expected context. Their relocation allows me to interpret them and their narratives, which in turn, allows me to think about the genre of immigrant fiction in a new light.

Illuminating A Space For Women And Rhetoric, Lindsey M. Fox

Honors Theses

My overarching concerns are for the place and power of women in rhetoric and democracy. This concern developed during my study of classical rhetoric, when I noticed an obvious absence of women in rhetoric. For example, John Poulakos and Takis Poulakos state that any "ordinary person" could play a role on the political stage in Athens (34). This reference to "ordinary people" is proof that women were made invisible because, as George A. Kennedy explains, in classical Athens, democracy was only for "an assembly of all adult male citizens" (16). Male citizens, then, were actually rather extra-ordinary. Because democracy …

London Coffee Houses : The First Hundred Years, Heather Lynn Mcqueen

Honors Theses

This paper examines how early London coffee houses catered to the intellectual, political, religious and business communities in London, as well as put forward some information regarding what it was about coffee houses that made them "new meeting places" for Londoners. Coffee houses offered places for political debate and progressively modem forms of such debate, "penny university" lessons on all matter of science and the arts, simplicity and sobriety in which independent religious groups could meet, as well as the early development of a private office space.

Creative Redemption And Complete Affirmation In Nietzche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Matthew Homan

Honors Theses

Creative Redemption and Complete Affirmation in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra Any reader engaged with Nietzsche's thought, as we are (or about to be), must consider his or her life in relation to one thought, Nietzsche's most abysmal thought, the greatest weight:

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all …

Michel Foucault : Power/Knowledge And Epistemological Prescriptions, Martin A. Hewett

Honors Theses

In an interview in 1977, seven years before his death, Michel Foucault made the following profound and controversial statement:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

Within this sentence lies perhaps his most contested assertion: that knowledge is not some property of statements or beliefs that exist separately from relations of power within societies and discourses, but is constituted by and constitutive of them. Foucault's genealogies of sexuality and punishment are the most notable means by which he develops this claim, and their own potent explanatory powers leave us …

Only In Story A World : Atheistic Metanarrative In Leguin, Pullman And Wolfe, Samuel N. Keyes

Honors Theses

Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip Pullman, and Gene Wolfe, despite their apparent ideological as well as stylistic differences, all profoundly question the way modernity has divided knowledge, posing serious challenges to contemporary distinctions between religion, science and magic. Moreover, they share a common concern for the power of narrative to accomplish this critique.

In each of their multivolume fantasies, the differences between the categories of science and religion become meaningless. After such a deconstruction, the possibility of nihilism looms unless a new system of meaning surfaces. The move away from discrete areas of science and religion, therefore, in these works …

The History Of The One Hundred And Thirtieth Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, Terrence W. Beltz

Master's Theses

In August 1862, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania quickly responded to President Lincoln's request for more troops. An overwhelming number of Pennsylvania volunteers promptly answered the call that supplied the Union Army eighteen new infantry regiments who were to serve for a period of nine months. This devoted group of central Pennsylvanians, rendezvoused at Camp Simmons, Pennsylvania, in mid-August 1862, was to become soldiers of 130th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers who, with no military experience and little training, would face hardened Confederate veterans at "Bloody Lane" at the Battle of Antietam and "Marye's Heights" at the Battle of Fredericksburg. They were to …

Whipping Up A Region : How The North Taught The South To Cook "Southern", Erin D. Bartels

Honors Theses

I will trace this progression toward the essentialization of southern cooking and therein southern identity by exploring cookbooks dealing with all or part of the South and ranging in years from 1877 to 1941.

Valuing Servants Ends : A New Theory Of Ethical Service, Patricia Grace Devlin

Honors Theses

Many of today's universities encourage students to develop an ethic of service. Administrators, faculty, and staff members accompany students in campus-wide service activities; a number of collegiate honor societies reward students who engage in community service; and some academic programs require students to volunteer with local non-profit organizations. At its best, service learning inspires students to make a general commitment to service. The current emphasis placed on service learning in today's educational system reveals an emerging academic perspective not only on the value service has as an educational device but also on the significant role service plays in society. For …